Adventures of a Midwestern Girl in Sunny, Sunny California

The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted an interesting article about the nature of academic library job searches.
I don’t know what I find most interesting about the article: the “oh, snap” quality of it or the idea that it’s an applicant’s market in the academic world. That’s not what I’ve heard, although I am, [...]

Coming into the home stretch now and it’s getting harder and harder to get to the sessions and to make any meaningful sense of them. Perhaps I should reserve my postings until I have a chance to recover, but then I’d probably never get to them. Best to get to them when they [...]

There were a great many social distractions to choose from last night. I started the evening out at the SLA Awards Reception on the USS Constellation. The ship is very cool to walk around, particularly seeing just how small the officers’ quarters really were. They did have their own little rooms while [...]

Eli Edwards has posted on the SLA conference blog about an epiphany she had for first timers on the Expo Hall. I also had an epiphany that I would like to share. Like Eli, in the past I have always funded my own way to the SLA conferences and was never in a [...]

In spite of the title, the speakers for this session spoke very little on the concept of Open Access initiatives and instead focused on various public access initiatives of the government. The first speaker was David Gillikin, Head, MEDLARS Management Section NLM; mainly he spoke about efforts like Medline and MedlinePlus. He also [...]

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 [...]