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The 19th annual Computers in Libraries (CiL) conference was held in Washington, DC from March 12-14, 2004. CiL is the spring or East Coast conference of the two major conferences sponsored by the publisher Information Today, Inc., and Internet Librarian is the fall or West Coast conference. Both conferences have many of the same speakers, themes, and writers, which would also be familiar to the regular readers of the Information Today publishing group of magazines (which includes Information Today, Online and Searcher). The main theme of this conference is to focus on "all aspects of library and information delivery technology". This year's conference had over 2,400 attendees from 14 countries and almost every US state, and 50 different exhibitors. The conference featured over 100 sessions, three keynotes, several pre-conference and post-conference workshops, and many 15-minute "cybertour" sessions in the exhibition area. CiL was jointly held with the K-12 library-focused Internet@Schools East conference, and attendees of CiL could drop in on any of these sessions if they chose. As part of the registration price, Information Today provided a 347-page "collected presentations" book of most of the sessions' PowerPoint presentations. This was helpful not only for those taking notes, but since no sessions were repeated, you could still get information on the presentations that you missed.
The popular topics of discussion at the 2004 conference were: search engine updates, federated searching, blogging, RSS, social networking, institutional repositories, and portals. This is a not a conference for the technology beginner or librarians uncomfortable with technology. Most talks assumed a level of technical proficiency and assumed that you knew the appropriate acronyms and jargon of technology. There was not too much on implementation details of these topics, but more of a focus on theory or what librarians should be thinking about for the near future. This conference is highly recommended for systems librarians, and for library directors or whoever is looking ahead for the technology future of your library.
The keynotes of the conference were given by Clifford Lynch ("Expectations for our digital future"), David Seuss ("Ten years into the Web: the search problem is nowhere near solved"), and a "Top tech trends" panel by Roy Tennant, Mary Lee Kennedy, and Stephen Abram. These keynotes were always a great...