It’s always difficult for conference organizers to predict which topics will be important and/or popular enough to warrant a large room. Sometimes speakers face almost empty rooms, at other times it’s standing room only. This morning I went to an IFLA session on the collaborative efforts being put into place between social science and government libraries. The room was empty, which was particularly unfortunate because the last speaker, Judith Dueck, deserved many more listeners than she had in the room. Her topic was human rights information and she discussed HuriSearch, which is a database covering the topic in 77 languages. Although there was no Internet connection in the room, Judith showed screen shots of the search engine and records from the database. She had some caustic comments for the censorship activities of Google, Yahoo, and MSN in China, citing that as one reason to supplement Web searches with HuriSearch.

In the afternoon, the same room saw an overflow crowd to hear speakers talk about marketing library services. Now, I’m the first to admit that marketing is important and a crucial function for librarians to master, I just have to wonder at the disparity in the sizes of the audiences.

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