Archive | CIL2005

The final sessions of CIL2005 are now concluding. Gary Price and Tara Calishain took us on a whirlwind tour of Web sites with searchable databases and important information. In another room there was a spirited discussion of online communities through Web Junction. Internet @ Schools concluded with a session on blogging in schools. It’s been a busy three days and I’m off this evening to the final DineAround.

Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals

The search engine gurus—Chris Sherman, Greg Notess, and Ran Hock—gave us updates this morning on what’s happening, what to watch, and some inside scoop. In the process, there were also some quotable lines I thought worthy to share here.

Chris covered current trends, like local search, personalization, collaborative search, and desktop search. We’re “sorta” seeing the return of push, he said. “RSS is huge. It will completely change the way we interact with information.” I was happy to hear that we’ll soon be able to get search alerts from Google and Yahoo sent via RSS rather than e-mail. One cool thing both he and Ran mentioned was using Yahoo IM to search the Web collaboratively—this has interesting reference and elearning possibilities.

Ran talked up the capabilities in MyYahoo, including RSS feed aggregation, document storage, calendaring, and more. Unfortunately, he said that a problem for both Google and Yahoo is that most users just click on the search button and don’t take advantage of all the good content and good features. There’s a lot of copying of features among the competitors. Ran said: “To see what Google may have in 6 months, look at Google Labs. To see what Google may have in 1 to 2 years, look at Yahoo.”

Greg covered some of the quirky results currently seen in Google Print and gave some tips on how to find things. “Finding books is really messy.” Greg will cover this in his column in the May issue of ONLINE.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief
Information Today, Inc.
www.infotoday.com
phane@infotoday.com

Just 30 minutes after the close of the Computers in Libraries exhibit hall the aisles were lined with crates and boxes instead of attendees. It was a good show and now it’s time to hit the road for most of these weary exhibitors. Attendees have one last chance to attend a post-conference workshop tomorrow—it’s still not too late to register.

Nancy Garman
Director, Conference Development
Information Today, Inc.
ngarman@infotoday.com

Some interesting comments in the Creative Content track this morning. The World Bank is integrating Factiva at various points to mirror work procedures. Carol Knoblauch from Open Text thinks ILS systems will be supplanted by enterprise content managment programs. Someone in the audience wondered why PR departments were in charge of Web sites, particularly at universities. If you’re going to standardize your Web site, standardize it to industry standards, not library standards.

Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals