Vendors Show Support at ALA Summer Annual in New Orleans
No major deals or product announcements, but vendors turn out in force for a successful conference
By Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 8/15/2006
The American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in still struggling New Orleans proved a quiet affair, with no major acquisitions such as the SirsiDynix merger that set the show on fire at last year’s Chicago gathering, and no dazzling product announcements. The experience of attending this ALA was marked by the numerous stories of kindness and generosity toward the city and its library system through ten months’ worth of donations large and small to buttress the rebuilding effort.
While many of the publishers and tech vendors that regularly exhibit generously gave large gifts of cash, goods, and services to the city and its facilities, they also showed no small amount of support for New Orleans simply by being there.
Weathering the storm
ALA’s Midwinter Meeting in San Antonio and the Public Library Association’s (PLA) March gathering in Boston were hotbeds of hushed talk over who was and wasn’t on board for New Orleans. The sheer size of the PLA meeting was a crystal-clear indicator that the annual get-together numbers would be meager and unlikely to yield a return on the considerable investment of exhibiting on the show floor. Yet, not a single major vendor or publisher pulled out.
ALA has received countless kudos in the national press for supporting New Orleans by keeping the show there—and attendees never have been welcomed so graciously by the citizens of any city—but, as one vendor noted, that praise should cascade down to exhibitors who in turn supported ALA by ponying up cash for floor space and bringing their staffs.
OPAC attack
Despite slower floor traffic, many vendors commented that low attendance actually made for a better one-on-one experience with customers and potential customers who didn’t have to struggle for attention. Vendors never come empty-handed, and the exhibit area sported several new products and announcements of products (see below). Generally, content suppliers are still morphing their current index databases into full-text resources, while ILS vendors deal with rising hostilities toward OPAC designs. In fact, at “Top Technology Trends,” Notre Dame’s Eric Lease Morgan and others continued the attack, bluntly declaring that “OPACs suck.”
