I’m attending part of Information Online this week in Sydney. Today was a big day, starting out with the SLA breakfast at 7am where my good friend Alyson Dalby received her award for Australian and New Zealand Chapter Information Professional of the Year. I attended the conference from lunch and then met up with fellow LINTers Sean, Morgan, Peta and Michelle for a bloggers get-together which was really fun.

Day 1 highlights - David Lankes used Keynote (yay!) to put together a motivating talk on integrating library services, and the need to be in parternship not service with patrons, clients and organisations. He had an interesting breakdown of a typical library catalogue record vs an Amazon record for a book, noting the amount of space that is given over to reviews and comments which help people work out if they want the item or not.

Bucking the current trend, he said that “catalogues stink”, in fantasy-question land I thought of asking him at the end, “don’t you mean catalogues *suck*?”

Christine McKenzie talked about Yarra Plenty’s 23 Things program to learn about social software which I first heard about a while ago. She’s also behind the Unconference in Melbourne this March. I was hoping to hear more about how staff will be implementing these tools into services, but it was designed as an intro session for those who haven’t heard of the programme. They have some good incentives for staff to take part, and the programme itself designed by Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County is Creative Commons licensed so others can use it.

Neil Infield from the British Library’s Business and IP Centre gave a great rundown of that service. It was inspired by NYPL’s Science Industry and Business Library, which I visited last year. I’ll be in London soon, and I’m thinking of making a visit to the Business and IP Centre.

Cathy Slaven gave a fascinating insight into the usability testing of their website. Instead of just giving a ‘how we did it’ overview, she presented clips of video from the sessions, and showed the stages that the site went through. An excellent method and a very well presented talk.

In the spirit of Michelle’s post, my take-aways for day 1:

• How to be more of a partner with clients?
• Something I’ve been mulling over for a while but which only really clicked in Infield’s talk: the connection between patents and business research.
• How our assumptions about how people use our website are often wrong (I knew this already, but the videos in Slaven’s talk really emphasise this)

Apart from all of that, I caught up with almost half of the NLS2006 committee, had lunch with my former thesis supervisor who I hadn’t seen in a few years, bumped into former committee colleagues, contacts at the State Library, and of course the staff at ALIA. It all happens again tomorrow!