Topics (in alphabetical order):

A Bubbling Cauldron: The Global Threads in Open Access Activities. Open Access (OA) has come to mean many things to many people and often not the same thing across different communities. This talk will set a framework for some of the current threads in OA by identifying some key issues for different scientific communities and examining key drivers for international developments such as Berlin, Budapest, Bethesda and United Nations activities. Will those activities continue to fragment OA efforts or are the threads intersecting in the near future? Where does Google fit into the mix and what is its likely impact on libraries in the context of OA developments? Building a picture of the different forces and threads at work in our ever changing environment, will challenge all of us to weave a desired future for libraries.

Educational Knowledge Domain Visualizations: Tools to Navigate, Understand, and Internalize the Structure of Scholarly Knowledge and Expertise. Knowledge domain visualizations are the graphic rendering of bibliometric data designed to provide a global view of a particular domain, its structural details, or its salient characteristics (most cited authors or papers, bursting concepts, etc.). This talk will survey the history of knowledge domain visualizations, their generation, cognitive justification, and current and projected uses. The presentation will be visually rich with examples from both within and without Dr. Katy Börner's Information Visualization Laboratory at Indiana University-Bloomington.

Extracting Scientific Data from Complex Environments: Learning from Nature. - The surface of Mars is currently being explored with a combination of orbiting spacecraft, stationary landers and wheeled rovers. The scientific data gathered by these missions has provided extensive insight into the Martian landscape; however, only a small portion of the surface has undergone in-situ examination. A new rover concept for exploring the Martian surface, known as the Tumbleweed, will derive mobility through use of the surface winds on Mars, much like the Tumbleweed plant does on Earth. Tumbleweeds would employ a random survey strategy, scouting many sites over a broad area with the goal of identifying specific locations for follow-on investigation by landers, rovers, or human explorers. Multiple vehicles could be deployed for regional or perhaps global coverage of the Martian surface, performing wide-ranging survey missions to investigate the potential for human habitability as well as scientific precursor missions.

Let The Credits Roll: Accountability and Attribution in the Scientific Record - The scale and growth of scientific collaboration have been well documented in recent years. We have moved irrevocably from an artisanal to an industrial mode of knowledge production, most dramatically in the fields of high-energy physics and biomedicine. A new lexicon has emerged to capture the trend and related epiphenomena: we speak routinely of 'post-academic science, ' 'Mode 2 science,' 'the collectivization of science,' 'collaboratories,' 'hyperauthorship,' 'the corporatization of authorship.' Some argue that it is time to retire the concept of 'author' in favor of 'contributors' and 'guarantors' and to create new organizational and accounting models for academic research. The epistemic significance of collaboration is no longer in doubt. However, discussion of collaboration in science tends to focus on readily accessible indicators (e.g., co-authorship frequency, intensity, distribution), largely ignoring other paratextual evidence of informal collaboration involving 'trusted assessors' and 'cognitive partners'.

Success is Your Own Fault - In this funny and enlightening program, you will learn how to trust your own gut and question any book or person who says they have a "7 Step Formula For Success." Ross Shafer, author of "Nobody Moved Your Cheese!," encourages people to be accountable for the outcomes of their own lives. He wants people to stop making excuses for their failures and start using their own unique talents and strengths to shape their success. As an unhappy pet shop manager (in a town of 5,000 people,) Ross took charge of his own life and became a 6-time Emmy award winning comedian and writer. You'll see why Ross thinks having the courage to challenge conventional wisdom is the true test of your own talents.

The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones: Bridging Service to Diverse Users - While some of our users are ready for teleportation, some still struggle with e-mail and web-based searching. This causes a challenge for us in serving the wide range of users that confront our portals and reference desks. Hear our speaker share his insights into which trends will make the most impact on libraries and our users. Some trends are technological (but we know technology is just a tool); some relate to libraries alone (we are a bit different!); and some are part of a larger societal context. For those of us who value our changing users, technological innovation, and the survival of the library movement and the sustainability of the relevance of libraries, let's think about it... Join us as Stephen Abram reports on these trends.

Using Standards in Digital Library Design & Development - The presentation will cover a set of Standards or de facto Standards that can play a role in the design and development of Digital Library applications. The Standards that will be discussed are the ISO MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration, the ISO MPEG-21 Digital Item Identification, the ISO MPEG-21 Digital Item Processing, the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, the Internet Archive ARC file format, the NISO OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services, and the proposed info URI scheme. The presentation will discuss these Standards by illustrating how they have been used in the context of the aDORe Digital Object repository. aDORe has been designed and implemented for ingesting, storing, and accessing a vast collection of Digital Objects at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The presentation is an opportunity to learn about Standards that can help addressing real-life challenges in DL design and development, and help increase interoperability across systems.