Computers in Libraries 2004 Ponders Past and Future

The 19th annual Computers in Libraries Conference peered into the future, drew lessons from the past, and ran like clockwork. Program chair Jane Dysart and her organizing committee are by now old hands, bringing together three keynote addresses, 100 speakers in 60 panel discussions, and 50 vendor exhibits to Washington, DC, March 10–12, with the seemingly greatest of aggregational ease. Tom Hogan, president of conference sponsor Information Today, confirmed that the 2000 preregistered attendees, from 46 states and 13 countries, represented a seven percent increase over 2003.

If the conference came at a time of little breaking news, it was well situated to bring a broad perspective to what topics and technologies have become de rigueur and which will pose challenges and cause trepidation in the future. Two of the keynote speakers riffed on the related concepts of "Changing Expectations and Unintended Consequences." Clifford Lynch, executive director, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), pointed out that no one could have foreseen the business implications of being atop a list of web search results and discussed how distributed sensor networks raise surprising privacy issues. He wondered if books that broadcast their titles via RFID tags will one day become what personalized cell phone ring tones are today.

"Unintended consequences dwarf the goals and expectations of the early innovators," said Northern Light CEO David Seuss. Employing a historical perspective, he explained how a Puritan decree that everyone read scripture daily unexpectedly led to an increase in literacy and libraries. With information came knowledge, wisdom, and…the American Revolution. Seuss's vision of the Internet revolution is one of fractionalization, with a web split into specialized channels in much the same way that smaller cable TV networks are now topic-specific.

Second perhaps only to the realization that the "blogosphere" is now everywhere, the concept of aggregation seemed to be on everyone's mind, as represented by two separate technologies: really simple syndication (RSS), an XML format that allows web sites to syndicate their blog entries or news headlines, and federated searching. Jenny Levine, Internet development specialist, Suburban Library System, Burr Ridge, IL, and frequent contributor to LJ netConnect, provided an excellent overview of the power and ease of RSS and why it may be the next killer app. Frank Cervone, Northwestern Univ., presented academia's vision for a search software that would simultaneously and accurately pull from not only internal collections but from free-web and pay-based providers as well, deduping the results and offering full text via OpenURL technology.

Elsewhere in the searching arena, one rallying cry, as Sirsi VP Stephen Abram put it, is to "delay satisfaction," i.e., do not rely on just a single web search to provide the best results. This idea was echoed not only in the federated searching buzz but also in a noticeable amount of conferencewide Google-bashing. The awareness that Google has become many an end user's de facto library was palpable among these professionals as salvo after salvo was fired in the name of improved results, while some dared not speak its name; "You-know-Whoogle" and "Rhymes-with-Boogle" being two examples of the free-flowing alternative nomenclature.

"Digital Storage and Institutional Repositories" was another hot topic among those who hope to improve upon a poorly preserved digital past of crashed hard drives and unreadable floppies. Roy Tennant, California Digital Library and LJ columnist, proclaimed that we are in the "Golden Age of Digital Libraries," that one terabyte of storage can now be had by consumers for just $1000, and university repositories are pulling in a broader and more sizable user base.

CNI's Lynch and others worry that more is less. If every document of a person's life can be stored digitally, Lynch warned that we will need a "whole new social pact." If every course, lecture, and scrap of scholarship can be archived, who decides what to keep and what are the unforeseen dangers of "amateur curation"?

How far have conferencegoers progressed along the road to digitization? The vast majority of attendees still took notes with pen and paper and collected glossy handouts from the vendors, to say nothing of the 347-page volume of Collected Presentations. But traditional business contacts have long been replaced by email addresses and barcoded nametags. And, for the first time, a CD-ROM of the conference, with Power Point and audio presentations, was made available, albeit for $79.