Monterey once again provided a superb weather and location for librarians and technologists attending Internet Librarian 2004, November 15-17. The mood was upbeat and attendance up this year, affirming budget improvements, or perhaps necessity to learn more about the technologies significantly impacting information managers. Interestingly, more traditional information professional values surfaced during the presentations--First Amendment rights and privacy were discussed in the context of technology implementation, recognition of policy implications that are integral to internet applications.

- Keynote speaker Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, sees "Librarians and journalists owning the future of the Internet". Internet usage has gone mainstream at unprecedented speed, with changing demographics and changing usage patterns. There are more women, more minorities, more parents, lower socioeconomic levels, and more disabled accessing information at broadband speeds. In turn, the social dimensions of the Internet have expanded, with corresponding growth in "social capital" and communities. Librarians are needed to manage the information and making it useful for managing our lives more effectively.

-Patricia Martin, President of LitLamp, gave an inspiring keynote on finding sponsorships for libraries titled "Making Deals", based on her very successful experiences with ALA, Microsoft, museums, theatres, public libraries and other nonprofit organizations. She effectively translated nonprofit "assets" into the marketing four P's, outlining the process for finding alliance partners. Interestingly, sports sponsorships and traditional media are no longer delivering the same results as they used to, so libraries are well positioned to obtain sponsorship monies due to mastery of new technologies and highly regarded public services.

- Chris Sherman, of Search Engine Watch, was the technology keynote speaker, speaking on trends in search engines, a perennially popular topic for this conference, with all the changes occur which occur from year to year. Trends he sees for this year are local search, personalization, rise of RSS newsfeeds, collaborative search using IM technology, email and desktop search, and attempts at unified search. No disruptive technologies are on the horizon, but he does see an upsurge in specialty search engines as the titans jockey for position, but become more unwieldy.

With a well organized program and a wealth of topics to choose from among the four tracks, choosing sessions was challenging. The sessions on search engines were popular, as representatives from Google, Yahoo and AskJeeves were highly visible as panelists. Yahoo announced its collaboration with WorldCat to build a separate search service for books, within its engine, recognizing that library holdings are searched differently than the open web. But the future of search for information professionals looking for authoritative information without advertising bias lies with products such as Vivisimo with its on-the-fly clustering technology( now rename Clusty.com for the public search site) and Xrefer with its visualization interface.

- Blogging sessions were overflowing as panelists described how they put blogs to practical use in their environment. For public and academic libraries, blogs are evolving as productivity tools and simple content management systems, which allow non-technical librarians to publish to the web without learning HTML or relying on the usually sole webmaster to maintain their website. Indirectly, they are used as marketing tools, to keep library websites fresh and to increase the visibility of library services, such as new books, book readings, and special programs. Archiving and website search were valued features. The University of Minnesota libraries is experimenting with hosting blogs for all students, as a means of promoting intellectual freedom and communication within the university. This is a closed community requiring authentication, and ownership of the blog content remains with the university thus retaining the cultural memory of the institution. These libraries are leading the way to valuable applications of blogging technology to further their missions--look for more institutions to adopt this approach!

- The session on blogs within the corporation painted a different picture, with few attendees having a corporate blog. Successful blogs are focused on very narrow topics, providing high value to the readers. Blogging behind the firewall has very different purposes than blogging to external customers. Though the technology is simple and an an inexpensive KM alternative, commitment and focus on objectives are key, with judgment on appropriate content a key factor. In a similar vein, Steve Arnold of Arnold Information Technologies sounded warnings about the dark side of search within corporations, and the need to establish business policies prior to adopting new technologies, with potentially far reaching impacts on the corporation (think Enron!). His commentary was a refreshing reality check to the "all things to all searchers" rosy view presented by the general search engines.

- Access to book content has improved significantly in the last year, with OCLC
pioneering access to cataloging metadata and library holdings via partnerships with Yahoo and Google, and presumably other search engines in the future. On the exhibit floor, ebrary and Gale showed expanded book collections in their electronic products--indications that more of this authoritative content is becoming more widely in digital form. The driver is the rapidly dropping costs of digitizing collections, an intriguing presentation by Christopher Warnock, CEO of ebrary. Robots can now scan a book in less than 2 hours, at a cost of approximately $26, and then printed for less than $5--economics of this scale can have a significant impact in shifting library holdings to digital form, thus freeing physical space to become study areas, public access computer and reading rooms. Interestingly, providers of individual ebooks, such as Netlibrary and Overdrive were not represented at this show, an indication that attendees at this show are more interested in the subscription integrated products.

- "Cool Tools" sessions of various flavors were highly popular, ranging from library websites to search tips by Gary Price, ResourceShelf.com and Mary Ellen Bates, Bates Information Services. There were sessions on RSS and social bookmarking, as well as the latest gadgets--all reasons Internet Librarian has become a "must attend" event for library technologists!