Today I attended the Illinois Library Association conference in order to be part of the panel discussing "Top Tech Trends." My four trends centered on a few technologies that seem to be passing libraries by: texting/IM, personal storage, social collaborative networks online, and web services. My part of the presentation is available at http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/2004/tech.pdf, and the session handout is available at http://www.bloomingtonlibrary.org/handouts/04_ILATTT.htm. Major thanks to Charm for lending us her laptop for the presentation - she saved the day, no doubt!

Later in the afternoon, I was honored to receive an award from Today's Business Solutions, Inc. and ILA's Resources & Technical Services Forum. Thanks to TBS, ILA, the Forum folks, Lori, Teri, Sandy (both Sandys!), and everyone else that was in any way responsible for this!

And finally, I spoke to several different vendors in the exhibit hall, and this time I was ready with a handout for them. It included my business card, printouts of Leland Johnson's AIM catalog search bot, screenshots of various RSS catalog feeds, and a snapshot of Library ELF's home page (which I will be writing up very soon).

• Innovative Interfaces, Inc. - my ILS vendor; the rep hadn't heard of RSS, which I find discouraging after all this time, but he seemed to "get" it and he enthusiastically agreed to take the info back to others at the office.
   
• ProQuest - this rep was unsure why they would want to provide RSS feeds, but she agreed to get the info back to the home office.
   
• Recorded Books - one of the really big audiobook publishers whose titles are not yet available in Audible's catalog. I showed the rep ListenIllinois, and she said they are currently in negotiations with Audible, so there is hope.
   
• TLC - their rep seemed to "get" it pretty quickly, and he loved the idea of the AIM bot. He thinks TLC is already working on providing RSS feeds natively from the catalog, but he wasn't sure. He promised to take the info back and to let me know if they have indeed started down the RSS path!
   
• Blackstone - meeting with this audiobook publishers' reps was a wonderful experience. Their titles are already available in Audible's catalog, and they have been for some time. Not only that, they got me talking to Steve Potash at the OverDrive booth (more on that in a moment).
   
• OCLC - had a great talk with Paul, and he gave me the name of someone to contact about blogging, RSS, and AIM interfaces into the databases.
   
• EBSCO - talked to Matt for quite a while about RSS and even showed him Bloglines. I think he "got" it by the end, and he agreed to take the handout back to the office for discussion.
   
• Dynix - this guy TOTALLY got it, and he was pretty impressed when I showed him Peter Rukavina's RSS feeds from a Dynix catalog. If TLC doesn't beat them to it, I'm placing money on Dynix to be the first vendor to provide RSS feeds.
   
• OverDrive - got to spend a goodly amount of time talking to Steve Potash about their audiobook catalog. I have to say that I've deliberately not paid as much attention to their product because they had priced themselves out of our market. My libraries simply couldn't afford the start-up costs OverDrive has proposed in the past. Steve gave a demonstration of their product, though, and I have to say that it is indeed way slick, and circulating audiobooks directly to patron devices is definitely the wave of the future (like we didn't already know that). I really hope we can find a way to work with OverDrive to offer this service to MLS patrons!

It was a long day, topped off by a great dinner and wonderful company at Pegasus in Greektown. Thanks to everyone who stopped me to say hi, came to the presentations, asked questions, lent support, and offered congratulations. They were all much appreciated!