One of the main reasons I go to SLA is to catch up on what all of the journals, databases, and research tool providers are up to. Sometimes they save the big announcements for ALA and sometimes they make them at SLA.
Other years I've spent a ton of time at the exhibits, but this year it was a bit truncated. I also didn't go to any breakfasts (even free food doesn't get me into downtown DC at 7am!) and only a couple of other things put on by the vendors.
Here are a few things that I remember:
- Springer's bringing out an image database which seems to combine some medical image database they purchased with images pulled from their journal articles. From what they said, it doesn't seem to have any additional indexing like Illustrata or Biotext. They're also finally (finally!) redoing Springerlink so you can find stuff on it, but we'll see.
- IOP is going to have no price increases if you go e-only and like 4% if you take the text - this is new because they hadn't unbundled
- IEEE Xplore will now offer some AIP published journals from the Vacuum Society - apparently these aren't available to you if you currently get them on AIP's platform (?)
- Chatted with AGU - still no hope of getting EOS online for institutions (aw, come on)
- SPIE is rolling back prices for next year (I always did like them!)
- RefWorks talked about RefMobile and the new RefGrabit - but I already knew about those
- Jane's has some new intelligence centers (or centres)
- IET/Inspec has a social bookmarking tool (join the crowd!)
- Dialog's trying to be more integrated with their new parent - they've picked up the communications a bit and it looks like you can get a special deal to search databases on there that you have a separate site license to. You'd want to do this to de-duplicate your search results or if your site license doesn't allow the powerful searching you need.
- SIAM's coming out with some ebooks
It was nice to see so many government agencies including: EPA, DTIC, NOAA, NTIS, NLM, CENDI, LOC, DOE/OSTI, ERIC, Patent & Trademark Depository Library Program, and the Census Bureau
I was hanging out with Randy for a few minutes and he wanted to go to Bentham and ask if they had a statement (or defense) and they didn't.
Update: I forgot CRC Press - they're finally updating that poor tired interface and information architecture that is EngNetBase (yay!)