Conferences to go to?

While deadlines approach, the annual budget for my library is still unknown which makes its hard to plan for conferences. Invitations and interests swarm around. In spite of my buzz about online networking and social software, the physical get-together between collagues is still important. On my travel (wish) plan are:

• SLA centennial Conference, 14-17 June 2009, Washington D.C., USA
• I was invited to speak last year in Seattle and many would like to see me again.
  
• I'm in the Europe Chapter and Forestry Section of the Division of Environment & Resource Mgmt
• World Library and Information Conference, 75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, 23-27 August 2009, Milan, Italy
  
• never been to this, but it is on my list because of these sessions:
• Agricultural Libraries Discussion Group Theme: "Worldwide Trends in Open Access to Agricultural Information"
• Cataloguing Section Theme: "New Principles, New Rules for New Catalogues"
• Information Technology Section Theme: "New repositories: architectures interoperability and data exchange"
• Science and Technology Libraries Section Theme: "Open Access to Science and Technology Research Worldwide: Strategies and Best Practices"
• XIIIth World Forestry Conference, 18-25 October 2009, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• I missed the WFC in Canada which was regretted by many of my colleagues
• My session: 6.7 Forest information: Information services, libraries and networks. Forest terminology.

Why should I start a blog?

While attending the SLA2008 conference in Seattle last week (http://www.sla.org/content/Events/conference/ac2008/index.cfm) we were all recommended to learn new Web 2.0 tools, especially twittering at the conference. So I started writing my tweets at http://www.twitter.com/jarmosaarikko.

At the conference there seemed to be several SLA Bloggers' meetings. These people turned out to be a group of people in the SLA IT division which I'm not a member. But I thought I'd give this a go and as this Blogger service provided almost automatic creation for google acocount holders, I decided to try this one one, and it seems easy enough for now.

This is yet another learning experience for me in an effort to provide new and innovative approaches to our scientists at Metla in the new eScience or Science 2.0 environment. Partially this is also a personal experiment into the roles of my Information Service in providing support in developing the researchers' skills in using Web 2.0 social networking tools.

Future will tell how much energy and wits and writing skills I'll have to reveal my ideas and thoughts amongst the few international networks I'm involved with.