Conference wrap up
November 14th, 2005 beatrice.pulliam
It is a little more than a week past the conference and hopefully those of us who attended are beginning to process the several days of sessions, governance meetings, and connecting (or reconnecting) with colleagues, and those experiencing the conference virtually found the postings here useful and informative.
I attended so many stimulating sessions and can say that after a second year of sitting in on one of Karen Fisher’s presentations, I realized that attending an ASIST conference means I can get to hear about her most recent research. This year I attended the “Information Grounds” session. Like many other people there, and like those of you following the conference virtually either through the blog or wiki, we have all been a part of an information ground. Fisher defined an information grounds as a “temporary environment created when people come together for a singular purpose [namely to engage in informal and formal info sharing]”. Fisher identified churches as the most popular settings for information grounds for people in the lower income bracket and the workplace for those in higher income brackets. Think, where else do you spend most of your time? There were several panelists and the results of the studies were reported from research that included baby story-time hours in a large public library system in Canada, a Polish community in Seattle, Hispanic farm workers and college students.
Patti Maes’ “Just-In-Time-Information” plenary was exciting as she described and showed screen shots of some of the gadgets coming out of her Ambient Intelligence Group at MIT’s Media Lab. According to Maes, Just-In-Time-Information is providing “info to the user that is highly relevant to what h/s is focused on” and “promotes insight/inspiration/interpersonal connections w/o interrupting the user’s activities”. Sounds very information commons to me..
This keynote also appealed to the gadget freak in me, I like the idea of a device/app that allows me to keep track of my mentors published thoughts and opinions virtually and the sensors that track your interest and flash when you walk past certain books of interest or books that mention you (for me a very future state prospect).
The “Myth of the Intellectual Commons” session highlighted problems of attribution of ideas and rightful ownership of digital objects in a variety of situations (academic, work-for-hire and libraries in other countries — Anglo, Eastern European and Middle East). What was missing for me in this session and others was more discussion from developing areas (African countries, etc.).
The “Use of Classification in Information Seeking” session had a common thread of “people think they want a Google search but they really don’t”. I think the key will be to make the googlish search features available in most databases as robust as the advanced features we keep directing people to use. My ra-ra rant: It should be seamless for the user, and the user shouldn’t have to know or care about faceted classification. It should be like PubMED!! If only all of the other databases I use and instruct others to use had a single citation matcher or such powerful simple search.
Entry Filed under: ASIST2005