Preliminary activities related to the 2012 IFLA conference (Helsinki Finland, August 11-17) are heating up.  A total of 17 satellite meetings have been approved; calls for papers from the various sections are regularly arriving in my e-mail inbox; and online registration is available.  An intriguing new feature, IFLA Camp, the first ever “unconference” to be held at an IFLA conference, is soliciting proposals for discussion topics.  (A subsequent post appearing shortly here will go into more detail on IFLA Camp.)

So if you’re interested in IFLA and its annual conference, check out one of the websites with links above.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

 

I listed 684 conferences held in 2011 (up from 653 in 2010) on the ITI Conference Calendar, and mentioned 241 of them in my 11 monthly columns.  As shown in the figure below, 2011 followed the usual pattern, with the busiest periods of the year in the spring and fall. The spring period, April through June, had 192 conferences, and the fall period, September through November, had 240.  Each of these periods accounts for approximately 1/3 of the yearly total.  And also as usual, dips were observed in the year-end months and in July.

Conferences were held in 209 different cities in 21 countries.  Here are the cities in which 5 or more conferences were held.

London heads the list, as it usually does, followed by Washington and New York.  The reason San Juan, PR appears is that it was the location of the IFLA annual conference and its associated meetings.

On a country basis, the US had the most conferences, with 313.  Countries hosting 6 or more conferences are shown below.  Eight conferences were virtual—held online only.

The states where 7 or more conferences were held are shown below.

Here are the organizers of 5 or more conferences in 2011.

These data are similar to those of 2010, showing that the information industry conference scene has remained healthy, despite the difficult economic conditions.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

The conference scene is in its annual hiatus for the holidays, but it will resume immediately after they are over with a number of interesting meetings.  January is typically a month of fewer conferences than others, so I will include my usual statistical report on 2011’s conferences as an adjunct to this column.

HICSS

The Hawaii International Conference for System Sciences (HICSS) typically leads off the yearly conference parade.  This year marks the 45^th conference in the series, and it will be held at Wailea, Maui, HI on January 4-7.  Some of the tracks will be of much interest to information professionals.  For example, the track on Digital Media: Content and Communication appears for the 18^th year and includes such topics as digital libraries, information access and usability, and visual analysis of massive data.  The track on Knowledge Systems includes economics of knowledge management and transfer, knowledge management and social media, and strategic knowledge management for innovation.

Academic Publishing in Europe (APE)

The announcement of the 7^th APE Conference (Berlin, Germany, January 24-25) has just appeared.  According to the website, the goal of the conference is “better understanding of scholarly communication and the role of information in science, education and society.”  Keynote speakers are Derk Haank, CEO of Springer Science+Business Media speaking on “The Past, the Present and the Future of STM Publishing”; and Prof. Dr. Jean-Claude Burgelman, Head of Unit DC.2: ERIAB, European Commission, speaking on “Research and Innovation. From Web 2.0 to Science 2.0? The Potential of ICT to change the Modus of Science and Research.”  An interesting discussion “The End of the Semantic Web? The Internet of Things and Services” will lead off the second day of the conference.  An education and training day featuring presentations on several useful and relevant subjects takes place immediately before the main conference.

DigCCurr

The University of North Carolina continues its DigCCurr Professional Institute which began in May 2011 with a followup session on January 4-5 at its Chapel Hill, NC campus.  The theme of the Institute is “Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle”.  An interactive event, “CurateGear: Enabling the Curation of Digital Collections” follows the Institute on January 6 and will include demonstrations and applications of digital curation tools and methods by a large number of presenters.

Digital Book World

The 2012 Digital Book World Conference and Expo (New York, January 23-25) will have over 40 sessions, many led by top executives of book publishers, plus an exhibit hall.  The sessions focus on issues of special interest to trade publishers; a separate workshop entitled “Children’s Publishing Goes Digital” takes place on the morning of January 23.

D: Dive Into Media

An interesting new conference, D: Dive Into Media (Laguna Nigel, CA, January 30-31) will address the “evolutionary changes in media and what those changes mean for the industry’s future”.  The preliminary list of speakers is an impressive collection of CEOs from a wide range of media companies, including Warner Music Corp., YouTube, News Corporation, and others.  The format of the conferences is “no PowerPoints, no panels and definitely no pontificating, only … unrehearsed, unscripted and unexpected interviews.”

Scholarly Communication

The Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) is sponsoring a one-day workshop on January 20 at the mid-winter ALA meeting in Dallas, TX entitled “Scholarly Communication: From Understanding to Engagement”.  The workshop focuses on scholarly publishing, author rights, and open access.

Digital Preservation

Another in the series of Digital Preservation Management Workshops will take place in Coral Gables, FL on January 8-13.  The Workshop is a 5-day course on “practical and responsible stewardship of digital assets in an age of technological uncertainty” and includes lectures on such subjects as the “organizational infrastructure, technological infrastructure, and requisite resources”, as well as a number of case studies.

Society Meetings

Here are some of the society meetings of interest in January:

Conference	Dates	Location
2012 ALISE Annual Conference: Extending Our Reach, Expanding Horizons, Creating Opportunity	January 17-20	Dallas, TX
8th Annual ARL Leadership Symposium	January 20-21	Dallas, TX
ALA Midwinter Meeting	January 20-24	Dallas, TX
2012 SIIA Information Industry Summit	January 24-25	New York, NY
ALCTS Virtual Midwinter Symposium: Launching Your Star Potential: Leadership for Today’s Libraries	January 9-13	Online only
SLA Leadership Summit 2012: Future Now, Operation Agility	January 25-28	Atlanta, GA

Best wishes for the holidays, and I’ll be back in 2012 with more conference updates.  As always, the ITI Conference Calendar contains listings for other January conferences as well as those later in the year.

The program for the annual International Information Conference on Search, Data Mining and Visualization (II-SDV) is now available on the conference website, which give a rationale for attending this meeting:

Search engines, data and text mining, visualization and text analysis are subjects for many academic research meetings. Often they are also included in other information conferences. But the II-SDV meeting is the only event that focuses on these tools for those in the professional information community. Similarly, there are many meetings that examine the collection of intelligence. But the II-SDV meeting is the only event that focuses on tools for intelligence.

A fascinating interactive visualization of the program (see screenshot below) is also available.  One can click on a subject and see all the speakers addressing it, or click on a speaker’s name and see the abstract of their presentation.  It’s definitely worth a look!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

 

 

 

The upcoming BOBCATSSS conference (Amsterdam, January 23-25) has reached its capacity of 400 attendees and is now sold out.  That a conference of this nature would sell out 6 weeks before it occurs is surely a good sign in these economically difficult times.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor