Some thirty hours and two flights later I arrived at the Hyatt Hotel in Chicago on Thursday 15 May. I cannot remember how many very long queues I’d been in transit so when I arrived at Chicago airport and was standing at the end of another mile long queue I agreed to share a cab. This is worth doing and results in being removed from a queue. Aussie’s must have the sharing spirit, as a chap from WA travelled with me downtown. He was attending the National Restaurant Association conference also on in Chicago. Beautiful tulips lined the streets of this wonderful city.As the Cunningham Fellow recipient my attendance at the Meeting was funded by the MLA. The MLA over the past three years has provided the booth space to promote the ICML 2009. As hosts of ICML in Brisbane we are enormously grateful for the outstanding support we have received from the MLA.
Friday 16 May I attended a one day workshop Rapid Web-Based Course Development: A Short Course for Librarians presented by Jan Buhmann. What did I learn? By the end of the day I was aware of a few processes and tools that can be used for course development. I also discovered that Camtasia and Survey Monkey are so intuitive that even with jet lag I was able to use them. Why did I do this course? Curriculums are increasingly adopting online formats and I wanted to gain an understanding of what is involved. The course provided a one page listing of instructional design resources and rapid development tools. Let me know if you’d like a copy and I’ll seek Jan’s permission to share the list.
Saturday 17 May the morning was spent setting up the ICML booth. This involves hanging up Australian flags, pinning a large table cloth with a map of Australia to a backdrop curtain, putting out miniature koalas, laying out brochures and getting the larger Koala and Kangaroo raffle prepared. Fortunately the lovely staff at the Majors booth didn’t need their table (already dressed with an attractive skirt) as I’d ordered a table that wasn’t big enough. Last but not least I blew up our inflatable Skippy then the booth was complete.
The Exhibition Opening is always on the Saturday evening. Once again I had flown 14,000 km to experience koala frenzy. The MLA delegates just love our wee koalas that can be worn upon a lapel or attached to just about anything. All Australian hands were on deck, including Mary Peterson, Rolf Schafer and Saroj Bhatia from Australia to help promote ICML 2009.Sunday 18 May at 7 am I attended the Thomson (Reuters) Scientific Sunrise Seminar: Showcasing new translational research resources. The following is a summary of the session taken from the MLA Program:
• Investigator Portal: comprehensive research for all stages of disease investigation and therapeutic regimens
• BONDplus: public and proprietary sequence, interaction and related interactions information
• Thomson Collexis Dashboards custom datasets on therapeutic areas or diseases, providing unique data mining, display and predictive potential.
Ok, the truth, I attended this seminar as Thomson's door prize was an Apple i-touch though UQ is setting up a Translational Research Institute. I didn’t win the Apple i-touch…grrrr. All the resources are very specialised and are newly released. Are you familiar with Collexis? Watch this space! The Thomson Collexis Dashboard is only available to Web of Science subscribers.
BONDplus is a bioinformatics tool and it was way too early in the morning to digest the complexities of this resource, for more details go to: http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/bondplus/
This was followed by the McGovern Lecture on Sunday morning presented by Andrew Zolli. To Be Continued. Lisa Kruesi, Health Sciences Library Service, UQ Library
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