We hope you enjoy this presentation, Trends from the Front Lines of Change, which will give you a taste of what’s coming next in the online world.

This is our first narrated presentation, so please do let us know how you like it.

You’ve just experienced a common ailment called the blog lull, familiar to many as a symptom of life getting very busy for that blogger. In this case our lull was a result of the preparation for and multitude of questions subsequent to the annual Innovative Users Group conference. We had a great time getting to talk with librarians and hear what everyone’s been working on and wants to see us working on next. Now that we’ve begun to surface from the post-conference piles of email you can expect to see more happening here on the blog again.

Back before the IUG conference though, were two interesting ones I attended in March: South By Southwest Interactive and NISO Discovery. In a separate post, I’ll bring you the technology trends highlights from SXSW, but first I want to talk a bit about the Discovery ‘08 conference.

I was very impressed by how much was fit into this two-day forum. The title was “Next Generation Discovery Tools: New Tools, Aging Standards” and the speakers covered a good overview from that central point about what’s happening with discovery tools and where they impact information standards.

Here are a few highlights to give you a taste of this fascinating meeting of the minds.

Richard Ackerman of NRC CISTI delighted me by bringing Ranganathan into the API world with his principles “Every web resource its machine reader” and “Save the time of the machine”. One thing about next generation interfaces is the whole user category of non-humans they may integrate or interact with.

The potential for exposing more metadata from datasets within documents was raised by Robert J. Sandusky of University of Illinois in Chicago in his discussion of deep indexing of tables and figures. This is a level of granularity below the usual focus of libraries, but certainly one of interest to patrons in many academic and business contexts.

There was a nice concise overview of the next generation catalog landscape from Peter Murray of OhioLINK. Interestingly he chose one of our non-Millennium systems for his Encore examples which was fun to see presented by someone other than me.

There were many more sessions and great conversation over lunch. I definitely recommend this conference to others with a keen interest in the intersection of metadata, standards, and technology.

And I’ll close with a great quote from John Dove of Credo Reference which reminded us of how accustomed we can become to our special vocabulary to the point where we’re out of sync with what will help our users take advantage of the tools we provide: “I no longer use the word database because my wife doesn’t use it.”

Or at least so I have concluded after slipping on my front stoop and breaking my ankle (bone chips, fortunately, rather than a severe break) back on February 12th. I’m back at work now and hopping about on crutches, which are tedious, but better than nothing.

On the bright side, I’m able to get around well enough not to have to change my conference plans during a busy March.

This weekend I’m heading out to Austin, Texas, for SXSW Interactive to learn from the web wizards and hear the latest technology trends. There’s an amazing programming line up, so I’m expecting to have a lot to report on.

Then at the end of the month I’ll be at the NISO Next Generation Discovery conference. I’ll be presenting on Friday morning on the topic “Changing Patron Expectations & the Discovery Landscape”.

Please say hello if you see me at either of these conferences!

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

Seems like he might find himself quite at home at many of the discussions on public service at recent library conferences!

I have an updated version of his principles on the wall above my desk: (more…)

I’ll be writing here about information seeking, user interface, usability, findability, search & discovery technologies, ecommerce & other patron empowerment tools, community features, courseware, and whatever else ties in with the wide-ranging set of projects we’re doing here at Innovative.

It’s great to see the comments already coming in on the posts so far; we’re all really excited about this new place for us to share news and ideas and hear people’s thoughts.

Welcome! And thanks for reading!