The Special Libraries Association, the international association of information professionals and special librarians in corporations, business, science, government, and academic institutions, met in Chicago July 15–18 for its annual conference and expo.
The small group (final attendance hasn’t been tallied, but past conferences averaged 4,000–6,000), a fraction of the number who attended the 2012 ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim last month (20,134), honored fellow members and flocked to specialized sessions. Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s former “chief evangelist” and founder of AllTop.com, presented points from his 2011 book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. Entertaining and witty, Kawasaki covered the main topics of Enchantment, primarily about achieving likability and trustworthiness, and focusing on quality. The audience enjoyed hearing about Kawasaki’s favorite books, from Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink and Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, as well as How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. “I’ve had to enchant a lot of people,” Kawasaki said, sharing with the audience in 10 points what he has learned.
James O’Shea, author and former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times, talked about the new state of journalism in a session sponsored by SLA’s News Division. O’Shea, who wrote about Sam Zell’s purchase of the Tribune in his book The Deal from Hell, discussed his involvement in the launch of the Chicago News Cooperative. The cooperative was launched as a nonprofit two years ago, and folded earlier this year.
“The whole news landscape is in crisis,” he said. “It’s a depression. We’ve conditioned people to get news for cheap.” In addition to mainstream papers folding, the decline of print advertising has also affected alternative newspapers and most traditional journalism sources. However, O’Shea predicted, readers will pay for news if they can’t get it elsewhere. “If you want good journalism and you’re willing to pay for it, you can get it. What worries me is people who don’t have money.” And, he added, a lot of content consists of press releases and one-source articles. “Five years from now, people are gonna get tired of this regurgitated crap, and I want to be there” to see the transformation, O’Shea said.
In a session cosponsored by the Government Information Division, News Division, and Military Libraries Division, Patrice McDermott of OpenTheGovernment.org discussed the WikiLeaks controversy. McDermott talked about the problems of classification, the large numbers of people designated as document classifiers, and how guidelines for this work are “sometimes decades out of date.” In addition, McDermott said, “Overclassification clogs our system and makes it difficult to protect real secrets. And there are real secrets.”
There aren’t really deterrents for overclassification, and rarely are the classifiers penalized for improperly classifying documents. But anyone who retains or holds a classified document—and is not authorized to do so—can be prosecuted. Often, McDermott said, that person is a journalist writing a news story about an issue. “These leaks are sometimes the only way to have a debate in public” about a public concern, she said.
Just prior to the conference, scientific journal publisher IET announced it will be offering an open-access megajournal for the large numbers of qualified authors who do not meet IET’s specific criteria for their print journals. “We have a 75% rejection rate and at least 25% are entirely publishable—good research, well-written, etc.,—but they don’t fit the scope of a particular IET journal,” said Daniel Smith, head of academic publishing at IET.
The new megajournal, to be launched in the first quarter of 2013, will be “giving authors a choice,” Smith explained. “There’s no disgrace. There’s been some talk about it being a second-class status [to publish in the open access journal.] That’s nonsense. Some articles just don’t fit the scope of our journals.”
The terms for authors who want open access will still include some sort of fee for submission review, editing, design, and web production, but the end result will be free content for libraries to access.
