[Sigsti-l] Trisociety Symposium a success!

[K.T. Vaughan]

Hi all  -

This serves as a report from the Trisociety Symposium in Los Angeles last
week.  The Symposium is a sponsored by the chemical information bodies in
SLA, ACS, and ASIST (that would be SIG/STI). This year it was hosted at the
SLA conference.  There were between 75 and 100 people attending each of the
ten talks.  I think we could have attracted more people had the individual
talks been listed in the conference schedule, rather than the symposium as a
whole.   However, my real concern is that ONLY TWO were from ASIST
(according to a "raise your hands" survey taken in the afternoon)!  Ack!

One interesting point made during the course of the day was the difference
in attitude between academic libraries and commercial database providers
(including CAS, Thieme, and MDL Information Systems) when it comes to the
current state of libraries and the online world.  David Stern, Tina
Chrzastowski, Emily Poworoznek, Ben Wagner, and I discussed the effects and
outcomes of the push to online services - and then the vendors talked about
what some of those services could be (and, in some cases, are).

Selected papers from the symposium will be appearing in a forthcoming issue
of JASIST.

The next Trisociety Symposium is planned for the fall of 2006.  It will be
"our turn" to host the symposium.  Please send me comments and questions if
you have any - in particular I am interested in why people did not go to the
one this year (lack of interest?  too far to travel?  outside our scope?
conflict with other conferences/events?).  We make a financial commitment in
addition to our time and effort to make this symposium happen, and if it is
not beneficial to our members we should know that before we sink more
resources into planning the 2006 event.

- KT

ASIST SIG/STI Chair


-- 
K.T. L. Vaughan

NCSU Libraries Fellow
Scholarly Communication Center and
Collection Management Department

Campus Box 7111, Raleigh, NC 27695-7111
Room 4218, North Stacks, D.H. Hill Library
(919) 513-0377 (phone)
(919) 513-3553 (fax)
kt_vaughan at ncsu.edu
--