Internet Librarian 2005

I spent four days last week in Monterey attending the Internet Librarian 2005 conference. Sunday, I took Amtrak's Coast Starlight from Sacramento, and arrived in Monterey around noon. After getting my room, I took a walk to Cannery Row - about a 3-mile round trip from the hotel - and visited some of the neat shops there. In the evening, I attended a Demo Derby ("how my library did it better") at Monterey Public Library.

The remaining three days were full of meetings, keynote speeches, and quick meals on the run. I tried to pick meetings that were relevant to the work I do at Sacramento Public, but it was hard to choose between very good topics in the four "tracks".

The big ideas that underscored the tracks I attended were:

• Interoperability - information now flows from sources to users via a variety of carriers: in-person, by (cell)phone, by e-mail, via the web. Libraries that don't understand how the next generation expects to get information and who insist on delivering materials and services only by traditional means will die.
• Collaboration via "social software" - tools and services like blogs, RSS, wikis, Flickr, IM and del.icio.us are basically mainstream, and need to be included in library services for us to remain credible.
• MP3 players are becoming more common among library users, and they are being used for much more than music: photos, documents, e-books.

Next step is summarizing the sessions, routing my summary, and making links to the presentations available to the librarians in Sacramento Public. There are also "IL05" links in both del.icio.us and Flickr - just type that string into the search box to get notes, comments, and photos of the conference, most created live, during the sessions!