SLA says that former President Clinton has had to “clear his calendar” for the week that SLA is holding its annual conference in Toronto so has cancelled his keynote speech. Factiva, which was sponsoring him, moved quickly to find a replacement speaker. He is Gary Hamel, a leading strategy consultant who has published extensively in the Harvard Business Review and written several books. The latest book is Leading the Revolution, published in 2000. There’s even a Wikipedia entry on him. Personally, I’m more interested in hearing from a leadership and strategy guy than a politician. And I won’t miss the Secret Service presence one bit. I do have to wonder, however, about a strategist whose Web page lists a “coming event” date of October 2004. Uh, that was 5 months ago.

Next week is National Library Week and I’ve already heard from two companies with something free to offer librarians in celebration of this special week. First, xrefer is offering free access to its ready reference collection. The second is ebrary, which is providing free access to more than 55 library science book titles, plus the American Libraries digital archive, for an entire year. The ebrary offer is limited to ALA members, but there’s some 64,000 of them. Sounds like a pretty good deal!

I haven’t posted in a while, not because I wasn’t interested, but because I got totally carried away with other things. I’ve just finished up an article on Open Access for EContent’s June issue and am busily editing articles to be published in the July/August issue of ONLINE, which is developing into a “new technologies” theme issue. Unplanned, because I’m not all that fond of themed issues.

Then there’s all the conference planning. Next week is Buying and Selling eContent in Scottsdale, Arizona. I’m moderating a panel on monetization of technology, which should be really good. This fall, there are some exciting conferences coming up, one of which is brand new. Called InfoX, it’s five separate conferences to be held at the New York Hilton, Tuesday and Wednesday the 27th and 28th of September. Then there’s Internet Librarian International in London the 10th and 11th of October. The deadline for submitting speaking proposals was yesterday, but if you’ve got a super topic, shoot it over to me and I’ll still consider it!