The Journal of the International Informatics Institute

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MISSOURI LIBRARY ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE
October 1-3, 2003 | Springfield, MO

Jack Powers, Director of the International Informatics Institute, keynoted the annual meeting with an analysis of our expectations about the accessibility, veracity and price of information in the digital age and follows-up with several sessions about living well on-line.

Pervasive Information: A Revolution of Rising Expectations
Wednesday, Oct 1, 2003
1:00 - 2:00 pm | Keynote

Today's digital media landscape offers us an unprocessable wealth of news, entertainment and information. DVDs and CD-ROMs, the World Wide Web, 50 channel cable TV systems, 100 channel satellite radio feeds, pocket computers with Internet links, wireless Ethernet in the corner coffee shop -- we are awash in data, and we love it. The quick uptake of every new information technology snowballs into a widening demand for more, faster, better, cheaper. Today's youth can't imagine a world without 24 hour video music and news, 3 billion Googled Web pages, a limitless MP3 store and the electronic tools to search, query, select and capture it all. Media technologist Jack Powers examined the geography of digital data, looks at what's ahead technologically and culturally, and analyzed the important role of libraries in a world of pervasive information.

Jack Powers, Director, International Informatics Institute

Download the slides for the keynote in PDF format.
[1.2MB]

Copyright, Piracy and Personal Ethics
Wednesday, Oct 1, 2003
2:15 - 3:00 pm | Seminar

Being a good digital citizen means balancing the demands of copyright holders with historic concepts of fair use and public benefit. While courts and legislatures endlessly struggle to keep up with media technologies, each of us must define a personal ethical prism through which we view our rights and our responsibilities when acting digitally.

Download the slides for the keynote in PDF format.
[293K]

A Freewheeling Roundtable with Keynote Jack Powers
Wednesday, Oct 1, 2003
3:15 - 4:00 pm | Discussion

Bring your biq questions and strong opinions to a freewheeling roundtable discussion with media technologist Jack Powers. Whether it's technology bits and bytes, public policy dos and don'ts or cultural picks and pans, analyze the future of digital media around the world and discuss what it means to you and your library.

RESEARCH

Copyright, Piracy and Personal Ethics

By Jack Powers

In a recent seminar for a parents' group on Internet Safety, I talked about a parent's responsibility to teach good online citizenship in addition to e-street smarts. Afterwards, a conferee wrote to ask "Is it wrong to download MP3 files off the net?" Here's a personal answer.

AGE AND IT EXPERIENCE

As the chart below shows, information technology changes so fast that the life experience of IT professionals in their 40s and 50s is very different from the experience of younger folks:

Get the original chart in Excel spreadsheet format.

For comments and questions about this presentation, contact:

Jack Powers
email: jpowers@in3.org
phone: +1 718-499-1884

IN3 BOOKS
(Click cover to order.)

After the Internet: Alien Intelli- gence.
IT guru James Martin blows past the Pinnochio arguments of academic AI by outlining how intelligent machines will be smart but very different from humans, artificial and alien to the way people think. His section on genetic algorithms, neural networks and cellular automata, "Machines That Breed," is worth the price of the whole book.

The
Guten- berg Elegies: The Fate of Read-ing in an Electronic Age. Literary critic Sven Birkerts doesn't like what emerging information technologies like the World Wide Web, CD-ROMs and hypertext are doing to us. He argues that reading a book is physically, philosophically and culturally better than viewing a computer screen, and he worries that electronic media culture is destroying oru individuality and making wisdom obsolete.

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