Last night's panel discussion was, for me, worth the trip to California all by itself. Expertely moderated by Stephen Abram, the panel consisted of Mark Sandler, University of Michigan, Rich Wiggins, Michigan State University, Steve Arnold, Arnold Information Technology, Roy Tennant, User Services Architect with the California Digital Library, Adam Smith, Senior Business Product Manager with Google Print (and Google Scholar), and Barbara Quint, Editor of Searcher Magazine. Most unfortunately, Barbara was on the speakerphone and was very hard to hear.
Adam was very earnest in his claims that Google is doing this whole thing to unlock the world's knowledge - really! He claims that once this project is up and running it will make libraries more valuable because people will know what's in all the books that are locked up in our libraries. He only spoke about the project for about 5 minutes, and then participated in the panel.
I took about 4 pages of notes, trying to do a transcription for the most part - I may or may not come back and post those to go along with the audio - I'm sure you'll find lots of coverage here, as usual.
Aww screw it! I'm just going to throw up my completely unedited notes - this is what I heard and what I was able to type - this goes without saying, but this is just one guy's notes, ok? I missed a lot, and I summarized a lot, and I apologize to any of the panelists whom I misrepresent here.
If you have the above pseudo-transcript in front of you as you listen it should help fill in the gaps, and vice versa.
Here's your audio - it's about 1:25 in length - mp3. Turned out better than I had thought it would, though still has the omnipresent background hiss.
Oh, and here's the press release for the Open Content Alliance announcement about Microsoft.
UPDATE: Liz Lawley posted her long thoughts here. She's working for Microsoft right now so has an interesting perspective...
UPDATE 2: Barbara Quint's future scenarios can be read here (since they're pretty hard to make out in the audio)
