Conference Report- Computers in Libraries Enjoys Brisk Attendance

The 17th annual Computers in Libraries (CIL) conference drew more than 1700 paid attendees to Washington, DC, March 13–15, marking the first time in four years that attendance in that category was up. While paid attendance rose by several hundred over last year, overall attendance, at 2700, was down. This decline could reflect a decrease in the number of participating vendors (60), perhaps a response to the softening economy or just competition from the Public Library Association conference occurring simultaneously in Phoenix (see News ). Vendors were pleased at the CIL turnout, and many reported good traffic and interaction with the tech-savvy crowd.

Overall, participants reported finding what they wanted, if not in the presentations then through connecting with speakers—who made themselves available to attendees—or through networking with colleagues. The small Washington Hilton convention facilities provided just the right venue, with many meetings nearly filled to capacity, lending both energy and intimacy to the affair.

The conference was divided into four tracks. "Today's Digital Reality" was a grab bag that included one day on search engines, a popular day on collaborative digital reference, and a third on learning. "Webwizards Symposium" focused one day on web design, another on web usability testing (this session was packed), and a final leg on web tools, such as XML. "Digital Content Management," the smallest track, spent a day on e-books, another on tools and taxonomies, and a third on preservation and management. The "Systems" track was hugely popular, with sessions on processes, such as e-acquisitions, intranets, portals, and knowledge management; it finished with panels on delivering content and services, including information on wireless technologies, PDAs, and streaming video.

Each morning began with a conferencewide keynote address. On Friday, Rich Wiggins of Michigan State University and Roy Tennant of the California Digital Library paired off for a lively debate, "Digital Legacy Collections: Potential or Waste?" Despite the title, the argument centered on digitizing the entire collection of the Library of Congress (LC). While both speakers agreed that the collection should be digitized, they clashed over the efficacy of such a task. Wiggins asked the audience to "suspend our disbelief" and outlined a plan whereby such a project made sense, both philosophically and technically. A digitized LC, Wiggins stated, would go far to resolving preservation issues, increase access, generate improved technology, create standards, and set in motion a large-scale system for digital rights management.

Tennant countered with the prohibitive costs—not of technology but of people. Current copyright laws also are obstacles: "Why digitize material if it's just going to molder on LC's servers, to be used only in its reading rooms?," Tennant argued. He further fueled his position by asserting that the inherent complexity of the book and the limitations of optical character recognition (OCR) technology would hamper the project. The debate provided a good overview of what technology can enable right now as well as what impedes advances in library-related technology.

Unique for a library conference, CIL was attended by a true cross-section of the library community. In a way, technology served as a great leveler, as public, academic, and special librarians crowded together to learn how to make a good web site great, the pluses and minuses of a wireless building, and what content libraries were providing on PDAs.