The Scoop

This year’s Special Libraries Association conference was, as usual, a great experience. Lots of good sessions from the News Division and other divisions. Some of my highlights, in dump mode:

• A session on controlled vocabularies in art museums featuring folks from the Getty in Los Angeles. Turns out they have several datasets that might be interesting to check out.
• Lots of emphasis on digital preservation and archiving, including a session on the MetaArchive Cooperative. Seems like a similar effort should be underway for smaller newspapers who may not be fully capable of providing a failsafe repository for their content. Maybe something that an institution like Missouri or Stanford (which develops the software used for this) could take the lead on.
• A good intro on visualization techniques from Dennie Heye, and I hope that more such sessions are on the table for next year’s conference.
• Things wrapped up with an interesting session on the future of news libraries, which deserves a lot more discussion and dissection from the News Division. I’ll have more to say on this later, rest assured.