Adventures of a Midwestern Girl in Sunny, Sunny California

The Dialog Party was held tonight and I had a great time, as usual. It was held at the National Aquarium and had plenty of food, drink, and an okay DJ. I had wanted to see more of the aquarium itself, but was too drawn to the food and the dance floor for [...]

Now this was an interesting session. I will admit that my favorite speaker was Susanne Barker, Ministry Librarian, British Columbia Ministry of Forests and Range. She spoke on government library survival strategies and was funny, charming, and really had the best insights and ideas I have heard yet. Her main strategies for keeping [...]

Lolly Gasaway’s presentation on the implications of copyright in the for-profit sector was very interesting and very well-received. She began with a brief overview of the issues of the relevant important cases of the last 20 years.
• The Texaco decision (60 F.3d 913)
• Tasini (533 US 483)
• Legg-Mason (271 F.Supp 737)
It was a very good overview, introducing [...]

I guess the next big developments in search are in visualization tools, ways to view results in graphs and cluster maps and bar charts, oh my, rather than in lists of text results. I will say that the tools introduced in this session may well be very helpful to some of the attorneys at [...]

Another meeting that I kind of poked myself into was the Public Policy Advisory Council meeting. I was the only non-council member present, but they all welcomed me anyway. We spoke briefly about the EPA library situation and Doug Newcomb gave us an update. He said that the meeting they had had [...]

The newly-formed Government Information Division had its Board meeting today. Since I won’t make it to the division meeting tomorrow, I decided to stick my head in and see what was up. The general business was pretty standard stuff, including ideas to increase membership. In fact, the division is the fastest growing [...]

I started off the day today with a CE course. The course I was originally scheduled to take, Back to Basics Business Research, was cancelled late last week because the presenter had gotten ill. Instead I took a different business research course called Researching Private and Listed Companies Globally. It was a [...]

I will try to blog more about the individual aspects of my first full day at the SLA conference later tonight. This is just a quick note about something that happened this afternoon that was a real boost to my ego.
I went to the Public Policy Advidory Council meeting just to sit in and [...]

What vendors/exhibitors need to understand is that, like it or not, their conference experience starts at the airport.
Arriving at the Baltimore airport, I was expecting there would be other conference attendees. This seems fairly obvious. In fact, everyone in my airport shuttle was here for the conference. There was one woman who was [...]