SLA 2009 Washington DC -- Monday

Conference sessions started on Monday and I must say the sessions were excellent this year. The only one I left early was from hunger, not boredom.

The first program I attended was a vendor led program (OCLC) on their product, Content DM, which is an image management software. While our collections management system handles images beautifully, like most collections databases, is outside the grasp of search engines like Google (and as one speaker put it, if it’s not in Google, it doesn’t exist.)

I actually knew little about Content DM, so the session was interesting. The OCLC rep was Suzanne Butte, who gave an overview of the product and OCLC’s digitization services. OCLC not only sells Content DM, they also have services to digitize collections, as well as web harvest through Content DM (which we could possible use to catalog the VHS web pages – something we’ve talked about doing for a while.) Content DM has over 1,000 users and can handle images, audio, video, and pdf. Two users of the software also spoke: a representative from the George Washington Masonic Memorial Association and Stacia Clifton from the Peace Corps. The discussion afterwards was also interesting. Some people didn’t want the search engines to get to their stuff, which would be our sole reason for joining up. But different institutions have different goals.

The next session was on Web 2.0 with speakers from the New England Journal of Medicine and Marie Kaddell from Lexis Nexis. One tidbit was a new word – zettabyte (= 1 trillion gigabytes and it’s coming faster than you think.) The major points of Web 2.0 is the set of requirements to consider: it’s about web interfaces not web pages, it’s on the users’ schedule, if it’s not in Google, it’s not there (see above), and above all, blogs rule! I’m slowly being sold on blogs (which is why this is all going in a blog).

My last session of the day was a tour of the Folger Library. The tour was organized by the Museum Arts and Humanities Division (now called DMAH, but previously referred to as MAHD – which I much prefer.) I hadn’t been to the Folger in years. It was interesting to discover they collect more than just Shakespearean material. However, their view of customer service is very academic. Access to the library is by appointment only and unless you’re researching the theater collection, they prefer PhDs and PhD candidates. This wasn't unusual 20-30 years ago for specialized libraries, but in the world of the internet, social networks, and twitter it seems very -- outdated.