The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries was held here in Austin with the School of Information as host, and by all accounts it proved a great success. Worries about attendance turned out to be unnecessary as over 270 people joined us for the week. The weather was hot, the venue cool, and Austin is a pretty fine place for conference if you are willing to walk more than a 100 yards from the hotel. I chaired the final plenary which was a panel conversation on the theme “Google as Library” with Clifford Lynch, Gretchen Hoffman and Mike Lesk. I had to cut off the questions as we just had too many for the allotted time but it was a lively, engaging gathering that pretty much summed up the conference: enthusiastic people, more projects and good ideas than you could capture, and nobody allowed to hog the microphone or pulpit for more than their allotted time (oh how so many other conferences could use a little time and speaker management). Gerhard Fischer and Chris Borgman also gave boundary spanning addresses that were better than I’ve heard at many recent conferences I’ve attended. If you missed it, too bad. For once, the lack of engagement that usually comes with attending a conference in your home town did not not affect me, I enjoyed not having to travel and being able to sleep at home at night.
Meanwhile, the school is bracing itself (collectively) for the most significant change since renaming ourselves in 2002, with the move to new premises at 1616 Guadalupe now imminent. I am having a massive clear out of my office papers for the first time in years (8 precisely, since I last changed jobs) and it is a reminder about how tied we all are to paper: books and journals are obvious but all those reports, letters, memos, scribbled notes of meetings and ideas, student papers, dissertation drafts, magazine articles, records, budget forms, rules and regulations etc….they certainly pile up in our lives and I don’t foresee a change in this no matter how digital I become. Naturally this reminds me of the line that the most successful applications of information technology are the printer and the photocopier — (or is it the fax?), paper-generators all. There is discipline to being organized that I am not sure I possess but also a human tendency to keep items rather than throw them away unless you have to or are certain you will never need them again. As I look around our school, I am reminded again of how we can preach about information behavior far easier than we can practice it.