The SLA Centennial Celebration DVD is made up of video highlights from the SLA 2009 Annual Conference & INFO-EXPO held in Washington, D.C., 14 - 17 June 2009.
From the INFO-EXPO Grand Opening, to a quick chat with former SLA President (1978/79), Vivian Hewett, to interviews with SLA vendors that took part in the historic celebration; this video gives you a first hand view of the excitement and energy that was SLA 2009.
You can also share the highlights with your employer to show the diversity of knowledge and networking you gained at the conference and why SLA 2010 in New Orleans is a must attend event!
All the photos taken by SLA's photographer during SLA 2009 are available for viewing and download now! These will remain posted for a limited time, so be sure to take a look and download your favorites today!
4.You’ll be brought to your main category page – click through to see the list of categories.
5.To view a category, click on it.
6.You’ll be brought to a page of thumbnails. To enlarge a thumbnail for a better view, click on the image. You can view that category “slide show” style by using the arrows at the top of the screen.
7.You can collect the images you like in a Light Box to review/download at a later time if you wish. The images in your Light Box will remain there until you remove them. To access your Light Box, click on the lightbulb icon on the top right of the screen.
8.To download images click on an image – the dialog box that appears will guide you with your choices for download.
Right next to the DTIC booth was the very busy Patent and Trademark Depository Library Program booth. There was a lot of excitement to be seen at the government booths and the PTDLP booth drew a good crowd.
Patent and Trademark Depository Library ProgramBooth, SLA 2009, Washington, DC
Interested in hearing more about PTDLP? In August of 2007, Chris Black, Patent and Trademark Depository Library Program Librarian, joined Marie Kaddell, LexisNexis Information Professional Consultant, in a discussion about the Patent and Trademark Depository Library Program. In this interview, Chris shares information about the Patent and Trademark Depository Library Program, how the PTDLP uses exhibit space at professional conferences to reach out to librarians, special products and services that they offer, how the PTDLP leverages technology to enhance their training programs, exhibit experience take-aways and more.
Listen from the player, download from the mp3 link and listen at your convenience, or grab it right off iTunes.
In the INFO-EXPO at SLA 2009 in Washington, DC, the DTIC booth was so popular every time that I walked by that the crowd spilled into the aisle. It's great to see government librarians as participants in the exhibits.
Yes, what a week! This conference, which celebrated our 100th anniversary as an organization drew 5,856 conference attendees, up 16% from last year and the most in six years. Conference attendees came from 30 countries. It was wonderful to hear a broad range of languages in the hallways and exhibit hall. Our location was also multicultural, which seemed quite fitting. The Convention Center is a few blocks away from D.C.'s Chinatown. Washington, D.C. itself has residents from around the world and their influence can been seen all around.
Our speakers came from a variety of backgrounds and locations. Retired General Colin Powell was a surprising opening keynote speaker. While most of us had likely seem him comment on foreign policy on some news broadcast, who knew that he would be such an inspirational, funny and down-to-earth speaker?! I was also very pleased to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was part of the final keynote (panel). And I'm very pleased to see that his online profile state that he "was born and raised in New York City where he was educated in the public schools clear through his graduation from the Bronx High School of Science." Yes, public education can and does produce people who have a positive impact on our view of the world. (We tend to forget that.)
For those who ventured away from the conference to see parts of D.C., they saw the impact that information has had on our world. For example, data that was turned into information, which was turned into knowledge was at the heart of our missions to the moon in the 1960s as was a tremendous drive to make it so. As Tyson noted, those inspiring dreams create a drive in each of us to contribute which causes us to learn and to participate in careers that we might not consider otherwise. What dreams do we need to inspire our young people with now?
We also had fun. What would be a conference without open houses, networking events, and group activities that provided opportunities for us to know each other better? Activities included a road trip for some to the Mets vs. Orioles baseball game in Baltimore, MD. It seemed fitting that when SLA was in Baltimore that we journeyed to D.C. for game and this year (due to the game schedule) we had to journey to Baltimore!
As has become the custom with our conferences, there is a lot of content out on the Internet about what happened. There are nearly 900 photos in Flickr that have been tagged SLA2009. Technorati currently shows nearly 90 blog posts that use the tag "sla2009", but I would think the number of blog posts should be higher than that (perhaps there are more blog posts on their way?). And there are some videos in YouTube, but they have not been consistently tagged, so it's hard to find them all at once. This year, our Twitter stream carried a ton of information -- much more than last year! Twitter is searchable, so you can find older tweets from the conference.
(Note to bloggers, etc., please tag your stuff from the conference with sla2009. BY using that tag, you conference related content becomes more findable. Thanks!)
With SLA 2009 now history, preparations are underway for the Leadership Summit in St. Louis (January 27-30, 2010) and the next annual conference in New Orleans (June 13 - 16, 2010). With the economy still fluctuating, don't wait until the last minute to talk to your management about the benefits of attending the conference. If you attended to conference this year, write a 1-2 page report for your management about what you learned and how that knowledge will help your organization. If you were unable to attend, talk to your management about what you have gleaned from the blogs, etc., and why attending in person allows you to learn more. When budget estimates are requested for 2010, be sure to include in your estimate funds for professional development. In other words, make sure that your management understands that this is important to you and to them.
Finally, below is a video that shows some of the exhibit hall. The exhibit hall (INFO-EXPO) was packed this year with companies that had exhibited before as well as some new ones to the conference.
Charles Francis, a public affairs consultant in Washington,
D.C. who founded “The Kameny Papers Project" addressed the SLA’s Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues Caucus at their annual meeting at the
2009 Annual Conference.
Mr. Francis spoke about his work with Kameny Papers Project,
an archive of letters, memorabilia, and writings of Frank Kameny. Francis
described Kameny as the “Rosa Parks” of the LGBT Rights’ movement.
Kameny, a veteran from WWII, was fired from his job in the
federal government when it was discovered he was gay. Instead of accepting the dismissal
Kameny began a letter writing campaign to administrators in the federal
government. Mr. Francis distributed copies of letters from the collection,
written by two different administrators in the federal government. The letters
were a stark contrast from language used today referring to LGBT people as “sexual
perverts not suitable for federal employment,” saying that all LGBT individuals
are “automatically a security risk” and “a disruptive factor within any
organization.”
Kameny refused to accept these letters as the final answer.
He appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. He then became an
activist and organized the first LGBT White House picketing in 1966. In the
1973 he stormed the American Psychiatric Association’s Conference and helped
motivate the association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental
disorders. Today at the age of 84 Kameny remains active in the LGBT community
and recently headlined in the Washington DC’s 2009 Capital Pride Parade. Kameny’s
papers chronicles his experiences first as an outraged dismissed employee and
later as a trailblazing activist.
The most remarkable aspect of the collection isn’t its size
(over 50,000 documents) but that the items survived. LGBT material has
historically not stood the test of time. According to Mr. Francis this could be
due to simple neglect or societal prejudice. Mr. Francis described the destruction
of the largest collection of LGBT material by Nazis in 1933, at Magnus Hirschfeld’s
library in his Institute for Sexual Research as an example of governmental
endorsed obliteration of knowledge and history. Because of the incredible loss
of knowledge and history to the LGBT community Mr. Francis sees the
preservation of LGBT material as a kind of activism.
So in 2006, when Mr. Francis first learned that Kameny still
had this material sitting in the attic of his house, he saw the importance of
this collection. Given the hostile history haunting LGBT material Mr. Francis
wasn’t sure how interested the Library of Congress would be in owning its first
openly LGBT collection. However shortly after meeting with the 20th Century
Political Historian of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Mr. Francis
received a letter of interest from the historian that read, “A comprehensive
understanding of history requires that historians, and those who read history,
see how government policies and public attitudes affected real individuals and
how individuals reacted, adjusted, and grappled with their position.”
Mr. Francis worked with a professional appraiser to
ascertain the value of the collection. The problem however was that at the time
there were no other LGBT archival materials to compare the collection to for appraisal.
Once a value was agreed upon funds were raised via private donors to purchase
Kameny’s material and donate it to the Library of Congress. The Library of
Congress spent over a year and half indexing the collection and today the
material is available to the public in the Library’s manuscript reading room.
Mr. Francis finished his presentation by recalling a meeting
he had with Harry Rubenstein, the head of the Politics and Reform section of
the National Museum of American History. Mr. Rubenstein showed Mr. Francis that
the picket signs Kameny used at his White House protest were housed with Thomas
Jefferson’s lap desk and the inkwell Lincoln penned the Emancipation Proclamation
with. What the curator was telling Mr. Francis was that “the gay and lesbian
papers and pickets do not exist in a world apart from the American story; they
actually embody and renew America’s story.”
Doris S. Helfer (right), advocated the need to ensure that library disasters don't become catastrophes at the panel on "Preparedness for Info Pros: Lessons Learned from Recent Disasters," organized by the Museums, Arts, and Humanities Division. The other speakers on the panel were Alfred E Lemmon and Cynthia B. Love.
Slides:
* Doris S. Helfer (ppt) * Alfred E Lemmon (ppt) * Cynthia B. Love (ppt)
Congratulations to Ann Sweeney, 2009 recipient of the Social Science Division's Gale Group Murray Wortzel Award. The award was presented at the International Reception at the Zambian Embassy - a fitting location as Ann is the organizer of the reception and chair of the Social Science Division's International Relations Section.
The award was established by the Social Science Division to honor the memory of Murray Wortzel, a long-time member of the division whose dedication and commitment to both the division and SLA exemplify the consummate information professional, and is given at the annual conference every other year.
I have been thinking about how I am participating in this conference and how that is different from years past. In 1992 at my first SLA conference, I diligently went to as many sessions as possible. My goal was to learn, learn, learn and ensure that I returned back to my place of work with valuable information. For several years, my modus operandi was to soak up what others were providing during their sessions and visit as many exhibitor booths as possible. If my days went completely full, then I had failed.
In more recent years, I have continued to soak up information. My days are still full, but not always because I'm attending every session possible. Instead this "soaking up" occurs in a manageable number of sessions and during networking events (open houses) and committee meetings. I am also now in a position to give back by giving workshops and presentations. I'm among a wonderful group of people who are providing content that others need.
How are you participating in this conference? Are you soaking up as much information as possible? Are you now at a stage in your career where you can provide information, tips-and-techniques, and lessons learned to others? Perhaps you're doing a bit of both? Knowing that answer can help you as you plan your days.
By the way, if you are here just soaking in as much stuff as possible, know that one year you'll also find yourself providing content to an audience that cares about your viewpoint and knowledge. I hope I'm in the audience for your debut!
Welcome to the SLA Blog! This site will bring you useful information about the global information profession and about SLA.
Oral History Project
The "Voices of SLA: an International Oral History" is an initiative
of the Fellows of SLA in partnership with the SLA Centennial Commission. To
learn more or to volunteer and/or to offer suggestions, go
here.
