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Online Information Conference - Information at the Heart of Business

The Online Information Conference runs in the Olympia Conference Centre alongside the IMS 2008 and Online Information Exhibitions. The 3 day, international conference covers all aspects of the information industry - read down to see the themes of particular interest to the IMS event.

Conference Themes

2008 Conference Themes

'Information at the heart of Business'

Web 2.0 after the buzz
- Innovators under the spotlight - who stayed the distance?
- Web 2.0 - delivery-in-action or delivery inaction?
- RoI 2.0 - the evolution of the bottom line

New ways of working - socialisation, collaboration and innovation
- Risk 2.0 or Opportunity 2.0 - hype or hope
- Exploiting social networks
- Using Web 2.0 tools in learning environments
- User generated content - challenging professionals

Understanding behaviours for improved service delivery
- Perspectives from Generation Y
- Information seeking behaviours in the new world

Breathing New Life into Search
- Beyond keywords: Vertical and Custom Search
- Search Engine Optimisation and Search analytics - targeting value
- Heterogeneous search - any system, any medium, any format

Order out of chaos - creating structure in our information universe
- Catch the semantic wave - or drown in a sea of content
- Knowledge Structuring in a semantic world
- Is there life left in Taxonomies in a tag cloud world
- Semantics (open data movement) in Publishing - opportunity or threat?

Technology focus
- The ECM Dream - or perhaps illusion/nightmare
- Born again Intranets - a fresh start or another false start?

The brave new world for libraries and publishers
- New Channels, New Media and New Approaches for libraries
- The Rush to Digitisation - Is it practical, legal and profitable?
- R.o.I.P (return on information professionals) or R.I.P (rest in peace)

Information professionals surviving and thriving in the new age
- Do we have a profession?
- Hybrid career options
- Marketing libraries & the librarian (How can I help?)
- Information literacy vs. media literacy

The brave new world for libraries and publishers
- eBooks - finally gaining traction
- Ownership of content/new forms of copyright

The 2007 sell-out conference attracted 900 delegates from 48 countries, providing a forum dedicated to learning, debate, professional development, technology reviews and assessments, expert discussion as well as case-study presentations and the sharing of research results and opinion.

Keynote Preview Video

Clay Shirky , Author of ‘Here Comes Everybody' and thought leader on the social and economic effects of internet technologies will open the 2008 conference with a keynote address that examines ‘Every piece of information is a latent community.'

Clay's keynote will explore how one of the absolutes of information is that people don't just like to have it, they like to share it, discuss it, argue about it.

In the digital world, we now have media that can both transmit information and coordinate people at the same time; one potent side-effect is that published information can call a topic-specific community into being, by linking together the people who gather around it.

View the 2008 Conference Programme

View the 2008 Conference Programme (web page) >>
View the 2008 workshops >>
Book your place

Speaker of the Week

Speakers from the 2008 Online Information Conference will be featured in this new series of profiles. This week's interview is with Chris Sherman, President, Searchwise, USA.