Very fun, interesting session. Here are some sound-bytes from the panel:

Adam Smith from Google:

• Wants to dispell misinformation about Google Print
• What it is: Their effort to make all books digital (indexed by google) – doesn’t mean they have to digitize it
• Public domain – fully available
• Copyright – three short snippets from the book

The question was asked, “how will it look in the year 2020:

SteveArnold compared Google to the old pre-baby bell Bell Labs. Google has room to play and innovate.

Adam Smith… in 2020:

• everything is digitized
• everyone is an author, publisher, archivist – involved in the creative process

Mark Sandler on Libraries in 2020:

• some libraries will disappear (the ones that don’t “get it,” or that don’t change)
• they’ll need to change their mission – about access, leading people to content
• develop new strategies to connect users to content

Barbara Quint on libraries in 2020:

• authors are connecting directly with readers more
• librarians are discriminating between good/bad material
• you’re paying people to keep you from reading bad stuff
• we become censors… [me – how funny]

Roy Tennant’s take:

• we need print around
• (Barbara interjected) print becomes a format!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! an output
• libraries are about providing service

Stephen Abrams said: why do we ill books for $20 when we can buy them for $5 on amazon?

Barbara: ALA could issue a “librarian seal of approval” on good content

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Internet Librarian 2005

improve the user experience
– clean interfaces
– unique data
– unique functionality
– awareness of user’s work setting

Clean Interfaces:
– A great user experience is both boring and satisfying. It’s like turning on the tap and getting a clear, steady flow of clean water… [that must be the boring part?]
– clean design where tasks are easy to accomplish.
– white space
– weighting – most heavily used items get the most amount of space
– elimination of irrelevant or distracting content
– gave an example of lawyers.com

unique data – hard to find info
– metadata is critical

unique functionality
– content is more dependent on great software to amek it shine online

what to do:
– help the user do what they need to do
– minimal number of steps
– logical links (few of them)
– benignly redundant features

what not to do:
– gratuitous toys
– linkmania

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Internet Librarian 2005

“For most readers,you are the last stop between the reader and the truth.”

Five Rules to Blog By:

1. Transparency (include an about page – can be humorous – also full disclosure and honesty about who you are and why you’re writing). Transparency can be strategic.

2. Cite it

3. Be Accurate. “There is nothing more pathetic than a librarian who gets the facts wrong.”

4. Be fair

5. Admit Mistakes

[My thought] – Blogging ethics are very similar to normal writer’s ethics. And that makes sense, since a blogger is, whether they like it or not, a writer.

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Internet Librarian 2005

There’s lots of mention (Steven included) about things being in constant beta (GMail, Google News, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc). The reason? Someone stated that these companies are changing so fast, trends are popping up left and right, they simply can’t keep up. The person said the continuous beta trend will most likely continue.

Wikipedia – pointed out:

• no one used the World Book to look up info about Hurricane Katrina
• errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica

Netvibes – allows you to create your own webpage. Webmasters – why build your own My Library type of personalized site, when these companies are already doing this, for free, for our users? (I think Sarah Houghton said much the same thing yesterday during a question/answer time after the public library website presentation – awesome idea!).

Mentioned reddit and ratings systems

Library Thing – includes MARC records… user reviews, catalog your own book, RSS feeds for books you read, etc. Free acct – up to 200 books.

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Internet Librarian 2005

She has a friend that works at Technorati – cool…

She also mentioned the idea of the “long tail” – something about a curve, links, and blogs… I’ll have to look into that some more.

Yahoo’s My Yahoo helps her find what she wants. Her trusted contacts in My Yahoo help color her search results so she finds the stuff she really wants. This model works much better than simply typing a search into Google.

del.icio.us works a similar way – people can follow their interests through finding feeds of interest.

She showed La Grange Public Library’s del.icio.us feed.

• staff can get to the bookmarks
• patrons can get to the bookmarks (and follow the bookmarks through the RSS feed)

Searching is better when you can filter your search results through people you trust – human filtering rather than automated filtering.

Idea for web dudes: With your Subject Guides and category names for links: when you want to see what customers call things, go to del.icio.us and see what real people are calling them. Then use that term for the guide.

Look at the ESP Game – it’s a good excersize in tagging.

“Just brecause it doesn’t work for you, doesn’t mean it’s bad for everybody.” – her thoughts to librarians that are wary of constant partial attention.

Read “meet the lifehackers” found in the New York Times

an aside – she called this the Continuous Computing Generation

Pay attention to social bookmarking and tagging.

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Internet Librarian 2005