The National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS), US, has announced that registrations are now being accepted for the 2014 NFAIS Annual Conference, Giving Voice to Content: Re-envisioning the Business of Information. The event is scheduled for February 23 - 25, 2014, at the Hyatt at the Bellevue in Philadelphia, PA.
The conference program and registration information is available at: http://nfais.org/event?eventID=530.
This three-day meeting will take a look a new information mindset that is emerging. The ability to unearth or create new layers of knowledge using big data techniques such as data mining, linking, analytics, and metrics is challenging content providers and librarians to look at their information from a new perspective, considering its value in terms of all the possible ways it can be deployed in the future, not merely how it is used in the present. This new mindset provides an opportunity to ensure their relevance in a highly-competitive digital information world by re-envisioning their content and developing the policies, practices, and business models that will facilitate - not inhibit – its use. Program details can be accessed at http://nfais.org/event?eventID=537.
Highlights include a thought-provoking keynote by Hilary Mason, Data Scientist in Residence at Accel and Scientist Emeritus at bitly, on the application of big data techniques to extract new insights or create new forms of value that can potentially change information markets and the organizations that serve them; a look at "datafication," the generation of data and visualization from social and environmental processes, data that can then be quantified and measured to create new understanding of the world around us; John Blossom's view of the Signal Economy, a global shift in how value is created in all markets across manufacturing, media, marketing and services; a look at how innovative publishers such as The New York Times, OCLC, and Elsevier are applying data mining, linking, analytics, and metrics to create smart content; New technologies for collecting, enhancing, and managing information, including crowd-sourcing and the use of mobile devices for data collection; a discussion of the issues that content providers and librarians must address as the new information mindset takes hold, issues such as the re-use and sharing of content, privacy, content ownership, attribution, and others which if they are to be resolved require moving beyond the comfort zone of current practices, policies, biases, and business mindsets; and a closing keynote by Kerrie Holley, IBM Fellow and Chief Technology Officer, IBM SOA Center of Excellence, on the impact of "SMAC" - social, mobile, analytics, and cloud - that will combine with cognitive systems to have a major impact on 21st-century business, government, and society in general.
Interested parties may contact Jill O'Neill, NFAIS Director of Communication and Planning (jilloneill@nfais.org or 215-893-1561) or visit the NFAIS Web site at http://nfais.org/ to register or obtain more information.
