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May 2001
The third annual Internet Librarian International Conference [1] was held between 26 and 28 March 2001 at Olympia 2 in London with pre-conference workshops given on Sunday 25 March and post conference workshops on Thursday 29 March. Caroline Milner of Rubicon Communications gave a preview of the conference in the last issue of Cultivate Interactive [2]. Members of the Cultivate Interactive Team were at ILI and attended a number of the presentations.
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The actual Conference ran over 3 days and offered three parallel programme tracks: Track A was named the 'Intranet professional’s institute' and covered issues surrounding Intranets, portals and knowledge management. Track B was the 'Webwizards’ symposium' covering tools and systems, Web design and management and navigating the net. Finally, Track C dealt with e-resources and looked at content management, e-roles and e-learning. The running of three tracks meant that delegates could not see all presentations given at the Conference. However, the choice of three speakers at all times suggests that there should have been something of interest to most at any point in the day.
Here is a mixed bag of the more memorable presentations:
William Hann gave a talk about the technicalities of running a portal. Hann is the managing director of Free Pint, a free email newsletter and Web site for information professionals [3]. His presentation covered how Free Pint had dealt with the realisation that they needed to generate income somehow. Initially William had gone for raising cash through Venture Capitalists but had had a 'funny feeling' that it wasn't a good idea and backed out at the last minute at the cost of several tens of thousand pounds of his own money. It was probably a sensible decision given the current state of other dot.com companies. The approach Free Pint opted for in the end was one of 'organic growth', a process which has included adding adverts to the newsletter, getting sponsorship, adding company financials to the home page and spending 6 months on technical development. William was very open about the mistakes Free Pint had made and the lessons they'd learned. The presentation provided useful advice for any portal or Web publication thinking of ways of increasing their financial status.
Brian Kelly of UKOLN took us on a lightning tour of the rights and wrongs of hosting advertisements on public-sector Web sites. The issue of whether this form of income generation is acceptable in today’s political climate is a pertinent, yet still controversial one. UKERNA have recently published a fact sheet dealing with advertising on Janet that is very helpful [4].
Brian's polemical presentation was followed by the Web masters roundtable panel session. The panel consisted of Brian Kelly again, Greg Notess from Montana State University-Bozeman Library, USA and Mary Peterson from the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Australia. The Web masters initially gave some interesting tips on deconstructing your Web site and then discussed how Libraries fit in to the concept of the Web. It was pointed out that when Tim Berners-Lee developed the three key architectural components of the Web (Data format (HTML), transport (HTTP) and addressing (URIs/URLs)) he forgot one of the most important components, metadata. Conclusions were drawn that the Library community do have a number of valuable roles to play in the Web world, one of the more important being in driving metadata, but that their developments should be based on sound architectural principles which avoid vendor lock-ins. They should also keep up to date with new Web technology developments, such as XML, or face being left behind. The panel session involved a fair amount of interaction with a profusion of comments from the audience.
There were also some worthy sessions on Search Engines given by Danny Sullivan and Greg Notess. Both discussed 'the death of search engines', a prediction made a few years ago that finally seems to be taking shape. An introduction to the 'Invisible Web' was given by Gary Price and Chris Sherman. The invisible Web is the area not indexed by search engines and believed to be between 2 and 50 times larger that the visible Web [5]. It mainly consists of a number of very important databases, many of them from the government sector [6]. The presenters have a book coming out on their research in July [7].
Steve Coffman and one of his colleagues gave a live presentation of the Virtual Reference Desk [8]. The VRD is a way of providing live online reference assistance to users in need of support. A number of US libraries have started running VRD programmes and Steve got some of the librarians to log on in their pyjamas (so to speak). Three Slide sessions were given, one from London and two from different places in the USA. The whole presentation was very live and very dynamic. It was refreshing to see something different from your standard Powerpoint, and Steve's enthusiasm was enough to get us all excited.
The conference runs in parallel with an exhibition. Exhibitions at conferences generally tend to only be helpful if you are on the lookout for a particular product or service, such as library equipment or a new content management system. The freebees given usually only justify one lap of the exhibition hall. However this year the ILI Advisory Committee had the insight to include a number of free workshops. Some of the workshops echoed the presentations given at the actual conference whilst others were totally unique. Our very own UK National node Rosalind Johnson gave a tour of the new UK Portal & Cultural area of the Cultivate Web Site [9]. Stephen Abram of IHS, Canada & Bonnie Burwell, Burwell Information Services, Canada gave a number of workshops on Intranet Toolkits and e-learning. Steve Coffman also gave his global broadcast again using innovative technology to join together attendees from all over the globe.
On the whole the Internet Librarian International Conference did seem to be lacking a certain something. With 45 presentations given over the three days it became difficult for the delegates (and the library world) to establish clear themes or threads arising from event. The generalness of the Conference seemed to become a negative aspect, though this many of the delegates seemed happy with the generic level of content. It is possible that the Conference could benefit from more involvement from UK and European speakers and a broadening of the remit to include the wider cultural heritage sector. This however would reflect changes in the UK and Europe, which are not happening in the US from where a large portion of the delegates came.
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For citation purposes:
Cultivate Interactive "Internet Librarian International 2001", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/ili/>
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