SLA 2009 Preview : Christina's LIS Rant

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Christina K. Pikas is a science and engineering librarian in a special library as well as a doctoral student in information studies.
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SLA 2009 Preview

Category: Conferences • librarians
Posted on: June 7, 2009 8:40 AM, by Christina Pikas

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 study something or just think about things. You come back from CIL and you want to 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” (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 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.