The first session of Tuesday morning that I attended was on the Future of MAHD Libraries. The speaker was Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media from the Smithsonian – and he was wonderful. (His slides are at slideshare.net/edsonm.) Among the notes I took was a definition of Commons (a set of resources maintained in the public sphere for the use and benefit of everyone), and the statement that free and open seems to beat closed and proprietary (in general, I agree). He also talked about the Smithsonian’s forays into Flickr and felt they had done well from this because of increased visibility and general good vibes from patrons. He almost made a believer out of me. He felt that most of the unintended consequences of jumping into Web 2.0 applications were positive. And he provided two interesting web site addresses – Alexa.com (shows web patterns) and Battlebrands.com (check how your company’s brand fairs against others.) The need to prioritize your activities was important – you can’t do everything at once. Another link is smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispace.edu. He also suggested searching for angry admin and web guy on YouTube. All in all, a very good session.
The next session was a representative from Google to discuss the Google Books lawsuit settlement. The settlement involves only books and only text. The copyright holders registry is public, searchable, and administered by the publishers and authors, not Google. He said there was an app for OPACs to be able to link to the public domain material (we need to check that out) and also made an interesting point that most of the hits for Google books come from the main Google search site, not the Google Books section. I’d really love to see the VHS partner with Google Books for some of our rare materials.
My last session of the day was called "The Tyranny of Choice". Basically, people tend to become less happy the more choices they have. (It’s kind of a bell curve, with happiness rising when there are 2-3 choices added and dropping significantly after 10 or so choices are available. The speaker stated that librarians are caught trying to provide for people who demand the very best as well as for people who are happy to just get something. More choices are not always optimal because of opportunity costs, choice regret, adaptation, and the curse of high expectations.
Halfway through the talk, I decided to leave and get some lunch. The Wall Street Journal group was offering free lunch to anyone who was willing to sit in on their presentation, so I took them up on their offer. The presentation was quite interesting. The Wall Street Journal has been working hard to add value to their site for subscribers, allowing them to create "My Wall Street Journal" and tailor the feed to those areas and columns they most follow. And the lunch was good too.
Tuesday was apparently my day for socializing. After visiting the Vendor Hall again, I went to a nearby hotel for the Cuadra Users Reception (our collections system vendor). It was nice to see Carlos Cuadra, his wife, quite a lot of the East Coast staff and their two major sales representatives. And it was fun to talk to other users about what they’re doing. One poor woman was trying to reestablish a library at her institution after a devastating fire. Everyone was very interested in what we’ve done with pre-defined searching.
After that, I went to another hotel to attend the Mid-Atlantic Chapters Reception. It was well attended and it was nice to catch up with the other Virginia Chapter members who I hadn’t see yet, but by 9:00pm, I was beat and went home. Nighty-night.
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