ONLINE�99 CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION

Patricia Layzell Ward, Convenor, Library Link

This is one of the major events in the calendar of information professionals. Being well established, located in London, and effectively publicised to practitioners, it has become a meeting point for vendors, purchasers, researchers, academics and information professionals from the UK and continental Europe. An increasing number of vendors from overseas, particularly North America, come to the UK to demonstrate their services and seek new markets.

But this year there seems to have been a change of direction in the content of the conference. In the past it has carried a number of research papers from around the globe - but this year they seem to be missing. Whether it was a change of policy on the part of the selection committee, or whether there is little new real research to report is not known, but it was a source of discussion among the academics. Granted there were some excellent presentations, notably by Chris Batt who gave a scintillating presentation about government investment in the public libraries network, and progress to date. His paper underlined the speed with which progress is being made.

But many of the presentations were disappointing, both in content - we go to hear about what is new at the cutting edge - and in presentation. Perhaps some coaching and liaison between Chairs of sessions and speakers might liven up some of the sessions. Given the layout of the conference centre it is easy to move between rooms during the sessions, so the presentations need to hold the attention of the audience.

The exhibition is essential to attend and well repays the time that can be taken in talking with vendors. My award for the company that provided the best pre-event publicity was Westlaw. Their material was informative, welcoming and an interview was offered, and well organised before the event - other exhibitors take note! Wendy Beecham is the new Managing Director of Sweet and Maxwell with responsibility for Westlaw and she places a focus on keeping in touch with clients� needs. In talking with her it was perhaps not surprising that her career had started in special libraries and had been a law librarian before moving into legal publishing. Sweet and Maxwell has developed a good technological platform from which to launch Westlaw in February 2000, and beta sites were being tested in 1999. The service has been designed from the standpoint of the legal researcher and it will consolidate information meeting their needs. Westlaw received an award for the best stand at the show and discussion with the judges indicated that the layout and visual image did not only impress them, but also by the helpfulness of the staff. It was a high spot in the show. Westlaw�s website can be found at - HYPERLINK http://www.westlaw.co.uk Graham of Soutron who demonstrated the excellent library management package - Inmagic, gave another good interview. This is a superb, inexpensive solution for small libraries and private collections of documents, which costs around �1,000. Simple to use and with the facility of customising it with your favourite images, it is very user friendly and supported by an enthusiastic team. More information about Soutron and Inmagic can be found at: HYPERLINK www.soutron.com

Northern Light was at the exhibition and made a presentation at the conference. As ever their staff was informative and helpful. My award for the company that didn�t perform well goes to Dialog, and other people made similar comments. Being interested in having a personal subscription, the guy running the stand was approached. He quickly made it very clear that he was only interested in supplying corporate organisations, and passed my query to someone who demonstrated the service, but when being questioned about charges and particularly how the dial-units worked, she replied that she didn�t know - no one else wanted to help either

Despite the negative comments about the conference the exhibition provided a an effective means to catch up with the major players in the booming e-market, and talk with some newcomers.

Patricia Layzell Ward
Convenor, Library Link

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