ALCTS, a division of ALA, is hosting a series of ongoing electronic discussions of interest to the library community. You’re invited to join in. There’s no cost and you don’t even need to be an ALA member. And, the February 2009 topic includes federated search.

ALCTS is the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services. The ALCTS About page describes the organization:

Comprised of nearly 5,000 members from across the United States and 42 countries from around the globe, ALCTS is the premier resource for information specialists in collection development, preservation, and technical services. We are the leader in the development of principles, standards, and best practices for creating, collecting, organizing, delivering, and preserving information resources in all forms.

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The ALA 2008 Annual Conference is fast approaching. This year it’ll be in Anaheim. The conference starts next Thursday (June 26th) and goes through July 2nd. Like in the very recent SLA 2008 Conference, I couldn’t find presentations that would be of particular interest to the federated search community. Federated search vendors, though, are better represented in the exhibitor booths:

• Auto-Graphics, Inc. (Booth #1366)
• CARE Affiliates (Booth #466)
• Ex Libris (Booth #1694)
• Serials Solutions (Booth #1652)
• TDNet (Booth #1333)
• U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientific & Technical Information (OSTI) (Booth #2471)

Note that Deep Web Technologies will be co-exhibiting with OSTI.

Update 6/23/08: Please see Peter Noerr’s comment on this blog post for vendors I missed.

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The ALA Midwinter Meeting starts January 11. Aside from the presentations I wrote about earlier a number of federated search vendors are exhibiting at the conference, and some of these vendors are announcing new product launches, giving talks and demonstrating their products. Here are some links to vendor information about their involvement with the conference:

If you know of others let me know and I’ll add an update to this post.

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The 2008 Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association is from January 11-16, including exhibits from January 11-14. Visit the event homepage for more information.

Of interest to those wanting to learn more about federated search is this presentation on the exhibit floor on January 14.

Index Data
10:40 – 11:10 am
OPENing Up Metasearching
This presentation opens for inspection the black box of metasearching, explaining the role of software, database connectors, metadata, and content, and showing how metasearching becomes more functional and less expensive as these elements become “open.” Achieving openness requires partnerships among libraries, metasearch vendors, content providers and grant funding agencies. A drawing for a six month free subscription to MasterKey accessing up to 20 standards-compliant databases will be held at the end of the presentation.

Also, of potential interest to the federated search community, is this presentation the same day, also on the exhibit floor. It’s not clear if this talk is about federated search just because Serial Solutions is in the business.

Serials Solutions
12:40 – 1:10 pm
Increase Your ROI: Optimizing E-resource
Discover how you can use e-resource access and management services to yield a high return on your e-resource investment and maximize staff resources. By taking advantage of today’s technology and contemporary library tools you can streamline e-resource access and management for the benefit of patrons and fellow librarians, and then dedicate more internal resources for e-resource assessment. We will focus specifically on the use of solutions that focus on interoperability, integration, SaaS technology (software as a service), and a single, vendor-updated knowledgebase.

You can read about other exhibits at the exhibits page.

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