Following the SLA breakfast, I went down to the exhibition, which looks very nice this year, to prepare for my first talk. My topic was online trends. I talked about how personalization is altering search results and how visualized searching will require different literacy skills. Social search is definitely a topic of interest, particularly real time search. Predictive search holds various challenges for information professionals because we have so many different reasons for searching. And searching for us isn’t shopping.

I really believe that information professionals will have to make their own future because we are not the target audience for the web search companies. We need to insert the library into online, keep information professionals visible and relevant, and demonstrate how new technologies benefit people and enhance research.