Remember that brief flurry of excitement when SLA announced that Bill Clinton would be the closing keynote speaker for the SLA conference? Then SLA said he’d had to cancel because he had a schedule conflict in conjunction with his work on tsunami relief and, with the support of Factiva, were able to line up Gary Hamel as the replacement closing keynote.

Well, guess where Bill Clinton actually was yesterday, while Gary Hamel was delivering that keynote speech — in an Indianapolis bookstore, autographing his book. Then, according to the Indianapolis Star , he headed to a local synagogue to deliver a 1-hour speech that touched on peace, global interdependence, how Southeast Asia views the U.S., energy policy, and healthcare. Not libraries. Not information professionals. Although he did cite yesterday’s announcement by General Motors of layoffs in the U.S. but not Canada (which was on the front page of the Globe and Mail but that story said “Canada is also involved”) and attributed the lack of job losses in Canada to their national health policies.

Reminded me of a T-shirt I saw in Toronto. It said that Canadians were unarmed Americans with healthcare.

I just had a note from Roddy McLeod at Herriott Watt University telling me about a new service called EEVL Xtra , which is a new, free service, designed to put “The Hidden Web at Your Fingertips for Engineering, Mathematics and Computing.” It reveals articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, full text eprints,the latest research, and teaching and learning resources. EEVL Xtra cross searches (hence the X) dozens of sites, including many that index open access materials. Looks very promising.

I arrived in Toronto yesterday for the annual SLA conference. Most of my blog entries this week will be at the InfoToday official blog for the conference. It’s a surreal experience to be in Paris on Friday, home on Saturday, and in Toronto on Sunday. Three days, three different countries.

We wrapped up the WebSearch Academy conference last Thursday. Speakers were Karen Blakeman, Ran Hock, Greg Notess, and me. I think the 30 attendees (from 13 countries!) throoughly enjoyed the two days, although they looked a bit tired by the end. So were the speakers! TWe covered a lot in that time frame. The first day we devoted an hour and a half to blogs and RSS. Here’s the conference success story. The next morning one of the attendees walked in and announced she’d started a blog the night before, putting it together in her hotel room. Too cool! My biggest problem was demonstrating Blogger not only with a French keyboard (forget touch typing) and a French interface to Blogger. I know how to get to the Google English language interface when I’m in another country, but couldn’t figure out how to get Blogger to display in English. Anybody know?

According to the BASES newsletter , the databases produced by Cambridge Scientific Abstracts are soon to return to Dialog. If you recall, back in 2002, CSA pulled 19 databases from the Dialog/DataStar host. Since then, CSA has acquired several more databases. Cynthia Murphy, a Dialog SVP, is quoted in BASES as saying that 31 CSA databases will rejoin the Dialog system. This is really good news for those who have sorely missed the CSA files on Dialog.

I’m in Paris this week for the i-expo conference.
It’s been a busy week. I visited the International Herald Tribune library and was impressed with the staff and the amount of work they get done. One of their complaints was the removal of Le Monde from Nexis. I’ve looked and, of course, they’re absolutely correct. Try to select the Frence version of Le Monde and Nexis tells you they don’t have it (so why is it in the source list to begin with?), but no warnings appear when you select simply “Le Monde”. However, searches for anything recent returns no hits. The file stops at the end of February. An exhibitor here at i-expo, CEDROM is the alternative. They carry Le Monde, and other French language newspapers from France, Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland, along with a smattering of English language papers from the UK, US, and Canada, in their Europresse product.