The SAA Annual Meeting began with a celebratory air this morning as we honored five new distinguished Fellows at Plenary I: Scott Cline, Peter Gottlieb, Nancy Lenoil, Tim Pyatt, Ben Primer. As so often happens, you may be saying to yourself “Huh? They weren’t already Fellows?” The moral of this story is … take the time to nominate your most impressive colleagues for this wonderful honor. Keep the Fellowship flowing.
David Ferriero (aka AOTUS) followed with some cool announcements from NARA. Among them: the White House is about to announce a new records management directive that will help further professionalize RM in the federal environment. Also, David will be hosting a meeting at NARA in December to bring together representatives of the LAM community (libraries, archives, museums) to discuss commonalities and convergence. The organization I work for–OCLC Research–has focused on LAM convergence in a variety of projects in recent years, and it’s great to see NARA get on this important bandwagon.
Jon Voss (HistoryPin) ***rocked*** his plenary talk. (Hmm, with the ball park right across the street from us, maybe I should have gone with the baseball metaphor, but he did incorporate lots of good music.) The Twitter stream was going wild (e.g., Sibyl Schaefer said, “Best plenary ever!”) If you’ve tried valiantly to understand what linked open data is with marginal success (it took me a couple of years despite many attempts), Jon’s talk is the one for you. He not only illustrated how it works to bring intelligent linking to the Web, he made it beyond entertaining. Thank you, Jon!
By the way, if you’re here in San Diego and diligently attending tons of sessions, be sure to wander out onto one of the many verandas and patios surrounding the hotel for a quick rejuvenating breath of clear, fresh Southern California coastal air.
Lucky for you, I’m off to the Electronic Records Section in a couple of minutes, so no time to write more. Back with you anon.
Off the Record 