Whether you like it or not, the IMLS thrived and will continue to expand and thrive due to the Laura Bush 21rst Century Librarian Program...
While I am and probably always will be one of those people at the conferences who thinks they already know everything there is to know about the new information age, the Denver conference provided an excellent review of where we are going with digital collaboration. One of the most popular or in my estimation forward looking, presentation in my opinion was during the "Gaining Intellectual Control Cataloging and Metadata: Some Simple Strategies." By Susan Chung who went on to examine the role of steve.museum in tagging and the role of the public and general users in creating metadata as a part of work that is invariably done during the process of collection processing so that cataloging becomes an automated process. Most of the proposed ideas were way outside the scope of ordinary library work, but at some point this consolidation of cataloging and "normal" archive and content auditing as one process will probably be accepted as obvious. It is only the way we continue to segregate our digital and electronic background structure from the physical processing that keeps us from doing it now. As usual we face a situation where the "legacy" library work is keeping us from moving properly into the modern electronic library world.
Chung went on to explain the ways that the public and our users can provide metadata. This is the holy grail of metadata creation in my opinion and something that runs head on into the wall of the legacy library.
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