Final Day at the 100th Annual SLA Conference

My four days at the 100th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association/SLA, in Washington, D.C are over. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I met many new people, reconnected with old friends and colleagues – including a number I had worked with during my 21 years at USA TODAY – and saw many of my former students, including two from the first class I taught, in 1996.  Nearly 6,000 information professionals from around the world attended, a 16% increase over last year’s conference; quite an accomplishment in this economy. The information sessions I attended were very good, and the INFO-EXPO hall had many interesting vendors. It was a great way to learn not only about new products and services, but to find out about information products and services from a wide variety of large and small organizations through quick demos and talking with people working at the booths. A conference of this size would not be possible without vendors’ financial participation.  Check out more about the conference – either if you didn’t attend, or if you attended but want to find out what you missed, since there were so many things going on simultaneously – at these blogs: SLA blog, Infotoday blog (from the editors of Information Today) and Stephen’s Lighthouse, the regular blog of information world luminary Stephen Abram. There are handouts from the conference on the SLA site, which I found through Gary Price’s ever-helpful Resource Shelf.  Next year’s SLA Annual Conference will be held June 13-16, 2010 in New Orleans. I’ll resume blogging in a few days, so I can concentrate on a two-day Berrett-Koehler Authors Cooperative marketing workshop, starting Thursday and hosted by ASTD, the American Society of Training & Development, in Alexandria, Va.