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ITI Bloggers February 27th, 2005

NFAIS has concluded its formal programming for the day, but the delegates assembled here are not done with their networking and other business activities. They are about to go into their official business meeting, which Marydee and I will not be covering. Also on the agenda for tonight is a formal reception here at the Ritz.

Marydee and I will be hanging around tonight and certainly will have more to report as things happen.

Until then . . .

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content

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ITI Bloggers February 27th, 2005

Not many of the players in this room would still call themselves “abstracting and indexing services”–at least not in front of their markets–but that didn’t stop today’s speakers from talking about “A&I” as if it was still a pertinent topic.

Outsell’s Leigh Watson Healy noted that librarians value information services based on the quality of their A&I layer to a much higher degree than end-users value that service aspect.

EPA’s Richard Huffine, speaking on this last panel, put it this way, “A&I adds value, but it may be something end-users don’t need to understand (or shouldn’t need to understand) in order to use a service.”

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content

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ITI Bloggers February 27th, 2005

If Richard Huffine, of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is emblematic of my federal government, I’m feeling better about paying my taxes. He may put the lie to Stewart’s comment that no one in the room is a digital native, because if he isn’t one, he sure comes close.

I didn’t realize there was so much business intelligence research going on at the EPA, I suppose I thought it was just science, which of course they do access through scholarly literature. And the EPA’s ability to aggregate and federate is exemplary. The EPA aggregates news, research, and legal information. It also merges internal and external information. Now he’s using flickr’s tagging as an example of open access and individual creation of metadata.

Pricing inconsistencies are rampant, as are platform and format irregularities. He’s running into publisher exclusivity, another concept I thought belonged to the last century. Licensing issues affects portability and re-use, limiting EPA’s ability to create an aggregated information portal.

What does the federal sector need? Staff need the ability to search aggregated content, better IP authentication, easy collection and export of citation to manage staff’s own knowledge. Libraries need partners not adversaries, sliding scale cost models, guide the integration of external content in agency intranets, portals, and other knowledge manaagement environments.

He ended by pointing out that the federal sector is a unique client.

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

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ITI Bloggers February 27th, 2005

Mimi Drake pointed out that “in academe we do everything” and “everyone is a desktop user.” There’s differences not only in the expertise of faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates but also among academic institutions. Undergraduates “know how to P and C” (that’s point and click, she explained) but there’s lots of other things they don’t know, like how to evaluate what they find on Google and that information on their laptops come from the library not the computing center. Faculty don’t believe that copyright restrictions apply to them; undergraduates never heard of copyright. Undergraduates are seduced by the visual, grad students want to get their PhD’s as fast as possible.

Mimi ended with the traditional plea to information producers to consider librarians their partners and recognize that librarians sell the products produced by NFAIS attendees to the academic community. I guess I wonder why we still have to say this.

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

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ITI Bloggers February 27th, 2005

Though certainly not her main point, nor the focus of her remarks, I was taken with a remark that Barbara Peterson made about corporations and Open Access materials.

“The irony,” she said, “is that it’s the big companies who really need access to it [the literature], but they have the money to pay for it . . . they also have the money to pay to make the systems that will produce useful results across an open access collection.”

Dick Kaser
ITI, VP, Content

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ITI Bloggers February 27th, 2005

What do users want in public libraries? According to Stewart Bodner, it’s cheap, fast, and good. They want full text, linking, current data, and relevancy. He noted the importance of personalization and customization, but also said it was hard to implement in the context of the public library. He made the distinction between Digital Immigrants, who use PCs for email, word processing, and searching, and Digital Natives, who use Internet capable devices to connect to the world. For Digital Natives, it’s a lifestyle. Stewart then looked at us and said, “No one in this room is a digital native.” Then he claimed that “convenience trumps quality” and said his job (and by extension, any librarian’s job) is “to make quality convenient.” Great stuff and an interesting view of information quality, something I’ve been talking and writing about for years.

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

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ITI Bloggers February 27th, 2005

Barbara Peterson first contrasted her present employer Ecolabs with her prior employer 3M, which gently gave us the realization that corporate libraries are not all the same, not in what they do, not in how they value libraries and librarians, not in how they support information initiatives. What do users want across the varied corporate library landscape? They want stuff that is user friendly, has direct links to full text, is easy to access, and available globally.

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

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ITI Bloggers February 27th, 2005

Information Today just posted a NewsBreak about the NFAIS conference and this blog.

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

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ITI Bloggers February 27th, 2005

Outsell’s Leigh Watson-Healey spent some time earlier today sharing what Outsell analysts have determined about the difference between the needs/demands of information professionals and end-users (or in the parlance NFAIS is using here, “desktop searchers.”)

The program is now turning to an examination of these differences from the unique perspectives of experts from four different user settings.

On the platform are (right to left–hey, why not?):

Dr. Dennis Norlin (far right), Executive Director, The American Theological Library Association (Chicago) and panel moderator;

Miriam Drake, Professor Emerita, Georgia Institute of Technology;

Barbara Peterson, Global Knowledge Manager, EcoLab;

Stewart Bodner, Associate Chief Librarian, New York Public Library; and

Richard Huffine, Federal Manager, US EPA Library Network, US Environmental Protection Agency

Several of these folks have, by this time, had their time at the microphone.
Marydee and I are taking notes and we’ll give you some snippets in the next few posts.

Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content

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ITI Bloggers February 27th, 2005

A big smile from Barbara MacKenzie, editor-in-chief, RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, during the NFAIS conference’s first networking break.

NFAIS builds generous periods of networking time into its programs, since this community of vendors is really a community.

Delegates used their 30-minute break not only to stock up on scones, cookies, and coffee, but to huddle in groups, where the conversations ranged from just catching up with old friends to discussing (sometimes quibbling with) what they had just heard on the program.

Dick Kaser
ITI, VP, Content

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