SLA 2010: The Good Times Really Rolled!

Hi, Sean Henry, your 2010 SLA Maryland Chapter President reporting in!

My, how time flies by: I hope all of you had a Happy Fourth of July early last week! Yep, this report from SLA 2010 (June 13-16) is very belated, but I’ve been working on it a while…

Although I originally hail from the Deep South, SLA 2010 marked my very first time in New Orleans, and, wow, had I been missing a lot!  The conference experience was reinvigorating both personally and professionally, and I enjoyed my adventurous 1100-mile-drive down there, getting sunburned through my car’s open sunroof along the way!  Driving through Alabama was especially pleasant.  Below are my impressions of SLA 2010 plus restaurant recommendations!

Leadership Institute

The conference officially started bright and early on Sunday, June 13 with the SLA Leadership Development Institute (LDI). SLA President Anne Caputo, a Maryland Chapter member, addressed the ongoing Alignment Project as an initiative to sustain our profession and association through current and ongoing information revolutions.

Anne urged us as members to remember that the Alignment Project is a member-oriented initiative. It’s about sustaining our profession and the Association through the ongoing and evolving information revolution with powerful language and strategies based on research data to help us position ourselves in our careers. Last year’s name change proposal was just a tiny piece of the larger Project, Anne urged us as members to go back and read the Alignment research thoroughly, and apply the tools we find there when seeking positions, writing resumes, defending our ROIs, or asserting our value across and within our organizations.

As a follow-up, Maryellen Bates (who will be our keynote speaker at Xtreme Reference in October!) reported on behalf of the Alignment Toolkit Task Force. She described the new toolkit being developed as "the love child of the Alignment Project and 23 Things." It will consist of 23 new tools that focus on providing value to users based on what  they say they want from us, including:

• Providing insights and identifying new trends

• Facilitating good decision-making

• Offering expert analysis

• Creating competitive advantage

• Giving value-added intelligence.

If you’d like to peek at these tools as they are being developed, visit the Alignment wiki  and please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas!
Also during the LDI, we got sage advice about vendor sponsorship and marketing tips from our own Chapter Past-President Chris Olson, along with Dee Magnoni from the Boston Chapter. Both stressed that it is necessary to be familiar with vendors' budget cycles and the three “buckets” to which vendors must allocate their resources:

• The new product pipeline

• keeping current customers up-to-date and happy

• communications through advertising, sponsorships and tradeshows

Thanks to Chris, Our Chapter Sponsor Relations Chair Pat Sproehnle, and many dedicated Chapter members (several who were in New Orleans on the INFO-EXPO floor inviting exhibitors to participate in helping sponsor programs and events!), we maintain healthy vendor relationships, which is extremely important during these challenging economic times.

Keynote Address

On Sunday evening at the General Opening Session, we enjoyed the keynote address by the husband-wife team of James Carville and Mary Matalin, residents of New Orleans who have been very outspoken in the media regarding the BP disaster.

Armed with speaking points about the evolution of information, they both touched upon their understanding of the issue. Matalin asserted that relevance and clarity are dictates of information use and that information out of order is useless and irrelevant without a system. Carville touched on many things including the unhealthy habit of looking up information to support opinions rather than to get at the truth, using this catchy metaphor: “People use information the same way a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination!”

Chapter Cabinet and Joint Cabinet Meetings

Chapter President-Elect Ashley Conaway and I attended the Cabinet sessions as your representatives to receive news and conduct business.  First, we meet with the Chapter Cabinet on chapter-related business, and then we convene with the SLA Division Cabinet to discuss items of interest to all SLA units. The business agenda was a little light this year, but here are some highlights:

• First some sobering economic news: SLA Treasurer Dan Trefethen reported that it has not been a good year financially: All revenue numbers have come in less than expected; The Association has reduced salaried headquarter staffing by 30% and has cut back as much as it can without impacting major services; The Board of Directors are examining the Association’s structure to find ways to creatively cut costs; In the meantime, the Board has empowered CEO Janice LaChance to take out credit against investments due to a current shortage in cash flow.

• AN SLA Chapter Code of Ethics is (finally!) in development, and a draft will be circulated to chapter leaders in the next few weeks.

• In the next couple of months, the Association may implement a powerful, new open-source (no-cost) content management tool available for all the SLA unit websites. This will make maintaining and updating our Chapter website much easier. Plus, we’ll be able to add more dynamic features, and maybe a value-added “members only” section.

• The Boston Chapter - the oldest SLA Chapter – will celebrate its centenary on September 28!

Near the end of the Joint Cabinet Meeting Cabinet,  SLA President-Elect Cindy Romaine moderated a panel discussion featuring  SLA Board candidates for Chapter Cabinet Chair-Elect (James Manasco and Ulla de Stricker), and Division Chair-Elect (Scott Brown and Richard Huffine). The toughest question Cindy posed was “What should the SLA let go of in the changing landscape of information professionals to better serve members?” I especially liked Huffine’s frank response that the SLA should give up having a solo annual conference, but co-host it instead with other related associations. Given the low conference turnout this year and several cancelled CE sessions, that might not be a bad idea. Remember that the SLA Board Elections begin September 8! Check the candidate's positions here.

Tech Zones, Spotlights, and Ticketed Sessions:

Despite several CE cancellations, there was still a very wide palate of awesome opportunities to hone professional skills and gather fresh perspectives.  As an Academic Division member, I enjoyed the spotlight session: “Tenure: How to Get It and What it Does For You.” I just survived the stressful tenure process earlier this year, and I must say there was a lot of sage advice given at this session!
A ticketed Tech Zone session I attended was entitled “Monitoring Tweets to Compete” hosted by Dow Jones. I learned a lot about how to follow the pulse of competitive intelligence via Twitter, plus extremely helpful tips about how to organize my Tweets into lists, and keep up with multiple feeds via TweetDeck, Wow!!  I also discovered an application to automatically add SLA tweets to our SLA Maryland Page on Facebook.

Closing Session:
Oops, I missed this due to a mix-up with my hotel reservations (my fault) that necessitated me to leave a little early. Still, I leave you here with the “Mad Librarian’s” link to Janice LaChance’s closing remarks (audio). Plus, check out Jill Hurst-Wahl’s conference notes at her Digitization 101 blog.

There is no way to candy-coat it: Attendance at SLA 2010 was far down this year. Only 3469 in total attendance this year compared to 5856 in 2009. However. Our SLA presence for one week in June contributed five million badly needed dollars to the New Orleans’s economy. Thanks to all who came!
For the first time, we had a virtual world component at the Conference for the general sessions and spotlight sessions – 101 attended these sessions online.  I think this may become a viable conference option for several of us in the future!

“Future Ready” in 2011

The 2011 Conference will be in Philadelphia (June 12-15), where the programs, sessions and panels will explore the theme of “Future Ready” in the context of three areas: driving innovation, building collaboration and adding value. The keynote speaker for the opening session will be the famous journalist and author Thomas L. Friedman. He should draw a crowd! Philadelphia is a lot closer to home than New Orleans, so I hope to see a lot of you there. Mark your calendars!

List of New Orleans Restaurants I enjoyed

I can’t end a report from New Orleans without mentioning some of the great places where I ate!

• Irene’s Cuisine:  I enjoyed mushroom caps with escargot as an appetizer, a goat cheese salad, and veal lasagna, along with a half bottle of white wine and a glass of grappa as digestif – no room for dessert! Although restaurant was packed, I have never been in a restaurant or any other place of business where customer service was better.

• Chartres House Café: I stopped in here for a Monday lunch on a whim, where I had my first crawfish po’boy, which was a mixed experience: I find that eating breaded fish served on bread to be quite redundant!

• Tujaques: The SLA GLBT Caucus enjoyed out annual dinner here at New Orleans’s second oldest restaurant. I had shrimp and pasta in a citrus cream source for my entrée. Delicious!

• Royal House Oyster Bar: My last and most surprising stop for a quick lunch before leaving New Orleans: I sat at the counter and dined on Oysters Rockefeller with white wine and Key lime pie for dessert – This is one of the first places I’ll seek out when I return to New Orleans!

The good times really rolled at SLA 2010, despite some dampening financial news. Check out the July 1 press release. As always it was a great time to connect with colleagues and learn in a stimulating atmosphere!

Comments

[Ashley Conaway]

Thanks for sharing! I wonder if any MD Chapter members joined in on the Virtual Conference. I'd love to hear about someone's experience with that.