I Went to New Orleans and All I Got Was...

...a great SLA Annual Conference. Plus a helluva lot of humidity...


Now that it's been two weeks since the conference ended, it's time for a recap! Well, not a recap per se - I won't put you through every session I went to - but I will hit some highlights. It was a long conference this year - four and a half very full days - but it was good!

Saturday: Board Meeting #1! This was followed by the 2011 annual conference planner's meeting. 2011 is shaping up nicely! I'm pleased to be working with the divisions that PAM is cosponsoring with, and I'm excited about our sessions. I'm also extremely pleased that the Arizona Chapter is going to be participating in a session next year, with other Western State chapters. We're working out the details now.


Kudos to Khue D for the PAM Early Bird Dinner at Liborio's Cuban Restaurant! It was definitely a leisurely event, but the crowd had fun and the mojitos were amazing.

Early mornings ho - 7:30 meetings almost every day, bleah! The first one was Sunday with the Leadership Development Institute. (I have been developed!) Discussions about the direction of SLA, the upcoming conference, and other activities (Alignment Toolkit, anyone?) were held. More to come at January's Leadership Summit, I'm sure.

Sunday also brought Board Meeting #2 and the interesting opening session, with Mary Matalin and James Carville - they're entertaining speakers but I got the impression they didn't quite have a good sense of their audience. I tell you, though, I could listen to Carville reading a cereal box with that accent and enjoy it...


Monday was full of business meetings, roundtables, the exhibit hall, and a lively book group discussion while the heavens poured buckets and buckets of water on New Orleans. After dashing through the dwindling raindrops we enjoyed the PAM Open House. I missed four other things I wanted to go to - the whole conference sorted out schedule-wise quite well except for Monday at 5:30, when five things collided. One of those things - that I missed - was the West Coast Chapter Reception; I'm proud to say that the Arizona Chapter will be involved with it next year (after we sort out a bit of a name change)!

Tuesday... more business meetings, a co-moderated session on Data Curation, prep with my co-presenter for our session the next day, and a lovely book signing event during the French Quarter networking reception. The ladies in the walking table dresses were fun! And thanks so much to everyone who bought a book and had it signed. I hope you enjoy it!


The big deal Tuesday night was, of course, the IT/PAM/LMD Dance Party - a Masquerade! The turnout was great, the masks in use were even greater, and we closed it down, once more having to shoo folks out at midnight.This is a great event and I highly recommend that everyone just plans on putting it on your schedule!


Wednesday brought the last of the board meetings and a definite decrease in energy - until the adrenaline kicked in for my session "Embed Yourself: The Librarian is IN!" with Jake Carlson of Purdue. We had a good time and gave, if I may say so, a great session - we ran over our time slot with the Q&A session, and we've had a lot of post-conference interest in it as well. This was followed by the jam-packed Astronomy Roundtable - always one of my favorites - and then the closing session with Nicholas Carr. I was intrigued but too tired to argue at this point!

The Kentucky chapter was kind enough to include me in their post-conference celebratory dinner (these people know how to have a good time at a conference, I tell you what) but I pooped out before the Bourbon Street crawl. It was an exhausting week but really good in a lot of ways, and I'm excited to be working on the 2011 conference planning. I'm also continuing to plot library world domination.... mua-hahahaha!

Call for Nominations: PAM IMA

The Special Libraries Association (SLA) Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics (PAM) Division is now calling for nominations for the International Membership Award. The SLA-PAM Division will present this award to a librarian from the developing world; it provides a two-year SLA membership, for the years 2010 and 2011. For complete information, please visit the following web page: http://units.sla.org/division/dpam/manual/awards/pamimadetails.html

Please submit nominations to the co-chair/s of the International Relations Committee (IRC) of the PAM Division (address below) by November 1, 2009. The award will be announced in December 2009. Thank you.

Objective:
The purpose of the award is to provide an opportunity for librarians from the developing world to be an active member of SLA and of SLA-PAM.

Components:

• The award will provide SLA membership, including PAM Division affiliation, for a period of two years.
• The award recipient will serve as a member of PAM's International Relations Committee (IRC) during the term of the award.
• SLA-PAM will fully fund the award recipient's attendance at SLA's annual conference during the first year of the award, including travel costs, lodging, conference registration, and related expenses. Please note: travel to the conference is contingent on several factors including procurement of a visa to travel to the United States. This is the award recipient's responsibility.
• The award recipient will prepare a short report on the state of scientific information/libraries in his/her country, to be presented to the membership at the annual SLA conference either in person or in writing.
• The award recipient will also prepare a final report reflecting on his/her experience with PAM and providing recommendations for future improvements to the award program; this report is to be sent before the end of the second year of the award to the PAM Executive Board and PAM IRC.
  

Qualifications:

• The nominee must reside and work in a developing country and have basic English skills.
• The nominee must be working currently in a library, information center, library school or other information-related capacity, in one of the subject areas related to science and technology. Priority will be given to applicants working in Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics areas.
• The nominee will not have had a previous opportunity to become actively involved in SLA, such as by attending an SLA conference or other professional library association meetings in the U.S.

Nomination Process: Self nominations are encouraged. Nomination documentation should include the following:

• A letter highlighting the candidate's professional career and qualification and explaining why this person should be granted the award.
• The candidate's current professional resume.
• Contact information for the nominee: name, position, business address, and (if possible) email address.

Nominations are to be submitted by 1 November, 2009, to the PAM IRC chair, and the award recipient will be announced in December. Selection will be made by the PAM Executive Board in consultation with the PAM IRC Chair/Co-Chair.

Please submit nominations to:

Mangala Krishnamurthy
Chair, SLA-PAM International Relations Committee
Rodgers Library for Science & Engineering
University of Alabama Libraries
The University of Alabama
P.O.Box 870266
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
Phone: (205) 348-2109 | Fax: (205) 348-2113 | Email: mkrishna@ua.edu

Or

Kiem-Dung Ta
Co-Chair, SLA-PAM International Relations Committee
Oklahoma State University
Edmon Low Library
Stillwater, Oklahoma 74078
(405) 744-9743 | Email: kiem.ta@okstate.edu

SLA 2009: Day Five

Wednesday, Day 5, came grey and gloomy...

The morning kicked off with the second IT Board Meeting and plenty of bacon. (These things are important!) This one was about a third as long as the first one; we just needed to finish working through the agenda for the year. A division this large has a lot going on! I then had to immediately gallop off for the Astronomy Roundtable, which ended up being standing room only - always well attended, Jane did a great job this year of keeping the conversation flowing and on-topic. (It's always neat to hear what ADS has up its sleeve, as it's a resource I use quite often.)

That was pretty much the last formal session of the conference for me; the closing reception of the Info-Expo hall was next (including my second book signing, which went as well as the first one - yay!), followed by the Closing Keynote. This year it was a panel discussion again, moderated by Judy Woodruff and consisting of Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium), Robyn Meredith (Forbes magazine), and John Patrick (Internet visionary, formerly with IBM). It was pretty cool - I always love to hear Tyson speak, his passion is just wonderful - and hearing all three discuss the global information changes that are coming from such different popints of view was really interesting.

After helping to fling beads at the Closing Reception on behalf of the 2010 conference committee, I enjoyed a beignet or two and then ran away to do some touristy bits at the Library of Congress. I'm going to close my SLA postings with this shot of a wall mosaic from the LoC, as it really says it all as far as I'm concerned:

Onward!

SLA 2009: Day Four

(I swear I'm going to get these finished today, dang it. I have other stuff stacking up behind them!)

Day Four, Tuesday, was going to be the longest day on the schedule - from the 7am start of the PAM Business Meeting through the IT/PAM/LMD Dance Party that night. Oof!

The big items at the PAM Business Meeting were the Award winners. Dana Roth was given the Achievement Award for the multiplicity of his work relating to scientific literature; Dr. Helmut Abt was given the Division Award for his work in citation analysis; and Thomas Heverin, Michael Peper, Kara Young, and Yun Zhang were the IoP Publishing Travel Stipend Award winners. Congratulations to them all!

Then it was off to moderate the "History of PAM" session, which was well-attended and chock full of good memories of division folks and events. A write-up will appear in the PAM Bulletin later this year, and the Division History section of the website will also be updated.

Lunch was spent at the IT Business Meeting, where hearty congratulations were bestowed on Stephanie Buck, winner of the 2009 Joe Ann Clifton Student Award for her paper on emerging technologies, and the North Carolina Chapter was awarded the Outstanding Chapter Technology Programming Award. A rather nifty Flash movie of the history of the division was also shared.

Later in the afternoon found me at the Matchbox DC Bistro for the Tech Support Roundtable... a session that many RSVPd but few actually appeared. *sigh* But for the two folks who did show up, it was a lively and informative session, where we talked about Vista, cloud computing, and the kinds of things that are really required from technical librarians these days. Oh, yeah, and the food was awesome...

What really bummed me out about today was the arrival of a wicked migraine about halfway through the session, and I had to bail on the Embassy Ball Dance Party. I'm still searching for photos or posts about it... I can only imagine the attendees are still recovering!

SLA 2009: Day Three

So, after completely discombobulating my brain with the fact that yes, Day Three is, in fact, Monday, I was able to shake it up and get going. Kicked off the day with an informal meeting of the Innovations in Technology committee - 2/3 of us, at least - but it was great to meet James in person. And then, it was the non-conflict Info-Expo Lunch Reception and (drum roll please) my first book signing! It went well, I think - the time certainly flew by! (Thanks again to Jill for the great photo!)

The afternoon was spent at the PAMwide Roundtable. The moderator, Joe, had a great idea this year; in addition to the usual round-the-room introduction, you were supposed to share a hobby, and something you were hoping to get out of SLA this year. Thankfully, he set aside the first hour for this, as it was a packed room! Then an experiment in social networking using Twitter was tried (with middling success), and a presentation of the International Membership Award winner's talk was given. (Sadly, the IMA winner, Ms. Adefunke Olanike Alabi, was unable to attend this year due to visa problems.) It was interesting and sobering to hear about the state of scientific librarianship in Nigeria, and I only wish Ms. Alabi had been able to deliver her talk in person.

The evening was given over to the US Naval Observatory - and what an evening! After a brief but lively discussion about the tour bus scheduling, a group of us were off for the PAM Book Group discussion, held in one of the conference rooms at the USNO. We read and discussed "Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries" by Neil deGrasse Tyson; the discussion was lively and included comments on the readability of the book, how some folks had known the author while he was a postdoc, and a great back-and-forth about science and religion. (Really, it was pretty spiffy.) By the end of our discussion, the other group of folks had arrived from the conference center for the USNO Tour, pulled together by Sally (who we cannot say enough good things about). After two hours of amazing thing piled on amazing thing, a full busload headed back to the convention center. Some folks went on to a reception at the Spy Museum, others headed to the IT Division's Sci-Fi night, but me? I went back to my hotel and crashed again!

SLA 2009: Days One and Two

I think this may be the first conference since I started blogging where I didn't live-blog it (or at least same-day blog it). It was both liberating and guilt-inducing (yes, those can happen simultaneously!). So here's the first of the post-conference catchups!

Day One: Saturday. The two events Saturday were, of course, at the same time, sigh. I missed the PAM Division Early Bird Dinner and walking tour (which I hear were both great) in order to attend the first IT Division Board Meeting. It was, shall we say, illuminating... plus the hotel had put out purple pens! After the chock-full-o-stuff board meeting we all headed off to the restaurant PS7 for a lovely dinner (I had the tuna au poivre, yum) and great conversation.

Day Two: Sunday. The work day kicked off with the PAM Newcomer's Lunch, where the division board welcomed new members who were attending their first conference. Unfortunately, we were all having so much fun eating & getting to know each other that we forgot to take photos (sigh). This was immediately followed by the PAM Board Meeting, always lively, and then the grand opening of the Info-Expo hall. Upon browsing the hall I was pleasantly surprised to come across a poster of my book prominently displayed at the ITI booth!

Sunday also included the opening keynote, by General Colin Powell. I know some find his reputation to be questionable, but I have a lot of respect for this man and what he went through, and I found his speech to be witty and charming. His comments about social networking and his grandkids just made me chuckle, and his story about his first airline experience after being Secretary of State was a hoot!

The closing event for the day was the AIP-sponsored PAM Open House. It's always a blast to see everyone and be able to do some serious networking over delicious food and drink. (Check out AIP's photos of the event over on Flickr!) I had planned on then heading over to the IT Division's Mystery Night, but I just crashed and had to head back to the hotel for the night.

Weather report for the weekend: ICK. How do people live in that humidity all the time?!? (The temperatures were lovely and mild but I felt like I was breathing through a hot wet washcloth all weekend long. Bleah.)

It's that Special Time Again

I am currently being inundated with all kinds of information and events at the 2009 Annual Special Libraries Association Meeting in Washington, DC. It's been a blast so far and I hope to have time soon to actually blog & photo-share about the events! Highlights for me so far have included Gen. Powell's keynote speech, the PAM Open House, and the US Naval Observatory tour. Tomorrow is the History of PAM session, which I'm looking forward to moderating for PAM, and the Technical Support Roundtable, ditto for IT. And then the party of all parties, the IT/PAM/LMD Dance Party - oof!