NFAIS Humanities Roundtable VII: Building The Base for Authoritative Content 

When:
October 20, 2008

Location:
The Graduate Center
of
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Room 9204/9205

  Final Agenda

8:15am - 9:00am: Registration

9:00am - 9:05am: Welcome and Opening Remarks

Jill O'Neill, Director of Planning and Communication, NFAIS
Barbara Dobbs MacKenzie, Editor-in-Chief, RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, Host

9:05am - 9:45am: Digital Initiatives in the Humanities

The opening keynote will provide an overview of the proliferation of digital information initiatives in the Humanities that is taking place in academic institutions across the United States. Issues such as the impact of collaboration and social scholarship, the rise of new information tools such as From the Page, and efforts in digital modeling, text mining and the visualization of search results will be discussed. Content providers and users of humanities information will be given a glimpse of the new types of content and technologies that will need to be integrated into existing products and services in the not-too-distant future.

Julia Flanders, Director, Women Writers Project and Associate Director for Textbase Development, Scholars Technology Group, Brown University [ Slides]

9:45am - 10:15 am: Search and Retrieval Expectations in a Google Environment

Today's students and young professionals are digital natives. Their information search and retrieval skills are based on a lifetime of use of intuitive search engines and web-based information. What products do they use and why? What do they see as the barriers to utilizing traditional information products and services? Do they use libraries? Learn the answers to theses questions and more. Gleaned from the results of surveys and focus groups, the data discussed in this session will provide attendees with a better sense of the information search and retrieval expectations, assumption, and needs of the rising population of Google-trained research students.

John Law, Vice President, Discovery Services, Proquest [ Slides]

10:15am - 10:45am: Article Discovery in a 21st Century Library Environment

Today's libraries are evolving to meet the needs of a digital information society and they are redesigning the functionality of library information management systems. As a result, new business opportunities are emerging. By highlighting access to books, videos, music, articles and other media for individual users, OCLC is creating in WorldCat a new kind of resource-sharing facility. The WorldCat platform encourages and incorporates user-generated contributions and is providing applications for such social networking sites as FaceBook. Learn more about how a traditional library service can be transformed into an information discovery tool for digital natives in the 21st century.

Janet Weber, OCLC Online Computer Library Center [ Slides]

10:45am - 11:00am: Break and Networking Opportunity

11:00 am - 11:45am: Building Information Products for Today's Users: Leveraging Student Input

With the born digital generation now moving into faculty and research positions, it is essential that information products and services meet the needs and expectations of this new generation of information seekers. An earlier session in the agenda focused on the information search and retrieval need of young users. This session will focus on what information resources need to look like in order to engage the modern user and how information providers can elicit useful feedback from advisory groups for their own products and services.

Kate Wittenberg, Manager Publishing, Center for Digital Research & Scholarship, Columbia University and Meghan French, Doctoral Candidate in American History, Columbia University [ Slides]

11:45pm - 12:45pm: Lunch (will be provided)

12:45pm - 1:30pm: Social Networks, Online Communities, and Immersive Virtual Worlds

Social networks are part of the mainstream, attracting participants across all age groups to a life observed at least partially through such branded services as Facebook, LibraryThing, and Google as well as services offered through such white label platforms as Ning. Learn about the potential for these services in the context of the Web and your targeted audience. Jill O'Neill will share observations and insights from one participant's experience in worlds where grey-suited executives and animated figures formed through computer graphics share equally in the benefits of the online environment.

Jill O'Neill, Director, Planning & Communciation, NFAIS [ Slides]

1:30pm - 3:00pm: Integrating Web 2.0 with Content Delivery

Web 2.0 technologies are essential channels for both communication and the distribution of information in today's web-based environment. This session will highlight three innovative organizations that have incorporated Web 2.0 technologies (wikis, blogs, podcasts, etc.) into their regular content delivery and communication channels. They will discuss the challenges that they faced in the implementation, the opportunities that have resulted, and the response of their users to date.

Scott Jascik, Editor, InsideHigherEd; Michael Ross, Senior Vice President/Education General Manager, Encyclopedia Britannica; John Houser, Senior Technology Consultant, PALINET [ Slides]

3:00pm - 3:15pm: Break and Networking Opportunity

3:15pm - 4:00pm: Authoritative Content: The Value of Abstracts

Terence Ford, Head, Research Databases, The Getty Research Institute.

There is much discussion, particularly in the abstracting and indexing community, about the user-perceived value of abstracts and indexes in a world dominated by search engines and the Web. In this session the results of a recently completed survey regarding the user-perceived value of bibliographic records and abstracts as a contribution to the body of authoritative content will be discussed. The research is based upon a survey of users of the International Bibliography of Art.

4:00pm - 4:30pm: Closing Keynote: Authoritative Content in the Digital Age.

We live in a new information order. Social networks abound, collaboration among scholars is becoming the norm, and the born-digital generation is now assuming the roles of faculty, scholar, researcher and business leader. As a result, the way in which authoritative content is presented, accessed and retrieved must change to meet the expectations of the new generation who will now use it. This session will discuss the future of collaborative approaches to information discovery, the design of intuitive and transparent search tools, and the need for information environments that engage the user and encourage information exploration.

Stephen Francoeur, Digital Reference and Information Services Librarian, Newman Library, Baruch College [ Slides]

4:30pm: Adjourn