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Vol. 20 No. 2 — February 2003

InfoToday 2003 Keynote Speakers

The three keynote speakers for the plenary sessions at InfoToday 2003 are thought leaders and business leaders in today's challenging information economy. Each will provoke, inform, motivate, and stimulate your thinking about your work and how you do it.

Larry Prusak is well-known among librarians, information professionals, and knowledge managers. He has spoken and written within our industry since the 1990s, when he was an early advocate of knowledge management. Prusak has an international reputation for working with information professionals in helping firms leverage and optimize their information and knowledge resources. He has also written several books and numerous articles on knowledge and information management. His latest book, What's the Big Idea: Creating and Capitalizing on the Best Management Thinking, is due in May.

In his opening keynote on May 6, Prusak will discuss where new ideas come from, how to evaluate which ideas are worth pursuing, and ways to customize ideas to suit an organization's unique needs. Attendees will learn how to determine when to adopt a new idea aggressively and how to be effective as an information professional or knowledge manager in promoting new ideas within an organizational structure.

Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology, was the first employee hired by the Google founders and is still on the company's inside track. He created many of the original IT components that sparked Google's explosive growth and continues to be a major influence as the company experiments with new forms of search and new definitions of information retrieval. In his keynote speech on May 7, Silverstein will explain these new directions and discuss their potential impact on information professionals, knowledge managers, and the library community.

Marybeth Peters, director of the U.S. Copyright Office, will discuss the digital copyright agenda in her keynote speech on May 8. The last decade has seen numerous changes in domestic and international copyright laws, and the U.S. Copyright Office has been at the forefront of the debates and legal battles that shape the digital copyright agenda. A recognized expert on intellectual property and copyright law, Peters will discuss the changes and their success as well as the continuing challenges facing users, producers, and lawmakers as they deal with this issue.

InfoToday Content Management Symposium

InfoToday features three co-located conferences: National Online, KnowledgeNets, and E-Libraries. Attendees who register for a Gold or Platinum Pass can attend sessions in all three conferences. In our planning process, however, we realized that the hot topic of content management crossed the parameters of all the programs and is of major importance to all the attendees. Therefore, we created a special half-day of shared programming.

Bob Boiko, author of the Content Management Bible, kicks off a special afternoon Content Management Symposium on May 8. This program is followed by a fast-paced schedule of breakout sessions that offer an in-depth, intensive briefing on content management software, tools, technology, and strategies geared toward the perspective of the information professional and knowledge manager. This is an excellent opportunity to hear well-known experts speak about taxonomies, content categorization, and case studies. In addition, attendees will learn how to select and deploy a content management system.

Additional workshops on content management topics are scheduled on May 9. The addition of these special sessions to InfoToday allows attendees to structure a tightly focused 1- or 2-day content management conference-within-a conference on this crucial topic.

Content at Camelback

Buying & Selling eContent is considered a must-attend event by many top information industry executives and corporate library managers. Now in its fourth year, the conference will be held April 13­15 in Scottsdale, Ariz. Outsell, Inc., which has teamed up with Information Today, Inc. to plan and produce this event, has added its analysts' insights and expertise to the roster of executive-level speakers.

The program agenda features top-notch speakers and compelling topics, but it's the networking opportunities that really grab folks' attention and set this conference apart. The networking begins when those who are registered for the event use the e-mail addresses on the advance list of attendees to set up private appointments during the conference. It continues on-site at the golf outing, welcome reception, lunches, and other events held outside in the shadow of Camelback Mountain. The mix of content creators, solutions providers, and large enterprise buyers creates an unusual opportunity to develop deals, partnerships, alliances, qualified leads, or even mergers or acquisitions based on a foundation of personal relationships and common interests.

The 2-day conference program includes an Outsell briefing on the content industry, sessions on answered challenges, forward trends in enterprise content services, new business models for content publishers, the content commerce vision, changing roles and changing buyers, early figures on the Outsell 60 Performance Scoreboard for 2002, a popular CEO panel, and a keynote address by Larry Prusak on the "Power of the Right Ideas."

Computers in Libraries Registration Deadline Coming Up

It's time to get serious about registering for the Computers in Libraries conference March 12­14 in Washington, D.C. You'll save money if you sign up by Feb. 14. In addition, remember to check with your library networks about even lower group prices. The event covers a wide range of current issues and practical topics for information professionals.

Michael Schuyler, a favorite Computers in Libraries columnist, will deliver the keynote address. You'll also hear popular, knowledgeable speakers like Mary Ellen Bates, Gary Price, Greg Notess, Darlene Fichter, Steve Arnold, Roy Tennant, Frank Cervone, Andrew K. Pace, and many others.

Calls for Speakers

As you go about your daily work as an information professional, please consider volunteering to share your knowledge or expertise at an Information Today, Inc. conference. We rely on practicing information professionals and librarians to build the event programs. Being on the frontline daily, you know what works, what doesn't, and why. We offer no promises, since we receive far more proposals than we can accept. However, the proposals collectively shape the direction of each conference and help the organizers understand current trends and topics.