Cheers to Steven Grove/No strings attached!

Thanks to Steven Grove from Harold Brittingham Memorial Library in Cleveland
who presented at the recent No Strings Attached wireless/pda/technology conference.
He shares some news with this group:

"NO STRINGS ATTACHED conference was a rewarding experience for both IT
professionals and librarians. Many institutions including MIT, Harvard,
Ohio State and University of South Dakota came together to discuss
wireless and handheld applications in academic and hospital environments.

Many vendors including Dell, Compaq, Plam, Oralce, DISCO, Spinrt,
Microsoft, IBM, Sun, IP Blue, and others were featured in video-streamed
presentations. THese should be available in a week's time at:


http://www.cwru.edu/is/no_strings/default.htm
.

This was an opportunity to learn from each other. 37 different
sessions were featured. Topics included: security, wireless technology, the
Wireless Institute, health sciences applications in both medical
schools and teaching hospitals, library applications, PDAs, LANS, WLANS,data
tracking and Wireless ePayments.

It is hoped by John Molnar, John Molnar.Conference Coordinator at
jem6@po.cwru.edu that this will be an annual event.

The presentation went well and we had someone from
TAUBMAN library at UMICH there. My boss spoke
with her but we didn't get her name... Lots of
questions....

Other attendees were wireless analysts, IS, etc.
Other interesting sessions for libraries:
Implications of Student Use of Personal Digitial
Assistants in 3rd Year Clerkships Objectives:
Cristina Pope, NEOUCOM, Assistant Director,
Medical Library (medical college)

Also Robert McKenney from OSU (OHIO STATE) presented
Next Level of Distributed Learning: THe Introduction
of PDA's to THird and FOurthYear Medical Students

website: http://mcpdacentral.osu.edu/

Streaming available in two weeks.

CHeck out:
http://www.cwru.edu/is/no_strings/default.htm

ALso check out U. of SD initiative..they brought
PDAs to all freshman at the campus, including law
and medical...

My input: GO LIBRARIANS! Steven said that a chief
assistant in this initiative at South Dakota is a librarian, Heidi
Nickisch Duggan! Go Heidi, go! Hopefully Heidi will become
a contributor to Handheld Librarian and share her experiences.

PDA Conference in Peoria
We have over 50 librarians signed up for the pda conference
June 7 in Peoria! We have them coming from all types of libraries-
not only medical and health sciences, but academic, public, etc.
It is interesting no school librarians are signed up. Is it just
me or does it seem like more types of libraries are getting
interested in handhelds and applications for libraries? Have others
noticed this?

At the ILA RTSF Technology user group this week, many of the
librarians were fascinated with the pda presentation by Teri Ross Embrey
and were excited about the possibilites. At the SLS Tech Summit, there
were people from all kinds of libraries there who were very interested too!