Inforum 2007, Prague and Google Scholar

This is the first post of a series about my working week in Prague at Inforum 2007. It was my intension to write a post every day, but there are two reasons I could not live up to that.

First of all it was the high temperatures in the city. At arrival it was already 27 degrees Celcius and it only went up, and unfortunately the airconditioning at the hotel could only condition the air the other way around, max 6 degrees UP, not down.

The second reason was the scale and intensity of the conference. All activities, presentations and social interactions were keeping me mentally and physically too occupied to just quietly sit down and concentrate.

I am going list the subjects that I will post on more extensively later. The highlight of Inforum 2007 for me were:

• the presentation of Péter Jacsó: Trends in Professional and Academic Online Information Services Astonishing facts about the bad handling of references and metadata of Google Scholar, clustering, and federated search.
• his use of NeedleSearch, an absolutely marvelous Firefox add-on that offers an incredible tool for users to make their own search engine collection. It also helps me to enable even more licenced databases for our Library Toolbars.
• The presentation of Peter Godwin : The Web 2.0 Challenge to Information Literacy This made me even móre determined to start an information literacy program that included the specific use of Web2.0 tools by students and staff.
• The National Medical Library of the Czech Republik, their Medvik system and the creation of their Library Toolbar.
• The Ikaros company and intensions to start a presence in Second Life for New Media Education

You can see a load of pictures of the conference. And at Flickr I will post my pictures soon tagged with INFORUM2007 and Prague

(Picture by Boris Skandera)

Tags: library toolbar, quicksearch, google, netvibes, Inforum2007, Ikaros, livetrix, browser extension, toolbars