Internet Librarian: Alexia Estabrook
By Alexia Estabrook, MSLS, AHIP, Information Services Librarian
Providence Hospital, Helen L. DeRoy Medical Library, Southfield, MI
Mid-fall 2005 found me in Monterey, California – the home of James Steinbeck and, for the next four days, librarians from all across the country. The reason for the gathering was the 9th Annual Internet Librarian Conference, hosted by Information Today, Inc. I was able to attend the conference and a pre-conference workshop due to a generous grant.
The Internet Librarian conference is “the ONLY conference for information professionals who are using, developing, and embracing Internet, Intranet, and Web-based strategies in their roles as information architects and navigators, Webmasters and Web managers, content evaluators and developers, taxonomists, searchers, community builders, information providers, trainers, guides, and more.” (http://www.infotoday.com/il2006/). Librarians and information professionals from all types of libraries come together to learn, collaborate, network and converse about all things Internet and library related. Regardless of what type of library we hail from, be it corporate, medical, public, academic or school, we all have something in common – the love of all things Web.
The theme of the Internet Librarian 2005 conference was Shifting Worlds. “It has been 10 years since the last major technological sea change when the Web rocked our world. Not just the information world, but also those worlds at the very roots of our lives – the places and spaces where we work, learn and play. All indications point to very dramatic and dynamic changes in the coming year.” (http://www.infotoday.com/il2005/). I can attest to that – by the end of the conference my world had shifted. Rarely had I ever come back from a conference feeling as optimistic and enthusiastic as I had from this one.
My funding from the GMR allowed me to attend a pre-conference workshop. I chose the Web Manager’s Academy. This workshop was taught by Frank Cervone from Northwestern University, Jeff Wisniewski from the University of Pittsburgh, Marshall Breeding from Vanderbilt University and Darlene Fichter from the University of Saskatchewan. The workshop began with a discussion of the disconnects between libraries and their “Next Gen” users. Before we can improve products and access to our libraries we must understand who are users are and how the want to access our information. Though the instructors focused mostly on their area of expertise – the academic library – I found the discussion relevant. Our job in the medical library, especially those in the hospitals, is more difficult in that our users are not as homogenous as the academic library. Our patrons run the gamut from young students who grew up with the Web to older physicians with little or no computer experience. I believe this is a topic that deserves fuller discussion among medical librarians. The rest of the workshop was devoted to “Next Gen” web services, including Live Reference Chat, syndicated library news, dynamic organizational portals, device independent delivery and virtual services.
Each day the conference opened with a keynote speaker or speakers. The opening keynote was given by Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/index.asp). He discussed some of the latest findings of the Pew Internet Project and the subjects the Project is considering in the future. His speech was thought provoking as always, especially for librarians who work in consumer health. More and more Web users go to the Internet to find health information with little or know knowledge of what is relevant or authoritative. In addition, the digital divide between older / younger, urban / rural, and broad / narrow band offers additional challenges for librarians as a whole and medical librarians in particular.
Elizabeth Lawley, who can be found blogging at http://mamamusings.net, was the keynote speaker for the second day of the conference. She spoke on social computing and the information professional and focused on building trusted communities online. I couldn’t help but reflect on MEDLIB-L, one of my favorite professional online communities! With the coming evolution of the Internet to Web 2.0, I hope the library community embraces all the new avenues of social computing to maintain and grow our trusted community.
The keynote speakers for the last day of the conference were Rich Wiggins and Roy Tennant. They offered us a lively debate on Google Print. Rich viewed Google as a smart corporation and that their foray into digitization as cause the library community to “think big”. Roy Tennant wondered aloud if Google was the “Devil or merely evil”? He proposed that blind wholesale digitization caused older, free material to win over newer, not free material. Adam Smith, a project manager from Google was a surprise participant at the end of the speeches. He was hit with a lot of hard questions from the audience and did his best to answer though “no comment” was a popular response.
The closing key not speech was given on the afternoon of the third day of the conference. Stephen Abram, from SirsiDynix, spoke about libraries competing with Google, and positioning libraries for the 21st century. His advice was ten-fold: know our market, know our customers better than Google does, beware of where are users are, search for the target user, support our culture, position libraries where we excel, be wireless, get visual, integrate with our community, and take a risk by sacrificing our fear of success. This last point really hit home for me. How many times have hospitals librarians said, “I’d love to do that but if it were a success I have no time to add that service”? Perhaps we need to look at our current services and evaluate against the current needs of our customers. Maybe it isn’t that we need to do more but to do different things. Stephen Abrams can be found blogging at http://stephenslighthouse.sirsi.com/.
If the official theme of the conference was Shifting Worlds, the unofficial theme was collaboration. Information Today, Inc. created a Conference Wiki where conference attendees could post about anything from the best place to stay to restaurants to thoughts on the conference itself. In addition, there were scores of official and unofficial conference bloggers, most posting in real time thanks to wifi access in the conference center however sporadic it may have been. A search in Technorati of the tags IL05, IL2005, and Internet Librarian 2005 will show you the breadth and depth of library bloggers and their thoughts. In addition to sessions on blogs, wikis, RSS, blogging ethics, federated searching web services and portals (and these were just the sessions I attended; there were many more) there were the returning favorites of “Thirty search tips in 40 minutes”, “Web Wizard’s Cool Tools”, and “Search Engine Update”.
I returned home from this conference with more ideas than I’ll ever have time to implement in my lifetime. Since the conference Web 2.0 has developed even further with the advent of Plogs and Mashups. The Internet is developing at such a fast pace that we librarians barely have enough time to assimilate the current technologies before the new technologies arrive. That is the main reason I enjoy the Internet Librarian conferences (Besides the fact that it is held in Monterey, California). Not only am I kept abreast of current Web technologies, but I’m also learning about how they have been implemented in all types of libraries. I highly recommend this conference for any librarian.
This project was funded in part with federal fund from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. NO1-LM-1-3513.
