From folksonomies to federated searches, reference databases are constantly evolving. Meet seven industry leaders who are driving those changes. Seven leading publishers shared their insights on the future of reference databases at American Libraries' second annual "Speaking Technically" panel at ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim. Moderated by American Libraries Direct Editor George Eberhart, the panelists talked about their new products and ideas for enhanced services. On hand were (left to right, above) JIM DRAPER, vice president and publisher of Gale/Cengage Learning; STEPHEN RHINDTUTT, president of Alexander Street Press; CHRISTOPHER WARNOCK, CEO of Ebrary; MICHAEL GORRELL, chief information officer of EBSCO; KEVIN OHE, editorial director for electronic products at Greenwood Publishing Group; ANTHONY PAREDES, vice president of Capital IQ, a division of Standard and Poor's; and LINDA GOLDBERG, vice president for user experience at ProQuest. Watch a video of this program at AL Focus, at alfocus.ala.org.

American Libraries: In June, ProQuest agreed to purchase Dialog from Thomson Reuters. What plans does ProQuest have for it?

LINDA GOLDBERG: I want to see Dialog as a service that makes users fascinated, not only with the tool that they're using for search and retrieval, but with the information that they find there . That is the goal-making the experience of retrieving, locating, and identifying information fascinating, inspiring, and engaging.

How much time do you all spend looking into new technologies for information delivery?

MICHAEL GORRELL: EBSCO is constantly looking at new technologies and new user experiences. We just released EBSCOhost 2.0, the first major revision of our user interface since 2002. In the past sixyears, we've also added many products and features based on our research.

Do you use any focus groups?

GORRELL: We use many focus groups, usability studies, and user testing, all the way from guerrilla user testingpulling people off the street or off the campus-to structured laboratory testing. The Kent State University School of Library and Information Science has a Usability Lab with Tobii eye-tracking hardware, and we did some formal studies there.

JIM DRAPER: We do that all the time at Gale. About two years ago we conducted an 18-month study of how graduate students and undergraduates use and interact with literature products, and we learned some fascinating things about how they bounce around within products-what they call "flicking." As we watched their hands and eyes interact with the screen, we realized that we could do a much better job for the end-user experience.

What are the best ways for your customers to tell you about enhancements that they'd like to see?

CHRISTOPHER WARNOCK: In every customer visit that Ebrary makes, we ask for feedback. We have a trial program that we put potential customers through. During this program we ask for feedback on the system and how they see it. Librarians are forthcoming about what works and what doesn't work. We also conduct surveys with librarians, faculty, and students.

ANTHONY PAREDES: We do the same at Capital IQ and Standard and Poor's. For the last eight years, we've had an option for customers to submit feedback or request data and usability enhancements directly on the platform. About every two months, we add new functionality into our products, all driven from client feedback.

Gale has just introduced a federated search service that allows users to search for articles across your many databases. How does that work?

DRAPER: OneSearch is a complement to our PowerSearch program that has been in production for about two years. It's a high-end federated search that looks at metadata across all of the Gale databases. Librarians can sign up for the PowerSearch Plus and look in other vendors' databases. For example, ProQuest products can be viewed through our interface, and it harvests their metadata, making for a much more powerful search engine. The inspiration forthat came from our customers.

What other search technologies will you be implementing over the next few years?

STEPHEN RHIND-TUTT: Video is extremely cumbersome to search; although Google has made some inroads, the proportion of video they've put up is relatively small and in the public domain. When you go into a bookshop, you can find both a public-domain $10 version of a classic novel by Charles Dickens as well as the $45 Oxford University Press scholarly edition. At Alexander Street Press, we think there's a similar opportunity to create what we call a "critical video edition." It should serve as a research tool, not just by Alexander Street users, but by others through OpenURL and other protocols.

Going forward, perhaps we'll have 200 different search mechanisms to interact with everyone else's database.

How will metadata fit into this new federated search concept?

WARNOCK: Metadata is a funny thing, because in some cases it costs more than the information it describes.