Elluminate Session
Sorry I had to miss the Elluminate Session last night. Work conspired against me.
However, I did get the chance this morning to view the recorded session and really enjoyed it. Dan is a great presenter and I found his job very interesting. The continual learning curve he must contend with is really inspirational. My wife rolled out Microsoft Sharepoint 2003 at the Enterprise level for her company last year and has complained about it ever since that time, so I burst out laughing when Dan mentioned how much it sucked. His position appears very similar to what my wife does with the added librarian side and viewing it made me think that corporate life might not be as bad as all that. Almost glamorous in some ways.
Just the ability or freedom to implement tools such as the one's he has going on is great and very empowering. I would have liked to see the variety of tools (databases) he had at his disposal. One of the things that is most annoying about working in an academic setting with a business slant is the disconnect between our work and the work of our contemporaties in corporations. I beleive that the tools we both use should be as similar as possible. We should be able to train students in skills that they will one day use in their work life.
For instance although many businesses use Lexis our version as Academics differs substantially (although Lexis has been working to make that better).
I also like Dan's mantra of not being a gatekeeper. Too often I am struck by how opaque our tools can be to the average user and the tricks necessary to provide the information that exists to the people that need it. federated searching is a move in this direction, but if vendors continue to make interoperation difficult Google will eat them. In fact in my work I am finding that Google Scholar is already making inroads in my working habits.
In any case, it was a great presentation and I wish I had been there to bother him with questions.
