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My apologies for posting a stream of consciousness list of topics but for the moment I have a good wifi signal 🙂

The second day of ASIS&T included a number of interesting presentations taht talked in broad strokes about many of the issues of current interest to lis realms. There was an interesting discussion on the approaches of using user-generated tags to create ontologies by inferring relationships in the morning session on tagging. It seems that hopes of ‘real-world’ applications in this are not quite grounded enough for traditional use but I did wonder how we could open our DF facets & use the resulting tags as enhancements to our ontological relationships.

On monday afternoon I attended a session which occured in both Second Life and in person. After a few minutes of technical difficulties, we listened to various speakers (both originating in person and in second life). I was struck with the extent to which the graphical experience of viewing slides and other participants in a MUVE enhanced a distributed session in the way that a simple teleconference or even real-world video feed would not have. My takeaway – still complicated & fraught with challenges and a possible time suck but every interesting.

Tuesday afternoon included a series of talks on the use of Institutional Repsitory implementations at various instutions. No action items from this talk were apparent but the discussion of the use of IRs to replace shared server space made me wonder to what extent we could use our own Dspace implementation to serve a collaborative file sharing space.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion at this conference occured for me in the Tuesday morning session on social networks and conference attendance. Given my experience with the SecondLife presentation yesterday I was curious to hear about other’s views regarding the persistent value in real-world conferences. As can be imagined there were a number of perspectives and the questions really centered more on how virtual social networks enahnce conference experiences rather than replace them. In any case, it was refreshing to attend a session that was run as a series of small focus groups rather than a long, multi-person lecture.