Monday at the NFAIS conference was all about content. Except content and technology seemed to coincide in NFAIS’ definition. The first session featured Krista Mantsch, senior research librarian at National Geographic, who gave a wonderful talk on web 2.0 initiatives within the organization, including some that failed. This is an important point, since most people only talk about successes. One project, aimed at kids, failed mainly because the primary backer of the project left National Geographic. Other projects, however, are successful, like the Gazeteer, MetaLens, and Traveler magazine’s walking tours. Martin R.Kalfatovic from the Smithsonian explained the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It seems to me that this project could almost stand as an antidote to "everything is miscellaneous" since it is grounded in standard taxonomics. Linneaus anyone? Finishing out the first session was Rafael Sidi introducing Elsevier Illuminat8 project. Barbara Quint wrote an ITI newsbreak on this.

Information discovery through emerging technologies featured John Crupi from JackBe talking about enterprise mashups ("the user is the killer app"), Aaron Brown, from IBM, on text analytics ("key enablers are technology advances, ubiquity and standardization") and George Spix from Microsoft. ("I’m here to entertain you").  All talked about really cool technologies, particulary Spix with surface computing.

We then moved on to the future of information discovery, again very tech heavy. Ben Shneiderman, who started out with talking about what Google doesn’t do well–vague queries, open ended searches, Randy Marcinko on visualization (and even though he’s now CEO of Groxis, his talk did not focus on Groxis but on other visualization tools), and Susan Dumais from Microsoft talking about "sideways search." My favorite line from Dumais: "Search is not the end goal." She asked us, if we had 15 minutes downtime, would we spend it searching, expecting the answer "of course not," but ummm, I can think of several people in the audience, including me, who would do exactly that. Sick or ahead of the curve?

The Miles Conrad Lecture was given by Robert Massey of Chem Abs