rowanf | Jun. 5th, 2007

I had a great time at the receptions last night. I managed not to volunteer to co-convene the GLBT Issues Caucus, I made a wonderful contact, Teresa Bailey from JPL, at the SJSJ SLIS reception and then wandered off with her to the Western Chapters reception. (Didn't make the Thomson party, oh well). She is just getting into Second Life and I offered (as I always do *grin*) to help her get her avatar together. She is a visual artist as well as a veteran librarian and I think having shows of her work in SL and having her involved in Info Island will be great! I begged off going to the KM or SF receptions which stated at 9pm and came back to the room.

I got up first thing this morning to go to the IEEE breakfast. I was mainly interested in the new sci-tech search portal called Scitopia scheduled to launch here at the SLA annual meeting. It is in beta actually. But it is a federated search engine for the digital libraries of 15 scientific societies who have pooled their metadata. I am really excited about it. Esp. having talked to Dialog and finding out there are no pay-as-you-go options available unless you are in AIIP. I am not an independent information professional but I went and asked them if Dialog's discounts are available to associate members. They'll let me know. If Scitopia eventually allows for registration and things like alerts I may just ditch Dialog altogether. The biggest thing I have running there are my INSPEC alerts.

Then I went to a session on online genealogy research with Chris Cowan of ProQuest talking about Heritage Quest Online, Thomas Kemp of NewsBank talking about Genealogy Bank and Ransom Love of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints talking about the digitizing going on at Family Search. It was interesting and I have already had fun with the Newbank product (and paid $90 for an annual subscription)... evidently there was a Cincinnati Doctor Amick in the 1890's who had a cure for consumption which he thought wasn't contagious. *grin* I'll have to send that along to my Ohio line cousins.

Then I went to a session on Global Librarians and got an update on the Lubuto Library project in Zambia (to which I gave money last year) and on a project by Libraries without Borders in Angola. I got a copy of the Lubuto video to show folks and I think I would like to do some fundraising for them. A librarian from Campbell also sounded interested so I gave her my card and hopefully something will come of that. I think these kinds of projects are so important, esp. things like Lubuto which work with street kids.

Wah! I got so intent on genealogy that I didn't make it back for my next session (my computer is still on Pacific time and fooled me). Darn. Perhaps a nap is in order so I can actually do some of the night time activities tonight. Yeah, that's the ticket.