Monday, June 12, 2006

SLA2006: The Exhibitors

Also posted in the SLA conference blog.

There are 305 exhibitors this year with 72 new exhibitors, all with a total of 482 booths. This is the largest exhibit hall in 10 years!

I'll post information on the Exhibit Hall later (maybe much later), but want to point out that there are several companies exhibiting that provide digitization-related services. To find them, look at the list of exhibitors in the conference program under several categories including:

  • Cataloging
  • Categorization
  • Content Conversion
  • Data Conversion
  • Digital Archiving Solutions
  • Digital Systems

This morning I went to the OCLC update as well as a presentation by CSA on MultiSearch (a federated search product). What stood out to me about OCLC is how large it has become. OCLC has members (or was that presence?) in 109 countries; 54,400 libraries in total. CONTENTdm -- which is of interest to me -- is used by 300 libraries and contains 5 million objects. OCLC's PowerPoint from this morning is not online, which is a shame. It was packed full of info and too much to try to write down. [Addendum, Sept. 8, 2006: The presentation from the OCLC update is indeed online here. The PPT is quite large -- 11.5 MB]

BTW OCLC is going to release an open WorldCat later in the summer at WorldCAT.org.

As for MultiSearch...this seems like a federated search option worth investigating. I'm sure that each federated search option has its pros and cons...so defining requirements and reviewing as many options as possible is something libraries will need to do before making a decision.


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