TCL Goes to Washington

(Loads of info, including a spreadsheet of titles covered available at: http://www.scopus.com/)

This session was held at the Elsevier exhibit booth on Sunday morning.  If you’ve ever been to ALA you know how these things go; it’s the smiley, glamorous sales force with giveaways and sometimes food!  (I wore a Scopus button for 2 days hoping to get tagged for a free iPod, but suspect the I’m-from-the-University-of-South-Carolina-where-we-have-WOS on my nametag lowered my chance to be *randomly* selected.)

Anyway, this “users forum” was led by 2 librarians - Kimberly Hill, Associate Librarian, Technology Initiatives, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (formerly employed by - ahem - Scopus) and Stephanie Willen Brown, Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Connecticut Libraries.  (more…)

 I was initially excited to attend this session since it was being moderated by Andrew Pace, (ALA columnist and Head of Information Technology, NCSU.)  The session was, unfortunately, held on the “reading stage” in back of the Exhibit hall.  It was extremely crowded with folks spilling out into traffic aisles and sprawled on the floor.  The ambiance of the hall made it difficult to hear.  Nonetheless, I persevered for some time but bolted before concluding remarks.  Marshall Breeding, Director, Innovative Technologies and Research (a title to die for, eh?) Vanderbilt University co-chaired the session.  The program was advertised as conversation “from a vendor perspective,” so I should’ve been prepared for the corporateness, but I was hoping for less pitch.  The panel of vendors were OCLC, III, ExLibris, Sirsi Dynix, and MediaLab (the AquaBrowser folks) http://www.medialab.nl/, TLC http://www.tlcdelivers.com/tlc/default.asp, and Talis http://www.talis.com/. The moderators did a good job of keeping the panelists on their toes - none of the questions were pre-scripted or distributed in advance.  This made for some interesting discussion and some not-so-interesting thinking on their feet.  My note-taking was the least effective at this venue, but here are a few highlights:  discussion on prioritizing technology expenditures, debate on the merits of open source; the advantages of hosted software (imagine an III world where they host all of their customers’ apps and do all of the upgrades/updates/patches), OPACs vs. products like AquaBrowser.

This session was presented by LAMA and co-sponsored by RUSA.  The panelists included an architect, an audiovisual executive/geek, an academic director, AND a librarian… (more…)

This program focused on the expanding (and especially polarized) blogosphere and questioned whether the content of political blogs can be trusted.  Many bloggers have an activist agenda and include/exclude, omit, expand, synthesize, and otherwise handpick “aspects” of a story, news item, etc. to promote a cause.  Speaker was founder of “The Plank,” political blog for “The New Republic.”  The blogger from “The Nation” was scheduled to speak, but didn’t make it to the packed room before I had to pick myself up from my perch on the floor and exit.