As many of you know, our Library Advisory Board meetings typically coincide with the PAM Division of the SLA each year. While this worked well in many aspects, we realised that there were time constraints that made it difficult for many of our Board Members to attend both the meeting and the sessions at the SLA. This year, in an effort to make attendance decisions easier for our Board Members, we elected to hold the Library Advisory Board meeting separate from the SLA.
Beautiful Pompano Beach, Florida, served as the perfect landscape for this meeting, which started with the welcome reception on the evening of 12 February 2014 and continued over the next day and a half concluding midday on Friday 14 February. We had a variety of industry-savvy librarians in attendance from a number of different backgrounds — small colleges, large university systems, and consortia.
The two main topics of discussion were on the hot topics in physics, a presentation given by Tim Smith, Publishing Manager at IOP Publishing, and a demo of IOP Publishing’s new ebooks programme — what has been published and what is in the pipeline — presented by Chris Box, IOP’s Market Intelligence Manager.
The topics were well received and discussions were extremely detailed, with new ideas and useful information shared by all. Both IOP Publishing and the librarians agreed wholeheartedly on the value and benefit of holding this advisory board, and look forward to the event in 2015.