The Special Librarians Association annual conference, this year in Baltimore - the city made famous by the song "Good Morning Baltimore" in Hairspray - comes to an end today on a high note.
SLA ceo Janice Lachance said attendance, at 5,551, was "a few hundred more" than last year in Toronto. Lachance, who has renewed her contract and will be continuing in post for three and a half years, has also launched a personal blog during the show.
The SLA is planning to aggressively enhance its international outreach over coming years, said Lachance, a fact which might worry established UK professional associations Cilip and Aslib.
Blogging seems to have been a major theme of the show. The SLA created its own multi-contributor conference blog (using Typepad technology, as the IWR Blog does) which covered lots of events from many angles, and gave good competition to Information Today, whose blog of the show was also useful for those who couldn't make it to the US.
The 5-strong ITI team on the Information Today Blog, led by Dick Kaser, VP of Content, did do all heavy-duty "walking the floors" blogging which focuses on the commercial aspects of the show.
One has to wonder, with so many blogs being launched these days, if the blogging phenomenon is passing its peak. Are we in danger of thousands of voices drowning each other out, and nobody listening? Certainly finding ways of evaluating blogs so that there are mechanisms for the very best to bubble to the top is surely the next phenomenon to emerge.
In this respect, we were glad to come across the PubSub list of Library Blogs, which ranks hundreds of blog sites for librarians. The top 10 listed when we looked were:
1 ResourceShelf
2 Infothought
3 A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette
4 beSpacific
5 panlibus
6 Catalogablog
7 Unshelved
8 LISNews.com
9 Library Boy
10 The Laughing Librarian
This is a dynamic service, so expect that to change on a regular basis, and - one word of warning - as these lists are partly based on linkages, they don't necessarily accurately reflect quality or a peer review process. Now there's a thought - a blogging peer review system. Anyone up to do that?
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