One redeye flight later, and on to the InfoToday 2003 Conference and Exposition...
Sad to say that in spite of many excellent speakers and panels, the conference was notably smaller than last year's, due in large part to the overshadowing presence of the SLA conference due in New York a month from now. Vendor displays were down by at least half from last year, probably more. The assumption has to be that the vendors were not convinced that the buyers were coming, and perhaps they were right. The CEO breakfast with Dialog CEO Roy Martin, Jr., MuseGlobal CEO K.T. Noerr and SIRSI CEO Pat Summers wrestled with the state of professionally managed content collections, and had respectable attendance, but the chat and Q&A by Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology of Google, which dealt with the unmanaged Internet, was packed to the doorways. More coverage of this in our news commentary later this week. Bottom line: one camp searches for the persistence of memory, while another camp lives to understand the present.