My time was limited at this year’s conference and I wanted spend time at the exhibits (I’m back in my office already). That meant missing the excellent programs put on by the legal division (ok, I might be a little biased since I was part of the program committee). I did hear feedback along with comments (e.g., You missed a great program!) as I networked with other attendees. The programs that I heard raves about from those who attended that I plan to purchase if recordings are available include:
60 Gadgets in 60 Minutes - I have to admit that I’ve never attended this program that is put on from year to year. I will also admit that I have way to many gadgets in my life already and enough clutter in my mind from dealing with those that I am a bit afraid to learn about others that I will want to buy. That aside, what I heard from others was that this program was thoroughly entertaining while being informative as well. I might have to face my fears and attend next year.
Ethical Competitive Intelligence - This program focused on how to be ethical while doing competitive intelligence. The comments I heard were that the speaker, Richard Horowitz, was great and the information gleaned from the program was that it was a very clear message about how to conduct a CI search and feel like you haven’t sold your soul when you’re done.
Information Professional: The New Private Investigator- Howard Trivers (Baker & Daniels) presented this program on how to find people, public records and criminal information to a standing room only crowd of over 200. The reports I heard said that the program was a thorough review of the resources available for this kind of research and how to use them.
The Impact of Globalization of Capital on Law Librarians- After meeting with the speakers (Saule Omarova, UNC Chapel Hill School of Law and Geraldine Clement-Stoneham, Linklaters) the night before the presentation, Nola Vanhoy, Alston & Bird (the program’s moderator and current SLA Legal Division Chair) told me that the program was going to be phenomenal! The next afternoon, an attendee of the program told me that the program was phenomenal! The speakers really delivered on the promise of the program’s description:
For several years, the financial press has been carrying articles predicting a shift of the pre-eminence of New York as the world’s financial capital to London and some say eventually Tokyo. Is this the fall-out from Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, the rise of the AIM as an exchange or is it just the realities of a globalization of capital? This session will feature panelists who can speak to this shift of financial transactions into the global marketplace and its impact on U.S. and International law firms on their library resources and librarians.
The programs that I didn’t hear about or that happened after I left included:
- Emerging Technologies Breakfast - Enterprise 2.0
- Web Tools for Legal Researchers - Web 2.0
- If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Tales from the Dark Side - Librarians who have worked on both sides of the great divide between vendors and those librarians in law firms.
- Knowledge Management Staffing Structures in Law Firms - Discussion of KM staffing (org charts, position titles and descriptions, compensation and more).
- Tax and Corporate Specialized Roundtable and Breakfast - this annual event focused on the off-shoring of tax librarian research/work.
Everyone I talked to felt the conference to date (as of yesterday afternoon) was well worth attending. I know that the time I spent networking, attending CE’s, and visiting exhibitors was well worth my time. The handouts for programs were made available on the web. Unfortunately, none of the speakers for the legal division uploaded theirs. Hopefully, that will be rectified after the conference. Also, last year the association selected presentations to highlight by posting the recording and slides on the web. I hope that happens as well. For now you can go to the http://www.infotodayblog.com/ to learn more about some of the programs.
I moderated a SLA Legal Divisionsponsored CE at the SLA Conference (currently happening in Seattle) called “What Do You Do After You Log Off” presented by Mary Ellen Bates, consultant and author of Library of Fortune. Mary Ellen’s presentations are always thought provoking and extremely useful at the same time. I’ve never come away from any of them without learning about important research tools and tips. This program was no different.
Without trying to cover the 4 hour program, I thought I would highlight some of the ideas and resources she talked about for use in packaging and delivering information as well as sources for producing statistics that go beyond what we have traditionally delivered to our library users.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good enough” - Here Mary Ellen talked about the need we all have as librarians to provide the perfect answer while the reality is that we may not have those types of expectations from our users and we most often don’t have the time to do it either.
BlogPulse.com - This is a tool for creating trend results of subjects that have been written about in blogs over time. You can search on a topic or the name of your company, firm, client, prospect, etc. and see the trend results for the last 2, 4, or six months in a chart format. It has other features to check out as well. Click on the following image to see the amount of times Target Corp was blogged about during the last 2 months.
Google Trends- This trend analysis tool will tell you what people are searching on over time. You can also compare search terms over time as well. This goes back farther than BlogPulse. You can search for trends in searching from January 2004. You can also limit by region/country or by year. Here again you could use this to search topics, companies, industries, etc. Click on the following screen-shot to see the trends for “competitive intelligence” shown with a chart and the top 10 in regions, cities and languages.
Furl.net - This is a social networking site that has tons of features. Mary Ellen demonstrated it as a tool that you can use to save urls for resources that you discovered while researching a topic. Once saved, you can share with others, produce a citation list, etc. No more copy and pasting into a report to send to your client. I haven’t had time to explore it myself, but it looks like a great resource for managing and delivering research results worth sharing.
This is only a minuscule part of what Mary Ellen presented. Definitely 4 hours that were worth it. As she does repeat this program at various venues, I would recommend attendance you you have a chance.
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