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So today was a day where I spent a good deal of time with vendors and since Mary Beth and Susan will most likely cover the sessions I went to, I’ll focus my post on what I learned about new products and offerings on the horizon.

The day started with a breakfast sponsored by Serial Solutions where Alison Head of Project Information Literacy presented (I’ll post on that in more detail elsewhere). After she spoke, however, Jane Burke announced a new product from SS called Summon Unified Discovery Service. The idea is to take the simplicity of a single search box a-la-Google and put behind it the metadata from your catalog, IR, journal subscriptions, web information etc. so that it is as easy to use as Google but substantially more effective in getting to research. It’s a fascinating prospect – some big name journal publishers are on board already – and is absolutely worth watching in the future. I stopped by the booth later in the day and got an up close look at it and I have to admit I was impressed.

Next I made the rounds in the Exhibit Hall. Some highlights for me were:

• Alexander Street Press’ brand new American History in Video collection that combines video and transcripts of newsreels, History Channel shows and more. Currently at 300 hours of video and expanding up to 2000 hours eventually, the collection is a really remarkable one. ASP has such quality databases and a wonderful interface that you wish you had a rich uncle who would pay for us to get them all!!
• Next I went to a booth presentation at Oxford University Press on their database Oxford Islamic Studies Online. A great assimilation of scholarship, Quranic studies including two translations of the Qu’ran and a concordance, encyclopedias, and other materials. No other source on Islam that i have seen has been quite as complete and integrated as this one. At the end, our gift for watching the demo was a Dictionary. Seriously – an Oxford American Dictionary. Looks like I’ll be shipping a box back home!
• I stopped by the Greenwood booth to talk to them about their digital reference options and caught a presentation of some of their features (which netted me a coffee mug). What I found out, however, is that by September, Greenwood, ABC-Clio, Libraries Unlimited and Praeger would have their eReference titles on the same platform. So many quality reference books come out of these imprints that I can say with certainty that I will be investigating what we need to do to set up an account so that we can purchase eReference from them as we do from Oxford and GVRL.
• Lunch was a What’s New with Gale session in a beautiful room on the 35th floor of the Sheraton. Several interesting things came to light here
  • A group has been working to assign LC Subject Headings to all the ECCO records. Libraries with ECCO will be able to purchase the new MARC records with the LCSH content.
  • They are creating an ECCO II with content from the 18th Century found and digitized since 2003.
  • They have a new wonderful looking database coming out called Slavery and Antislavery in America. This will contain an enormous amount of data, but most interesting is that it will have our slave narratives and abolitionist papers that we currently have on Microcard (SLA and SLB) included. This has long been an irreplacable resource in a hard-to-use format and its inclusion in this database will bring it to the top of our desiderata list. But the other content included also makes it extremely desirable for us.

There were other vendors and other news to share, but I think that is the highlights of what I found out today! More tomorrow!