Program, 2010 NFAIS Annual Conference

Hyatt at the Bellevue, Broad and Walnut Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19102

Redefining the Value of Information: Exploring the New Equation

 PROGRAM

Sunday, February 28

9:00am - 5:00pm: Registration
Grand Ballroom Foyer, Hotel First Floor

9:00am - 12:00pm: NFAIS 2009 - 2010 Board Meeting
Cliveden, 19th Floor

1:00pm - 1:05pm: Welcome and Opening Remarks
Judith Russell, NFAIS President-Elect 2009 - 2010
Dean of University Libraries, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida
Grand Ballroom

1:05pm - 1:45pm: Keynote: Redefining the Value of Information: A New Revolution

Clay Shirky, author, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations , and Adjunct Professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University

The printing press redefined the value of information. Publishers experimented with new forms such as scientific journals, novels, periodicals, and more. And those who controlled the information world prior to the printing press were horrified by both the novelty and volume of the content that it spawned. Today, a second revolution sparked by the Web, search engines and social media is again redefining the value of information. Noted author Clay Shirky will discuss why we are "in for a significant transformation of intellectual life" and why we must "not try to preserve the old forms, but to experiment, wildly, with new ones."

1:45pm - 2:30pm: What Information Users Really Value: Research Findings from Outsell

Roger Strouse, Vice President and Lead Analyst, Outsell, Inc. [ Slides ]

With the increasing commoditization and ubiquity of information comes a new value paradigm for end-users. While content itself continues to form the foundation of modern information solutions, the real differentiator is becoming the broader "user experience." Successful publishers and information providers must be innovative and aggressive in catering to the shifting values, preferences, and behaviors that underlie user loyalty. To rise above the noise of a crowded and sometimes confused information marketplace, both commercial providers and enterprise information managers need to place their product where users can readily find and use it, within the context of users' existing routines and workflows. This can mean, for example, packaging content for mobile devices, porting it into workflow applications, or posting it to social networking platforms. In short, the information industry must adapt to a new kind of information consumer whose loyalty and satisfaction are driven by a different set of values that go beyond content and extend to the experience of using that content.

2:30pm - 3:00pm: Break and Networking Opportunity:
Sponsored by the Getty Research Institute

3:00pm - 4:30pm: The Value Equation: Scholars and Scientists Speak Out!

Dr. Cameron Neylon, Senior Scientist, Biomolecular Sciences,Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK ( Slides ); John E. Ingram, Senior Associate Dean of University Libraries, University of Florida [ Slides ];  MacKenzie Smith, Associate Dierctor for Technology, MIT Libraries [ Slides ]

How do information seekers actually determine the value of the products and services that they use? What measures of value do they factor in - and why? In this session, three experienced researchers representing the sciences, social sciences and the humanities will discuss these issues and more.

5:00pm - 6:00pm: NFAIS Assembly Meeting (open to all NFAIS members), Grand Ballroom, Hotel First Floor

6:30pm - 8:00pm: Welcome Reception, Rose Garden and Promenade, 19th Floor; Sponsored by H.W. Wilson

Monday, March 1

8:00am - 5:00pm: Registration
Grand Ballroom Foyer, Hotel First Floor

7:45am - 8:30am: Continental Breakfast: Sponsored by Thomson Reuters Healthcare & Science

8:30am - 10:00am: Embracing New Measures of Value

Scholars and scientists have traditionally expected and relied upon traditional content providers - publishers, database producers and librarians - to offer authoritative, high quality products and services that facilitate efficient and effective research. Today, even more is expected from those products and services. They need to deliver to mobile devices, they need to blend into workflows, they need to support collaborative research, and more. Come and learn how innovative content providers and librarians are embracing these new measures of value today.

Christy Confetti Higgins, Digital Library Program Head, Information & Knowledge Service Program Lead, Sun Microsystems ( Slides ); Alisa Bowen, Senior Vice President, Consumer Publishing, Reuters Media, Thomson Reuters ( Slides ); Chris McCue, Vice President, Marketing, CAS ( Slides )

10:00am - 10:30am: Break and Networking Opportunity; Sponsored in part by CrossRef

10:30am - 12:00pm: A Fresh Look at Content

Information providers must regularly examine their content within the context of technological advances to ensure that it is being showcased to its best advantage and that users are receiving maximum value. A creative relook at individual pieces such as the text, charts, abstracts, data, etc., may uncover the potential for adding value through technology enhancements or through the incorporation of new forms of content - leading to innovative new products and services. Come and learn how content providers are taking a fresh look at their own information to create even greater value for users.

Dr. Emilie Marcus, Editor, Cell, and Executive Editor, Cell Press; Barry Graubart, Vice President, Product Strategy and Business Development, Alacra; Brigitte Ricou-Bellan, Vice President and Managing Director, Dow Jones ( Slides )

12:00pm - 2:00pm: Lunch on Your own

12:00pm - 1:45pm:  Members-only Session:  When Domains Collide:  Google and Media 2010

Google has worked for more than a decade to build its own domain. "Domain" does not mean Google.com. "Domain" in this talk refers to technical systems and methods to sustain certain activities. Some companies have automated certain business processes. Few organizations have built a next generation computing domain and then deployed via software new, often faster, business methods on a global scale. Media has certain entrenched business processes, systems, and methods. But Google's domain allows replacement or circumvention of existing methods. The effects of such a domain collision can be identified. Google is disruptive due to its ability to follow the clicks; that is, user actions. This talk reviews several of Google's most interesting domain functions and identifies their likely potential impact on publishing and traditional content business systems and methods. Domain collisions can take years, possibly decades to unfold. The outcome is a fusion of the established methods as reworked by the newer methods. Hegel himself would find the inevitable synthesis an intriguing intellectual and cultural event. This talk looks at the opportunities the domain collision fosters

Stephen E. Arnold, Managing Partner, Arnold Information Technology [ Slides ]

2:00pm - 3:30pm: Redefining Value with Emerging Technologies

Technology plays a pivotal role in enhancing the value of digital information. Semantic search capabilities, unique software filters that provide more precise answers, translation features to meet the needs of today's global market, analytic and visualization tools - all provide a showcase for the inherent value of the content being used. Come and learn about some of the new technologies that are available to enhance the value of your content.

Jignesh Bhate, CEO, Molecular Connections [ Slides ]; Abe Lederman, President & CTO, Deep Web Technologies ( Slides ); Del Satterthwaite, Director of Sales Engineering, Perfect Search Corporation
 

3:30pm - 4:00pm: Break and Networking Opportunity: Sponsored by the Philosopher's Information Center

4:00pm - 4:45pm: Miles Conrad Lecture: The Network Reconfigures Academic Library Collections

Award Recipient: Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, Research & Chief Strategist, OCLC [ Slides ] 






 

   The network reconfigures behaviors, industries and systems. What about the academic library? Will changes in academic library collections be incremental or will there be major discontinuities? This presentation will consider institutional and system-wide collection issues in the context of changers in education, scholarly communication and network behaviors.

Tuesday, March 2

8:00am - 12:00pm: Registration
Grand Ballroom Foyer, Hotel First Floor

7:45am - 8:30am: Continental Breakfast

8:30am - 9:15am: Plenary Session: Quality: The Key Value Factor in Professional Information.

Sabine Bruenger-Weilandt, President & CEO, FIZ Karlsruhe
[ Slides]

Why prefer commercial database vendors and pay for information when there is so much information for free on the Web? Quality makes the difference! Quality in the information workflow directly influences the precision and recall of search results. Quality assurance is required over the entire information workflow and includes database producers, vendors and searchers. Quality criteria are discussed, such as:

• Databases: current and comprehensive coverage of their field; transparency of the content selection and the intellectual value-add.
• Vendors/Hosts: provision of synergy from databases of different provenance; reliable operations and secure access; sophisticated and transparent retrieval, evaluation, analysis and reporting tools; efficient customer support.
• Searchers: information competence, i.e. familiarity with their company's research topics, sophisticated information tools and the specifics of databases

Information professionals and intellectual property professionals depend on the quality information products from commercial vendors to deliver to their organizations the quality needed for business critical research and decisions. The presentation emphasizes the importance of quality in the professional information workflow, provides relevant examples and aims to stimulate the discussion of this important topic within the community
 

9:15am-10:30am: Measuring Value in a Changing Environment:  Two Key Drivers of Transformation

In addition to debates over quality and the value of free vs. fee-based information, there are several key issues that are reshaping scholarly communication and user perceptions of the value of information. Perhaps the two most important of these are open content and the growing need among scholars and researchers for "social connectedness," with the latter resulting in the emergence of online scholarly communities of interest with their own "authoritative" content and the growth of user-generated content. This session will provide a thought-provoking overview of these two issues that must be considered when attempting to measure the value of today's information products and services.

Peter Brantley, Director, Bookserver Project, Internet Archive [ Slides ]; Joy Moore, Vice President, Global Partnerships, Seed Media Group [ Slides ]

10:30am - 11:00am: Break and Networking Opportunity: Sponsored by the Copyright Clearance Center

11:00am - 12:30pm: Measuring Value: The Content Provider's Challenge

How do you, as a publisher or librarian, measure the value of the products and services that you offer? Do you focus on product features and functionalities (the number of documents covered, search capabilities, etc.) or the benefits that they provide (such as saving time or improving overall business processes) - benefits that perhaps are the true value to the user community? This session will provide an overview of how content providers themselves should measure value and will be supported by two case studies presented by organizations that have been successful in measuring the value that they provide to customers. A third case study will illustrate how an academic library measures the value it provides to the university as a whole.

Victor Camlek, Vice President, Market Intelligence, Thomson Reuters Healthcare & Science [ Slides ]; Carmen Nitsche, Vice President, Content, Symyx Technologies [ Slides ];  Dale Kim, Industry Solutions Specialist, Mark Logic Corporation [ Slides ]; Paula Kaufman, Dean of Libraries and University Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ( Slides )

12:30 pm - 2:30pm: Awards Luncheon and Final Keynote
Grand Ballroom, Hotel First Floor

Knowledge in a Disaggregated World

Knowledge products have bee generated into text for hundreds of years, and scientific and scholarly results have been locked into text-based technology since the mid 1660's. But journal articles are a compressed version of what happened in the research. The form and function of a journal article was settled long before we could effortlessly transmit data, or incrementally store and edit vast amounts of text, or store and forward research tools in repositories. There is no reason, other than technical lock-in by the printing press, why we should think of the article as a natural unit of knowledge transmission in science. Scientists make data, narratives, research tools, inventions, pictures, sounds, videos, and more. But almost none of them et measured other than the article. We now have the capacity to measure the quality of a scientist across multiple dimensions, not just the article. This talk will examine the increasing importance of disaggregated, multivariate knowledge in scholarly communications, and the impacts both good and bad of the coming shift away from the journal as the core form of knowledge transmission.

John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science, Creative Commons [ Slides]

2:45pm - 3:15pm: 2010 - 2011 NFAIS Board Meeting
Cliveden, 19th Floor