FreePint's SLA Recap
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

As always at professional gatherings, SLA attendees took full advantage of the opportunity to share ideas, ask questions of one another, and learn about emerging areas of information work.

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One of the highlights of my trip to San Diego for SLA's Annual Conference was the pleasure of meeting (finally!) with a couple of FreePint authors I'd been working with all year, as well as chatting with long-time customers.

Exhibits were smaller this year and far more specialised: I counted quite a number of vendors focused on biotech and pharma, which stuck out to me as distinct from previous years. As always, the exhibit hall provided plenty of fodder for product reviews: Watch for FreePint's in-depth coverage of Leadership Companies Premium, InfoNgen, ALM Legal Intelligence and more.

One of the biggest news items was the long-awaited customer migration from Dialog to ProQuest Dialog. I had a chance to sit down with the leadership team for ProQuest Dialog and hear the details. While readying the article for publication, I was surprised to see that we'd started writing about this migration over two years ago! It's been a huge project and is a testament to the patience and creativity of both ProQuest and its customers.

As always at professional gatherings, SLA attendees took full advantage of the opportunity to share ideas, ask questions of one another, and learn about emerging areas of information work, such as big data. 

I presented at a breakfast session to a very engaged group of corporate information centre managers some of the insights gathered through the FreePint Series: Big Data in Action, with particular focus on the real-world examples offered in our webinar. If you missed the webinar, check out series producer Victor Camlek's summary. You can also request access to the video recording of this and other FreePint Webinars to catch up on areas of interest.

Recent FreePint Articles from Yulia Aspinall on how to use Prezi and Cindy Elliott on using grey literature for in-depth research would have fit right in with SLA's overall agenda of best practices, learning new tools and deepening the value of information work. The FreePint Report: Research in Non-Text Sources features an introductory editorial from Jan Knight. The report explores resources which exist outside the traditional publishing model - from infographics and online presentations to grey literature.

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