Email must die! That was the battle cry that rang out this morning at Internet Librarian International in London, with Brian Kelly leading the attack. Quote as posted on the ILI wiki by rakerman:

“Poor metadata – bad subject lines, subject lines not changed…”

“Viruses, spam, flame wars…”

“Email is where knowledge goes to die”

It was an excellent presentation and I wholeheartedly agree with Brian. I’m already using RSS, blogs, Wikis and Skype which were all mentioned by him as alternatives but I have been wary of IM, one of the other options he covered. But I am now going to give it a go, especially as May Chang gave some useful pointers to multi-protocol systems in her talk before lunch.

A reminder that there is still time to register for Internet Librarian International at the discounted rate (up until September 23rd) and that CILIP members receive a 20% discount off the full two day conference fee.

The event is being held at the Copthorne Tara Hotel in London between October 10th and the 11th. Tracks and topics include Blogs, Wikis, E-Learning and Training, Global Best Practices, Digital Libraries & Resources, Web Research Skills and Resources, Technology for Libraries, Information Literacy, Practical Technology Tips and Tools, and Managing Corporate Libraries.

I have to admit that I have a vested interest in this event as I am co-presenting a session on search engines with Yahoo expert Ran Hock. We’ve already had to submit outlines of our presentations to the organisers, but we both suspect that what we finally present will be very different. With so many innovations and product launches happening every week we shall be working on our talks up to the last minute, as I am sure will the other speakers. It promises to be an interesting conference.