On the road again: a busy month for our US library team
IngentaConnect's library services team has been on the road this month, promoting the site and its content - your content - to attendees at the Annual Meetings of the Special Libraries Association and the American Library Association.
The former was held in lovely Baltimore, MD in mid-June. Delegates at this show tend towards the corporate, but there was a higher than usual turnout of academic librarians this year. The conference incorporated a diverse range of speakers; highlights included the ever-popular Mary Ellen Bates, who provided real food for thought with some suggested ways in which libraries could add value to maintain their role, and Hershey scientists Debra Miller and Dave Stuart, on 'The Science of Chocolate'. Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg spoke persuasively in his Keynote about future perceptions of the internet; he certainly knew how to win over his audience (reference to the US's "insanely bad copyright system" prompted a burst of applause!). The exhibit hall was busy - traffic to the Ingenta booth was up on previous years, with several existing and potential customers checking in to find out more about the services and content we offer. Librarians were delighted to hear about the forthcoming addition of Haworth journals to IngentaConnect, and generally expressed real enthusiasm for the extent and breadth of content that the site offers - "you've saved my life on many an occasion!", commented one visitor to the booth, referring (we assume) to the fact that we can facilitate immediate access to more than 20 million articles. Maybe it's time we ordered some more of the Ingenta Lifesavers that proved so popular when we gave them away at library shows a few years back!
Barely had the library team had a chance to draw breath before they set off to ALA in New Orleans. The conference was the first major event to be held in the city since so much of it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina last fall, and local delegates expressed heartfelt gratitude to ALA and its attendees for their presence, and for the work they carried out around the city in two volunteer days coordinated by the Association. Nonetheless, attendance was down about a third on previous ALA Annual meetings, and traffic around the exhibits hall was lighter as a result. Our subscription agent program was of particular interest to the primarily academic delegates, and our relatively-new library product IngentaConnect Complete was given the thumbs-up by those of its customers in attendance. The "Only Connect!" balloons, produced to celebrate and promote IngentaConnect's 10,000th e-publication, were predictably popular with visitors! Speakers at the meeting included Madeleine Albright, whose speech was both engaging and amusing, albeit less well-targeted than that of Walt Mossberg at SLA. OCLC's Cathy de Rosa and John Horrigan of the Pew Internet & American Life Project presented an insightful session entitled "We are here. Where are our users?", a further tapping of the most common theme at both conferences: how libraries can exploit the web to provide valuable services to a new generation of users.