Maryland Technology Day 2007 Notes I was able to attend only half of this fabulous program because I had class in the afternoon but here are my notes.

First, it was a great design. It was very practical and and drew people from all kinds of libraries from New Jersey to Virginia.

It started with a keynote from Gary Price from ResourceShelf and Ask.com. I could listen to Gary speak an hour a day 365 days a year and still learn something new. The first thing Gary did was to perfectly set up my talk later :) He did this by talking about the roles of librarians and how we need to get the word out better and how traditional communication media are still important (well maybe not traditional, but older technologies such as e-mail). One minor criticism on this was that he spent quite a bit of time preaching to the choir which shortened his time to show other resources.
Neat things:

• Ask City - *meaningfully* annotate a map. Click on two points and get directions (walking or driving) between them, find businesses within a box or circle you draw, find the acreage in a box you draw... pretty cool. (see my map of restaurants near the ASIST hotel)
• TerraFly - Gary's been telling us about this for a while, but I hadn't realized all of the public records now available for each location... (see Milwaukee)
• Opinion searching - I've seen plenty of conference papers about this, but there are now some competing things available on the web. (I also talked about doing this at CIL um, 2006 maybe?). One is http://wize.com/
• Podcast to phonecast is pretty cool if you have lots of minutes. (I think it was: http://www.phonecasting.com/)
• Remember NewsNow and Argali

Then we had short updates from each of the sponsoring vendors (who sent someone).

• Ovid's new interfaces
• Knovel adding biomedical engineering, earth science, and Merck
• Morgan & Claypool Synthesis new titles, free trials, MARC records
• CAS, STN - express software free, anavist and viewer
• Royal Society now has a rep in Boston to cover North America
• WoS new interface
• Iconitel - consulting on licensing (I think?)
• the Elsevier guy just read straight from something so you can do that yourself
• L-N , new interface, new tools for all types of information

Then we had a brief break to visit the reps and talk to them. Scopus is coming out with an affiliation search like their author search - that should really help.

Then we had the first set of talks. My slides are posted below which is live. You can comment here or on slideshare. I had a great turnout - standing room only. I did a quick survey and there were people from - special (gov't, law firm, corporate), academic, school, public libraries, as well as from vendors and Catholic University and University of Maryland (HCIL and CLIS, students and faculty). Some fabulous questions. I may post some specific comments with the slides but may not due to time and a killer headache I'm fighting.

Then an awesome lunch (I wish I had a picture of the dessert table!). We even had cloth napkins and china plates.

and I ran off to class...  ¶ 10:41 AM| |cites (technorati) |