jcdl 5: John Willinsky (second keynote)

In the last few years, all of the conferences I have been to have had rather fabulous keynote speakers. I don't recall this being the case in the past. Maybe it's just that I'm really interested in libraries, information, and changing technology, and there are some great speakers in that field.

(Though would be nice to have some female or nonwhite keynote speakers every once in a great while. I mean, Brewster Kahle is my Internet boyfriend, and only somebody crazy would skip a Jonathan Zittrain talk, but still. Just once in a great while. Somebody not white and/or male?)

( John Willinsky. Sorting and Classifying the Open Access issues for Digital Libraries: Issues Technical, Economic, Philosophical, and Principled  )

jcdl 6: educational digital libraries

The next panel I attended was Educational Digital Libraries. All but the first of these papers were short papers, which might be why it's primarily the first paper I found interesting, in that first paper was more personally than professionally interesting.

( Children's Interests and Concenrs When Using the International Children's Digital Library: a Four Country Case Study )

( Digital Library Education in Computer Science Programs )

( A Study of how Online Learning Resources Are Used )

( Standards or Semantics for Curriculum Search? )

( Information Behavior of Small Groups: Implications for Design of Digital Libraries )

jcdl 7: Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanties and Social Sciences

Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanties and Social Sciences: Shaping and Advancing the Humanities Research Agenda

Much of this panel was dedicated to speakers from the IMLS and the NIH talking about their grant funding projects. A valuable talk, but not something that led me to take many notes. The key part of this panel, for me, was Greg Crane's speech, although I've heard him give versions of this talk before. While I've often disagreed with various points Crane has made, the overarching thrust of this particular talk is what I find very valuable. His focus is not a library focus about digitizing collections for preservation or access, but it's specifically a researcher focus: what tools can we add to our resources as we digitize them to give us more than we ever had before.

( Humanities Cyberinfrastructure )

( Ray @ IMLS on the humanities information landscape )

jcdl 8: User Studies and User Interfaces

User Studies and User Interfaces

This panel was probably the most useful in terms of immediate impact for my coworkers, just because of the research into OPAC interfaces. (Well, the most useful not counting the DSpace/Manakin tutorial.)

( Agreeing to Disagree: Search Engines and Their Public Interfaces )

( Static Reformulation: A User Study of Static Hypertext for Query-based Reformulation )

( A Rich OPAC User Interface with AJAX )

( Constructing Digital Library Interfaces )