Attending SLA
Jun. 13th, 2006 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowanfLast night I went to the Gay & Lesbian Issues Caucus and found (a) a free open bar - the liquor in this town is amazing and (b) about half the room was female! Item (b) is fairly new despite this being a 70% women's profession. I had intended to ditch the Caucus after the meeting and go to some of the vendor parties but Mary Ellen & Julie convince me that I should stay and go to the Caucus dinner. So I listened to The Web 2.0 talk by Dale Prince who does the Gay Librarian blog and went on to dinner with folks. I was sorry to miss Wiley's Goth party at Edgar Allen Poe's burial place. I mean who could resist and invite like this:
When you vision has gone bleary
from vendor demos oh so dreary
and the many conference sessions
have all but made you snore
Recall Wiley's invitation to SLA's delegation
and accept from us libation
libation that we freely pour.
Find your way to Westminster Hall,
present this card at the door --
only this... and nothing more.
*LOL* But resist it I did. The GLIC folks had a great dinner at Stashia's and I wore the black "Book Diva" t-shirt I had bought to wear to the Goth party. I sent several men to get their in the vendors room the next day... a definite hit!
This morning I got up and went to the Diversity breakfast which had two great speakers. The first one, Giandomenico Picco is a UN advisor and president of the Non-Governmental Peace Strategies Project in Geneva, a nonprofit institute aimed at devising new vehicles for the private sector to support peace efforts. He told stories of hostage negotiations in Lebanon as a backdrop to talk about finding commonalities in diversity. He traces many problems to people who cling to a single identity and advocates bringing all our multiple facets to the diversity table. After he spoke we heard from Tracie Hall of ALA's Office of Diversity about the Spetrum Iniative, a scholarship program that aims to get the librarian population more in line with the general population.
I hit the vendor room for awhile and finished visiting the other half of the floor. I asked Thomson to contact me about training with Aureka, I really want to try their patent analysis tools. Other than that, it seems I had hit most of the relevant vendors yesterday. The other side of the room was mostly law and biotech related.
I then tried to go to a session on using RSS but the first room was too small and they moved us across the hall to another room but there were enough people in the hall that the other room filled up before I had shuffled across. I decided I wasn't up to sitting on the floor and went to hear Mary Ellen Bates talk about Libraries of the future. She always does good talks. I ran back to my room and ate the last of my cheese and crackers from last night and then ran back to try and get into Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis, CoPs, RSS and podcasts) but once again decided against sitting on the floor and went to hear Mary Ellen (they put her in a double ballroom) talk about Becoming a Value-added Information Professional. Various urls she mentioned that I want to check out:
http://www.podscope.com/ - indexes the audio of podcasts via voice recognition
http://www.blogpulse.com/ - analyze what is hot in the blogosphere
http://www.google.com/trends - analyze what people are searchig for (google labs)
http://www.google.com/searchhistory - browse and search your own search history (beta)
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/ - newsblaster automated news tracking system under development at Columbia
http://quantum.dialog.com/training/workshops/addingvalue - the notes from a Dialog workshop on Adding Value to Information Services
http://support.dialog.com/searchaids/success/ - a Dialog search manual with some good descriptions of customizable options and reports
Now is another "free" period when they want you to be talking to vendors but I'm pretty done with that. I'll go back over in a little (I love having a hotel 1/2 a block from the convention center!) once they have set up the "ice cream social" in the vendors area. *grin*
My email is still not happening. So I guess I get to enter some Georges and read friends Ljs. :-)
When you vision has gone bleary
from vendor demos oh so dreary
and the many conference sessions
have all but made you snore
Recall Wiley's invitation to SLA's delegation
and accept from us libation
libation that we freely pour.
Find your way to Westminster Hall,
present this card at the door --
only this... and nothing more.
*LOL* But resist it I did. The GLIC folks had a great dinner at Stashia's and I wore the black "Book Diva" t-shirt I had bought to wear to the Goth party. I sent several men to get their in the vendors room the next day... a definite hit!
This morning I got up and went to the Diversity breakfast which had two great speakers. The first one, Giandomenico Picco is a UN advisor and president of the Non-Governmental Peace Strategies Project in Geneva, a nonprofit institute aimed at devising new vehicles for the private sector to support peace efforts. He told stories of hostage negotiations in Lebanon as a backdrop to talk about finding commonalities in diversity. He traces many problems to people who cling to a single identity and advocates bringing all our multiple facets to the diversity table. After he spoke we heard from Tracie Hall of ALA's Office of Diversity about the Spetrum Iniative, a scholarship program that aims to get the librarian population more in line with the general population.
I hit the vendor room for awhile and finished visiting the other half of the floor. I asked Thomson to contact me about training with Aureka, I really want to try their patent analysis tools. Other than that, it seems I had hit most of the relevant vendors yesterday. The other side of the room was mostly law and biotech related.
I then tried to go to a session on using RSS but the first room was too small and they moved us across the hall to another room but there were enough people in the hall that the other room filled up before I had shuffled across. I decided I wasn't up to sitting on the floor and went to hear Mary Ellen Bates talk about Libraries of the future. She always does good talks. I ran back to my room and ate the last of my cheese and crackers from last night and then ran back to try and get into Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis, CoPs, RSS and podcasts) but once again decided against sitting on the floor and went to hear Mary Ellen (they put her in a double ballroom) talk about Becoming a Value-added Information Professional. Various urls she mentioned that I want to check out:
http://www.podscope.com/ - indexes the audio of podcasts via voice recognition
http://www.blogpulse.com/ - analyze what is hot in the blogosphere
http://www.google.com/trends - analyze what people are searchig for (google labs)
http://www.google.com/searchhistory - browse and search your own search history (beta)
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/ - newsblaster automated news tracking system under development at Columbia
http://quantum.dialog.com/training/workshops/addingvalue - the notes from a Dialog workshop on Adding Value to Information Services
http://support.dialog.com/searchaids/success/ - a Dialog search manual with some good descriptions of customizable options and reports
Now is another "free" period when they want you to be talking to vendors but I'm pretty done with that. I'll go back over in a little (I love having a hotel 1/2 a block from the convention center!) once they have set up the "ice cream social" in the vendors area. *grin*
My email is still not happening. So I guess I get to enter some Georges and read friends Ljs. :-)
