It’s a gorgeous Saturday in Washington DC, or I’m assuming it is, since I haven’t seen much of the outside world since my bus ride from my hotel to the Washington Convention Center for the ALA Annual Conference.

I started out the day, after I found registration, by going to a session on the Digital Native. With a title like that, why did ALA put it in such a small room? I missed most of the opening presentation, which wasn’t by Matthew Hong, but by his Gale colleague, Ken Breen. Most of the value of the session, though, lay not in the slides but in the conversation that ensued. Lots of talk about how libraries are using (or not using) MySpace and FaceBook to reach digital natives. One librarian told of her library’s entry in Wikipedia being deleted because it was “promotional.” Hard to believe that Wikipedia editors would take such a dislike to a library. Someone else suggested it was a Wikipedia policy, but other library pages remain on Wikipedia. Another discussion ensued about libraries in Second Life. I was surprised that some in the room were unacquainted with Second Life.

What is the future fro scholarly research, even when the “scholar” is an undergraduate? Some interesting observations here, about students using deli.cio.us tags to keep track of and share their research sources. At one school, teachers want to see students’ bibliographies before they write their papers.

My frustration with the session, aside from the crowded room, was the number of technologies the attendees seemed unfamiliar with that ONLINE authors and columnists have covered. Peter Jacso, Greg Notess, and Darlene Fichter, in particular, write about exactly the developments that this crowd wanted to hear. I wanted to stand up, wave the magazine around (OK, lots of you have probably seen me do that), and scream, “Just read this and you will so much more knowledgeable!” Yeah, and Wikipedia will then delete me for being promotional.