June 7, 2007

Today was the final day of the conference (Nooooooo!!!!!). I began with another 7 am session on ebooks. I was a little worried because the session was hosted by the science division, and I wasn't sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the presenters (all vendors), did not actually discuss this products other than what was necessary to describe who they were. Instead, the vendors discussed information such as pricing schemes, accessibility models, Digital Rights Management, and copyright issues. It was very informative.

Next came the closing session with Dilbert creator, Scott Adams. He was hilarious. I think my favorite comment was "You've not had a bad day until your head is described using a WWII military movement analogy". I haven't laughed so hard in a long time!

My third session was "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Code" which was about the US Code. Again, I had rather low expectations since it sounds like a very dry topic. I was wrong. I haven't learned so much about a legal resource since law school! I HAVE to share this information with my colleagues.

My fourth session (boy I had a busy day!) was called Recruitment, Retention & Retirement: The Future of Librarianship (sponsored by the Legal Division). A panel of three women discussed their views and some research on the topic. Unfortunately, it was the one session that I found myself less than thrilled with.

My final session was really fun. It was called 60 gadgets in 60 minutes. We saw some serious technology, like I-Tech's new virtual keyboard, and some kooky gadgets like the food-shaped USB drives and the Nintendo Gameboy Platform Shoes. I loved it and got some great ideas to boot...the techies at my school are going to love this presentation!

In between all of these sessions, I also managed to have lunch with Bob Sullivan, the head of the legal division. We had a nice chat at the built in sandwich shop at the Convention Center.

After the last session, a new friend ( a planning librarian from Tennessee) and I went to dinner with another on of my friend's colleagues. We found a great Mexican restaurant called Lime. Although they screwed up our order (3 times for my friend), they had great food and a nice outdoor patio to eat on. We had a good time and a wonderful last meal in Denver.

Finally, I finished my night at the last legal division open house. I visited with a lot of nice people and said goodbye to my new friends. I really hope that I get to see them again soon.

June 5, 2007

Today was another early start. At 7 am, I walked into the Legal Division's Emerging Technologies Breakfast. While we finished up our breakfast, we had three speakers discuss new technologies or issues. The first Speaker was Nina Platt, who discussed Enterprise 2.0, which seems to be mainly the combination and practical useage of the new technologies brought forth by Web 2.0 (OK, so she went fast enough, my definition may be way off). I have to say, though, that althoguh I found her topic interesting, I kept getting distracted by her constant comments about how this applied to law firms, but complete and utter failure to even attempt to relate it to academic libraries. This was the first time I had run into this extreme firm orientation in any of the sessions. I believe Ms. Platt needs to re-evaluate her audience, especially since I can vouch for at least 5 academic law librarians at my breakfast table alone...

The next speaker was Tom Flemming. When Tom first began speaking, I didn't think I was going to like his topic because he started off with how different the Boomers were from Gen X and Gen Y (aka Millenials). I have heard that speech about 8 times now, and have not agreed with the overly broad generalizations yet. Thankfully, Tom quickly branched out into some og the new technologies being utilized by the newer generations, such as Linkedin.com, which Tom described as a new-style of rolodex.

The final speaker and host of the breakfast was Nathan Rosen, who spoke about Wikis. Nathan was by far my favorite of the speakers because I learned a lot about how wikis are being utilized in the legal field.

My next session was the Global Legal Information & You session, which was presented by two Law Library of Congress librarians. They both knew their stuff and went through a lot of resources. I had heard of the great majority of them, but was greatly interested by some of their suggestions for the initial structure of a reference interview when asked about foreign, comparative or international law. I definitely have lots of notes to transcribe from this session.

The next session held a bit of a surprise for me. I was attracted by the title, 20+ Tips for Searching the NEW Web. What I didn't realize was that the session was being presented by Super Searcher Mary Ellen Bates. This was the first time I have ever heard her speak, and I was quite impressed. A great many of the websites that she recommended were new to me, and I will definitely be sharing the sites with my co-workers as there are sites for everyone, even the techies who are notoriously hard to impress with new websites (usually the sites are already 6 months old to them). The session was very well done and had an truly amazing attendance.

I next went to the networking lunch that was being offered to all full-conference attendees. I met some nice corporate librarians who worked for Intel and Visa International. While we did not share many of the same resources, it seems that vendor relations are the same, no matter which industry you work in!

My last session of the day was another surprise. It was titled: Web Tools for Legal Researchers, which turned out to be a bit of a misnomer. The true surprise, however, was that it was presented by Gary Price of ask.com, ResourceShelf, and DocuTicker fame. Gary's presentation really did not focus on legal research websites at all. He did however, tell us about a lot of new resources which could be helpful to those in the legal industry, as well as other industries. For instance, he spoke about Zoho, which has released a lot of free or really cheap office utilities, and about Metavid, which provides searchable congressional video materials. The nice thing about this presentation was that Gary did not mind answering questions after the session had ended. I was able to ask him about some suggestions for my toolbar project and he was so interested in it that he asked me to email him, which I will do once I get home. This session, too, resulted in lots of URLS and info to share with the entire library.

I also attended the drawing for the two $1000 awards, but, alas, I didn't win. Oh well, maybe next time (I am still hopeful about some of the iPods and the GPS systems that some of the vendors are giving away).

I decided to grab some dinner and take it back to my hotel to eat while typing up these latest installments before heading out to the open houses tonight. I had a nice sub from Jimmy John's, which I had never heard of, but appears to be a chain (I am trying to be frugal, too). However, it is now almost 9 pm, and I am ready to drop. I think I will skip the open houses tonight since they are just starting. Tomorrow's legal division openhouse starts at 7 or 7:30, so I will defintiely be able to attend that one before heading off to bed.

Have a great night to all!

June 4, 2007 - Part 2

After my break where I wrote up "June 4, 2007 - Part 1", I went back to the Denver Convention Center (a very nice facility) for my next session: Mashups and Remixes for Government Information. We had two speakers. The first was Karen Huffman from the National Geographic Society. She went over a lot of different ways that her organization is using different information from different government sources and combining them together into a new information source. I kept thinking of mashups as a collage of different information. My favorite idea that I took away from Ms. Huffman's presentation is that you can share government information and news in a wide variety of ways, including creating your own RSS news feed where you feed stories from all of your sources into one newsreader or even embed the RSS feed into your webpage. Ms Huffman also spoke about Google Gadgets, which intrigue me, but I think I need to do more reseach on them before I can truly discuss them in more depth.

Our second speaker was Dan Newman, Executive Director and Co-founder of MAPLight.org (MAP stands for Money and Politics) http://www.maplight.org/. Basically, this website gathers campaign contribution data on politicians in the US Congress and California from one source and data on the same politician's votes on the various bills in front of the legislatures, and then analyzes it. The truly cool thing about this, however, is that you can see exactly what politician received contributions from specific special interests simultaneously with how and when they voted on a particular bill relating to the special interest groups. For example, the basic results for the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act of 2007, showed the following results:

Vote Date:

January 12, 2007

Change...

Date	Location	Motion	Result	Yes	No
January 12, 2007	House	On Passage: H R 4…	Pass	255	170
January 12, 2007	House	On Motion to Recommit with…	Fail	196	229

Cancel

Location:

House

Motion:

On Passage: H R 4 Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation Act

Result:

Pass

• 255 Yes Votes
• 170 No Votes
• 10 Not Voting
  

Interests who did want this bill to become law (such as Consumer groups and Elderly issues & Social Security) gave an average of:

• $25,098 to each legislator voting Yes
• $3,028 to each legislator voting No

Interests who did not want this bill to become law (such as Biotech products & research and Chambers of commerce) gave an average of:

• $6,964 to each legislator voting Yes
• $17,970 to each legislator voting No

http://www.maplight.org/map/us/bill/10572/default/votes/vote-294451

If you drill down, however, you can see for instance that Representative Boswell, who voted for the bill, received $68,064 from bill supporters, and nothing from the the opposition. You can even see when contributions were received.

The website contains some interesting information, and even allows you at run correlations yourself to see if specific special interest groups may have had an affect on specific issues. This is definitely a site to watch as it continues to expand and offer new features!

After this session, I took a short break and then headed out to dinner with a "Dine-around" group. Basically, a local SLA member agrees to take a group out to a local restaurant (each person pays their own way). This allows those of us who don't really know anyone to not only meet new people, but also experience local cuisine. My group, led by wonderful local Pat Wagner, went to local brewery Wynkoop. We all had a great time and some wonderful food. Pat was even nice enough to secure Free Pint coupons for all of us, so we could try some of the local brew...Very good!!!!!!! I had a great time and met some wonderful people. I even have plans to go out to dinner again with one of the group!

After dinner, I had planned on going to one or more of the open houses, but ended up heading back to the hotel and crashing...this conference is exhausting, but fantastic!

June 4, 2007 - Part 1

Today began at 5:30 am as I prepared for the BNA-sponsored Legal Division breakfast at 7 am. I was quite impressed by the food selection since they did a full breakfast and I was expecting just danishes. I was glad to see some protein!

I ended up at a table of law firm librarians who were based all over the world. It was interesting to hear about the various types of communication systems they have set up in order to coordinate everything and serve their attorneys no matter where they are in the world. One of the firms, Greenberg Traurig, has set up a virtual reference service, which one of their DC librarians was describing. Hmmm…maybe academic law librarians are not that different from firm librarians!

After breakfast, I went to the highly advertised synergy session where a 4 person panel discussed questions that had been submitted prior to the conference. I wasn’t really impressed. All of the topics were rehashes of things that I had heard in the past, and I was hoping for a session with more audience participation since it was touted as a discussion. It may have worked better in groups of 30 or less.

Next I snuck back to the EXPO looking for the Library of Congress representative that I had spotted yesterday. I never found her, but I did discover a few other vendors that I had missed yesterday, including the EPA libraries (yes, they do still exist), and a company called Bookwear, which provides marketing tools where cardboard covers are designed to look like books, but when unwrapped, there are items such as t-shirts, tote bags, etc. in them with the company logo on them. I was quite impressed and think that this may be an interesting idea for 1L orientation. I am bringing home samples to show everyone.

After the EXPO, I lugged my new samples down to the Legal Division Business Meeting and Lunch. I think the legal division is trying to stuff me with food. We had a 3 course meal which was very good. The Professional Grant recipients, me included, were recognized and many people were thanked for their participation.

Next came the Google Tips and Tricks presentation. While I was waiting for it to begin, I ran into a librarian from the UNC Academic Affairs Library, Linda Drake. We really hit it off when I told her that I was a 2003 UNC Law grad and had a nice discussion. She told me that she would pass my regards on to Lolly and Anne.

The presentation was really good. I knew about many of the features that were being discussed, but was excited about some changes that have been instituted in the last few weeks. I took 2 pages of notes, which I will have to type up when I return home.

After the presentation, it was time for a break, which is when I typed these observations. I will have to finish the rest of the day later, however, since it is almost time for me to return for my next session on Government Information Mashups.

June 3, 2007

I learned an important lesson last night…curtains are important when in a city that never turns off its lights. My room only has sheer curtains, so it’s not very effective. Hopefully, I will get more sleep tomorrow.

I began the morning by going down to the Trattoria restaurant in the hotel, since I was comped for having strangers wander into my room yesterday. The buffet was ok, but I was a little distressed when watching one of the waiters cough into his hand, then pick up silverware to set a table without ever washing his hands…I’ll skip this one next time…I did meet another SLAer on the way out, though, and passed on my extra free breakfast ticket to her…I felt like Santa Claus!

Next, I wandered over to the top secret Westlaw breakfast meeting (more coffee!). I met some nice people and learned about an interesting new service that will be launched later this year. Unfortunately, I signed a confidentiality agreement, so I cannot speak on this anymore for fear of death or being cutoff from Westlaw access.

Two of the people that I met, Julia and Lynn, became my companions on and off for most of the day. We went to Starbucks with another coffee loving SLAer that we picked up, Becky, and had a nice time. We also managed to catch a good portion of the Native American dancing back in the Conference Center. Amazing!

At 11 am, I was on my own in the EXPO hall. I spent four long hours wandering among the vendors and accumulating a wealth of loot. I learned a LOT, which I was not really expecting since I figured I was just going to get sales pitch after sales pitch. I did get a lot of sales pitches, but I also learned a lot from them, too. For instance, I found out that Elsevair (sp?) has a lot of great books that would fit in with our library, even though they are not technically a legal publisher. Additionally, I learned that a lot of law libraries are subscribing to market/industry/company databases in an effort to help build their knowledge base on various industries and legal areas. Not a bad idea.

In addition to a lot of information and business cards, I received a great deal of free stuff. A couple of the giveaways really deserve a mention. First and foremost, EBSCOhost is giving away Colorado pine trees in celebration of their efforts to become more “Green”. You can take the trees home and plant them! I think the best freebie that I received, though, was from this nice guy from Minisis, Inc. who was one of the first vendors that I spoke with. He gave me a USB drive! Very much appreciated since my current drive looks like it is due to break in half at any time…I also received two pedometers, one from Thomson and one from the Copyright Clearance Center. By bedtime, my count was 7262 steps, which is impressive, especially since I found the pedometers after already being at the expo for over 3.5 hours.

After the EXPO, I went to the LD’s Leadership Tea, where I met some of the movers and shakers in the division. We had a great conversation with Kgomotso Radijeng, the law librarian from the University of Botswana, about marketing libraries and library associations. I told her about my new toolbar and she seemed interested. Maybe I should write an article for the LDQ on my attempts.

After Tea, we went to the opening ceremony and saw all of the awards and heard Al Gore speak. It was a wonderful ceremony, and Gore had a great impact on us. “The revolution begins!”

I finished my night off at the LD open house. It was a nice turnout, and I ran into Lynn and Julia again. I met some more nice people, including Jean from Cornell and a few others whose names I am currently blanking on.

By 10:30 pm, I was dropping into bed. What a busy day!

June 2, 2007

It was an early day for me. 6 am! I was actually ready for it, though, because I was so excited about going to the SLA conference. This is my first time going to SLA and my first conference with over a few hundred people! By 9:30 am, Matt and I were on the road to the airport. We made good time, and I was at the Southwest gate with plenty of time to spare.

The flight was a bit bumpy, but not too bad. The ride from the Denver airport was more cramped than the plane, though! I did not know that I shuttle van could actually hold that many (10 + the driver) people!

We had a good drive, though. I ran into a representative from SLA vendor Dow Jones, Anna Maria Masters. We had a great chat all the way from the airport to our hotels. It definitely made the hour ride to downtown seem to go much quicker. It also made me feel easier about going to such a big conference where I do not really know anyone on my own.

I was booked into the Adam’s Mark Hotel. The staff has been really friendly and helpful, and the rooms are nice and clean. My stay has already been eventful, however. When I first arrived in my room and kicked off my shoes, I was unhappily surprised to find the carpet was wet. Thankfully, someone was able to come check to make sure that there was no leak. They said that someone must have just spilled some water.

While I was still fuming a bit about my now wet socks, I had yet another unpleasant surprise. I was sitting calmly on my bed looking over some paperwork when two people walked into my room. Somehow, they had been assigned the same room and now had keys to it…suffice to say I was on the phone with the front desk immediately. The hotel rekeyed my room and brought me new keys, but now I am a bit worried about leaving my belongings in the room. As an apology, however, I was provided with 2 free passes to the breakfast buffet at Trattoia. They expire tomorrow, so I think I will check it out. I wish I knew someone to give the 2^nd meal ticket, though.

I also discovered that there is a fur/furry convention going on at the hotel. This type of convention is for people who like to dress up as animals (some are also sexually attracted to animals, which makes the conference a bit disturbing). All kinds of new things to think about here!

After all of the excitement with the room, I wandered down to the convention center and followed the flow to the registration desk. What a breeze to check in! And we received REALLY nice bags. The only thing I managed to forget was a ribbon that is supposed to mark me as a newbie so that people will know to take pity on me and point me in the right direction (Ok, so no explanation for why new attendees get ribbons was given, but I can read behind the lines).

While I was at the convention center, I decided to stop and look at the dine around sign-up lists. I want to try one later in the week (I considered the German restaurant one for tonight, but I was really tired and would have had to rush to get to the restaurant 15 min late). Maybe on Tuesday J

While I was looking over the dine around lists, I started a conversation with another conference attendee, Irene S. Laursen. We chatted all the way back to our hotels as I helped her schlep some materials back to the Holiday Inn. Irene had a lot of great tips for me, such as to tuck some business cards in the back of my ID badge and to write notes about card givers on their cards in order to help remember them. The best tip of all, though: Reuters gives free massages at their booth. I have to check that one out!!!!

After some brief downtime in my room where I unpacked and checked my email, I decided to venture out for some dinner. The 16^th street pedestrian mall is great, with lots of restaurants and shops. There were some great street performers out tonight, too, including a group of bongo drummers and a robotic man with a huge afro. I wandered quite a ways down the mall to review all of my options and get some exercise. While one of the breweries (Rock bottom?) really tempted me, I decided to try to find something to take back to the room and eat.

I finally settled on a small burger joint that I had never heard of before, Good Times: Burgers & Frozen Custard. They advertised that there burgers were fresh and never frozen, so I decided what the heck. I ordered a combo with a guacamole burger and fries to go. When I received my order, the bag relayed this message:

Congratulations. You’ve followed your mouth. This is where it’s brought you. To all-natural Coleman beef, topped with whole leaf lettuce and fresh-grilled, honey-cured bacon. And maybe a slathering of spicy guacamole. Perhaps you’re about to dig into a sandwich of 100% chicken breast, a side of seasoned wild fries (or whole-ring onion rings) and a large fresh-brewed iced tea. And if it’s a lick or two of fresh, creamy rich frozen custard that we’ve made in the last two hours, or a thick, rich shake, you won’t be let down. Your mouth wouldn’t do that to you.”

That’s a lot for a burger to live up to. I wish I could say it was the perfect burger, but alas, it was not. It was a bit greasy, but actually tasted very good, especially for $5.69 for the whole combo. It was also very satisfying to someone who is craving something homey and down to earth. The fries were really good, too. Unfortunately, I am sure that the exercise I got when fetching it was lost to the burgery calories…

And so, I am back in my room, ready to veg out for a while before starting my official first day of the SLA conference…woohoo!

See ya tomorrow!

My new Blog

While I know that I am starting a little late in the game, I have decided to create this Blog to detail my trip to the SLA 2007 Annual Conference. I will try to post at least one entry for each day and some comments after the conference about my impressions and what I learned. My first few posts will be cut and pasted from the Word-based SLA Diary that I have been keeping thus far.

Thanks for reading!