Day One

A technology note: I had presumed that I would be able to post to the blog directly from sessions, but apparently providing wireless in the San Jose Convention Center is beyond the capability of those here in the Silicon Valley...

The conference opened this morning with the general session that began with a "state of the company" presentation from the CEO of Innovative (III) Jerry Kline. As is to be expected III is doing very well in a very turbulent library system market that has seen the consolidation of many of the other major players in the industry. In the past year III has added more new customers than all of their competitors combined. Since III is such a stable company, according to Mr. Kline, this leaves them with the ability to focus entirely on product development and not be as concerned with "the business".

Mr. Kline then focused on their new product Encore which provides a new search and aggregation interface that brings together the OPAC, federated searching, link resolvers and other resources into a single presentation interface. Encore is currently in development and is expected to be released by then end of 2007. SWITCH will be closely following the development and implementation of this product as it certainly fits in with our vision of how we would like SWITCH to evolve over the next couple years.

The podium was then given over to keynote speaker Robert Cringley who is a futurist and noted technology writer. His first job was also in a library in Ohio where his mother worked as a librarian. His general feeling seemed to be that though physical libraries will disappear, along with books, over the next 10-15 years that the professional librarian will become even more important as the navigator of the new virtual knowledge repository that will replace the library as a physical entity.

The keynote was followed by the IUG business meeting where we learned that there are 1,800 (!!!) attendees at this year's conference from 11 countries. The conference is getting so large that it is becoming difficult to find venues large enough to host and that the next two conferences will be held in Washington DC and Anaheim, CA. The session ended with a raffle of items donated by local businesses and III. I did win something, a $25 gift card to Starbucks, which was awarded between an iPod Nano and Canon digital camera. Timing is not my strong suit apparently.