Christina's LIS Rant

SLA 2009 Preview

SLA is the Special Libraries Association – it’s really my home
professional organization.
 I often go to basically 3 conferences in my profession: SLA,
ASIS&T, and Computers In Libraries.  You come back
from SLA and you want to buy
something. You come back from ASIS&T and you want to style="font-style: italic;">study something or
just think about things. You come back from CIL and you want to style="font-style: italic;">build something. So
they all have purposes.  By far, though, SLA is the most
important to what I do for a living.

This year should be really exciting – lots of good sessions.
 I’m disappointed that it’s local for me – it’s a lot less fun
to go to 8am meetings or 11pm open houses when you have to fight
traffic!  Here
are the sessions I’m most looking forward to:

  • Computer Science Round table – Data Curation: 
    “Societal Need for Digital Curation Specialists in the
    Library Setting”
    P. Bryan Heidorn, Associate professor at the Graduate School of Library
    and Information Science at the University of Illinois at
    Urbana-Champaign;
    “Metadata for Scientific Data and Dublin Core Metadata
    Initiative”
    Jane Greenberg, Francis Carroll McColl Term Professor and Director,
    SILS Metadata
    Research Center School of Information and Library Science University of
    North Carolina at Chapel Hill;
    “Digital Curation: From Concept to Reality at the US
    Geological Survey”
    Richard Huffine, National Library Coordinator for the United States
    Geological Survey. Then regular
    roundtable where we discuss issues about providing services to CS
    researchers (hopefully ACM will show up this year! IEEE, Springer, and
    Proquest/Safari are usually there)
  • The All-Sciences Poster Session (I helped with the theme
    and I’ll help with the online version in the fall) – theme is:
    “Scientific Information Workflow: Librarian Perspectives,
    Best Practices, and Models in the Digital
    Era” ( href="http://units.sla.org/division/dche/2009/poster.htm">http://units.sla.org/division/dche/2009/poster.htm)
    Sub-theme: “Helping our academic and corporate clients
    develop efficient ways to obtain, process,
    preserve, and/or share their scientific information (e.g., data, files,
    citations, or scholarly research
    papers) in an all-electronic environment.”
  • Physics Round table: “Keeping up with Current Events in
    Physics”  Speaker: Dr. James W. Taylor and 
    “What do physicists want? Changing trends in physics information”
    Speaker: Paul Guinnessy
  • Closing general session has Neil deGrasse Tyson (I saw him
    at the great planet debate, but he’s always a lot of fun)

Other sessions I might hit include one on manned missions to Mars, one
on forensics, one with the editor of style="font-style: italic;">The Onion, and of
course open houses by my home division (Physics-Astro-Math). I also
like to spend a lot of time going to the vendor booths and their
special sessions so I can find out what’s new, brush up on how to get
the most from their tools, etc.

Comments

  1. #1 Stephanie Willen Brown
    June 12, 2009

    Love your description of the three conferences — and I totally agree. Hope to see you at SLA this week!
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