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.