an unavoidable day -- cil 2006 day 2

for a 3-day conference, sessions on the 2nd day are usually the lamest. cil 2006 presents no exception.

planning for a handheld mobile future
i was checking out carol's blueberry yesterday and we both laughed at its extremely slow response in browsing the web. then there was this session advocating mobile devices usage in library environment. e-books' comeback kicks off another round of development in super-reflective screens, e.g. microsoft's new ultra-mobile pc with a 7-inch display, usb ports, wi-fi capability, and a touch pad interface. glad to hear that some database providers, like lexisnexis,westlaw,pubmed, have developed interfaces for mobile devices. but it all makes sense that many of them are in the medical and legal areas. this echoes the findings that people use handheld device to seek for answers instead of searching or browsing.
yes, new gadgets certainly show a lot of exciting opportunities for libraries to bring on, but sometimes i just couldn't help feeling that the format outbeats the content in this field. hope time will prove that i am wrong.

exploiting the value of structured metadata
lorcan dempsey from oclc explored the value of structured metadata through 4 layers, flat application, rich interaction, data is the new functionality, and participation. a numeric scale was used to measure the audience level for individual book titles (though i wasn't sure what it was for). on the scale, the higher the score, the more likely the book was to be found in the research library; and then the academic library, and then the public library, and the lowest score corresponds to the school library.
things to add on my check-out list: livesearch, ajax, finctionfinder

vendor visit

eos luncheon
another library automation system. unfortunately i'm not all that familiar with products in this field to enable me to make any comparison of the product.

new library, new technologies, new services
it's actually not the "web 2.0" new; but all the challenges and solutions talked during the session are just indeed down-to-the-earth. so too little surprise, but a good session to reinforce some established understandings.

digital preservation & the open web
a disappointing session. nothing new about digitization, but not even clear clue of the presentation. no mention about the notion of "open web", let alone how digital preservation was related to it.

taxonomy tales
this was the second half of a consecutive session, so it was all broken to me.

tomorrow is another day.