Members Council Opening Session, part 2

We did some house-cleaning tonight, such as the introduction of new OCLC Board Members: Vickey Johnson, Elizabeth Niggerman, Dave Roselle and Bob Seal.

Turns out that 4 of the 12 library representatives selected to go to Shanghai this spring are closely associated with OCLC.

We had some considerations about OCLC membership, such as:
1. Should we revise the criteria for being a governing member, with the WorldCat-PICA databases finally being fully linked?
2. What OCLC activities should be included in the member delegate algorithm? Brand new services may or may not "count"...
3. Next steps for globalization after May 2007?

Globalization was a hot topic.

And then we had a delightful keynote speaker--Dr. J. Richard Madaus of the College Center for Library Automation in Florida.

Dr. Madaus's presentation was on the future direction of technology in libraries: the "hurrieder" we go, the "behinder" we get.

He talked about technology trends and gave us a few recommendations and laughs along the way:
1. Realize the "gizmos" (technology) will change every year
2. Realize it's not about the technology--it's about the PEOPLE
3. Time to move beyond site-bound (physical collections as inventory) librarianship

Amd we had some "whoah" moments--like when he showed us the Ngage (Nokia) phone, or the 80 gig iPod.

Company to watch (in addition to Apple) is Creative. They've won the CES best-of-show for the past 2 years running.

We're all meant to request the Gutenburg DVD for free and check out the Research button in Microsoft Word 2003.

Then we talked about the Webspace lifestyle. For "native digital" people--those kids under 21--they ONLY know a world with a corresponding digital life on the Web. Here was an interesting corollary: is classroom-wide text-messaging the answers to a test considered cheating or collaborative problem-solving?

Shout out to one of our biggest fans, Bruce Newell.

You future OCLC Members Council delegates, I'll keep you posted on tomorrow's events...