Fountain of Knowledge

Jessie is at the Art Institute today. This is the view from the front of the Conference Center out to the Lake. 

My 8a session was on Taxonomy Design. I thought I was going to learn something about creating a taxonomy. I was disappointed to learn that he was not going to address creating taxonomies, rather he was talking about designing a taxonomy project. But (I mean AND) my disappointment disappeared because what he gave was an excellent talk on project management. He gave me lots of ideas for organizing the EndNote project. I took more notes about my ideas than about what he described, but (oops, AND) it was a good session. I learned what a Swim Lane Plan was and also what a RACI Plan was and they may prove useful herding our particular group of cats.

The next session was Guy St. Claire talking Knowledge Management. It started at 10a. After about 20 minutes, I slipped out to a 10:30a session on 60 Sites in 60 Minutes. Mr. St. Claire's talk sounded more like a cheer-leading session than something informational and I think I made the better choice. The speakers went through 60 online tools, all of which were very interesting, a few of which may be really useful to us personally and professionally. KLOUT tracks and evaluates your web presence on social media. If COMMS isn't using something like this, they make like to know about it. TEKSERV buys and resells Apple Products (this one is for the kids and their old iPods or new toys they'd like to buy). KNOEMA is a dataset site we need to explore. The AARP Bookstore has lots of Wiley books (including the Dummies series) for free check out. STILLNESSBUDDY provides stress relief at the computer. And EUTOPIC archives web links and screen captures for future reference. I currently use Delicious, but this one sounds like it holds more  types of information and may be more sophisticated.

I do wish Julia were here to help me discern what is really useful to us in terms of the vendor booths. I don't want to bring home a lot of junk, but don't want to miss something really useful. I have been to the NLM booth and praised their PubMed training we just took and got a list of their mobile apps. I went by WTCox and thanked them for their good service. But I'm not seeing a lot of new stuff (which I hope means we really are on top of things). I did pick up a brochure on an elegant table top scanner for digitizing documents with some sophisticated software for archiving. 

I also talked with the Freepint.com folks who "publish practical articles and reports about information practice, content and strategy".  There is some free content on their site that may indicate how useful the subscription might be. I also spoke with a women from Eastview.com. These folks aggregate statistics and also obtain in-country publications and government documents for countries ranging from Eastern Europe through the Middle East, Asia and North Africa. She's to send me some links.

I skipped my session on the history of Chicago, having had the boat tour. Headed back shortly for a 4p session on Web-Scale Discovery Implementation with the End User in Mind. I can't wait ;-)