Credo Reference at ALA Midwinter
The 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting was in Credo’s hometown of Boston earlier this month, and we were thrilled to have this gathering of librarians, vendors and ideas in our own backyard. Having the conference here meant that many Credo staff could attend and we all took away some great ideas, interactions and memories.
Product Manager Nancy King attended LITA’s semi-annual Top Technology Trends discussion Sunday morning. The five forward-looking librarians on the panel started with a discussion of trends like mobile technologies, augmented reality, user experience and discovery systems. The second half of the session focused on the reinvention of the book. To get the discussion started, Gregg Silvis, the moderator, held up a Rocket eBook reader from 1998 and a Kindle. (The two devices look surprisingly similar – see a photo of the Rocket eBook here.) For more on the discussion, see Library Journal’s write-up at http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6715484.html?industryid=49157.
CEO Mike Sweet enjoyed the presentation by Carrie Page of EDUCAUSE. Her work centers on the Net Gen Learner, and she focused on what the library community needs to do to make sure we stay in touch with this demographic. EDUCAUSE is clearly thinking about the challenges we face in the right way and we would do well to pay close attention to the implications of their research.
President John Dove and others from Credo attended the Independent Reference Publishers Group Meeting, hosted by CHOICE, on Friday afternoon. The meeting brought together a panel of librarians who provided the group with detailed accounts of where they turn when evaluating or sourcing reference works. Among the questions the panel answered was which types of reference works still work better in print than they do in electronic form? Credo Reference handles a broad array of reference content types, but it is always helpful to know that there is still work ahead of us to continue our work of re-inventing reference online.
Many of us spent time in the Credo booth and enjoyed hearing from our enthusiastic subscribers as well as meeting and talking with potential customers.
Our exhibit allowed us the opportunity to introduce our newest initiatives – Topic Pages and Publisher Collections. Topic Pages are our new approach to organizing information resources and are designed to provide contextualized, orderly access to authoritative content from the library as well as the open web. Publisher Collections are available now – read about our Sage, IGI-Global and CABI collections — and Topic Pages and will be available later this spring.
The Credo Reference Booth at ALA-Midwinter in Boston.
A highlight of the weekend was our event Sunday night to celebrate the launch of Credo Topic Pages and Publisher Collections. Joining us were many customers, publishers, partners and friends. Mike Sweet took a few minutes to welcome everyone and introduce our newest initiatives . It was an evening of great conversation with friends new and old and an opportunity to enjoy the beautiful views from the SkyWalk at the Prudential Tower.
Credo’s final ALAMW event was our presentation at the Technology Showcase Monday afternoon. Al Stevens, Credo CTO, spoke about our approach to the presentation of related content, focusing on our use of semantic information in the development of our Topic Pages.
It was a full and rewarding weekend and we look forward to meeting and talking with you all again at ALA Annual in June in Washington D.C.
