I started a packed day today at a 7:30am breakfast hosted by Serials Solutions. It began with an interesting keynote by Alison Head of Project Information Literacy, presenting her recent research on the challenges higher education students have in finding appropriate research. See this short video for a snippet of her findings so far. It was fascinating, and I look forward to hearing more in their report sometime after December 2009. The keynote was followed by a brief introduction to Summon, a Serials Solutions product that is currently in beta. In summary, this is NOT federated search, but a pre-coordinated metasearch index of all your library’s resources — digital and print, catalog, database, etc. See here for more details. I really look forward to seeing how this evolves.

Next, I proceeded to the cryptically named Cyber Zed Shed Theater. There I was regaled by Elizabeth Uzelac and Robin Sinn of Johns Hopkins University. They presented Integrating Search and Guides which outlined their innovative integration of several elements to create flexible, re-purposeable research guide content. Check the virtual conference area for their slides.

Immediately following was Jacob Hill of Elmhurst College who presented on Mobile Devices: Low or No-Cost Solutions for supporting mobile device users. He did a great job of illustrating how we can address this issue (rather than sticking our heads in the sand) even in tight times. See the virtual conference area for his slides too.