Conan the Librarian

Last week Monday 16 October 2006 I got to give a keynote speech to Internet Librarian International. For those librarians who had just that weekend travelled east to get to London, 9am Monday morning must have been brutal. Still, 350 librarians did appear in that one conference room, all together.

Thanks to Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, I had already cottoned on to how librarians were no longer who I once thought they were. But I figured they still must have all heard every possible Conan the Librarian joke by now. So instead we talked economics, the demand and supply of knowledge, Open Access, and the Digital Divide. Or, put differently, intellectual property rights and global markets for information. Well, one global market anyway.

([2006.11.20 update] Richard Poynder has, since the ILI Conference, provided on his blog a thoughtful response to my talk, in yet another article of his, full of insights and ideas.)