SLA Leadership Summit January 18, 2006

My day at the Summit started this afternoon at the open session of the Board of Directors Meeting. Nothing earth-shaking here (except for Dav Robertson's report of the Natural Disasters Task Force, which included some information on an SLA member library was destroyed by the Kashmir earthquake last fall - see the IPANDANET blog for details). Other reports included brief updates by the Baltimore and Denver program planning chairs, the acceptance of the 2004 SLA Audit report, a report on the SLA Board succession process (as SLA transitions to a January-December calendar), and a report by the Research Now Task Force. The Board meeting is scheduled to continue on Saturday.

I then attended the SLA Baltimore planning session. SLA expects this conference to be as big or bigger than Toronto, both in terms of number of attendees and in the number of sessions (13% more sessions). I also had time to verify a few details with other conference planners on some of the sessions we are cosponsoring. The Maryland chapter is working on a updating their Baltimore 2006 website with more information for Baltimore conference attendees, and has a blog they will be using to post more information for Baltimore attendees.

Finally, I attended the Denver conference planning session (while PAM Chair-Elect Joe Kraus is our official planner for the conference, I hope to share of the lessons learned I've made during the Baltimore planning). This conference should be interesting - I heard some interesting ideas being floated by the various science divisions, including sessions on avalanches, nanotechnology, open access (a perennial favorite) and I heard something about beer (I believe they want to take advantage of some of the 80 different beers brewed in the Mile Hile City). The Denver conference is June 3-6, 2007.