Listen up, info pros. Here is a chance for library science students, librarians in many fields, and those in the search industry and in the field of information science to not only win as much as $1,000 but to get their travel and lodging expenses covered for a trip to Computers in Libraries 2010 and take part in a panel discussion there.
And what’s more, one or more of the winning essays will be published in Computers in Libraries Magazine. I have had any article published in it and was that a proud day for moi.
Now, is that way cool or what!? I have always wanted to go to that conference. Put your thinking caps on, everyone!
The deadline for submissions in December 15.
And for those of you who don’t like writing, the sponsors are admirably flexible and say, “…So, we’re going to encourage submissions in a variety of media. If you’re video-oriented or you’re a graphic designer, or you make awesome collages, or you’re another kind of artist, we want you to submit an entry for the contest.
The sky’s the limit on the form of your submission but you do need to address the contest theme:
Tell us about the most impressive federated search application you’ve ever seen, or about one you’ve dreamed up. How innovative can federated search be? What unique problems can it solve?
Contest entries will be judged on creativity, originality, vision and relevance to the theme.”
They will even accept poems!
Hmm, how about
Searching:
Those who wish to find
Info of a certain kind
Find themselves in cyberspace
Sorting through a database
And not just one but many such
Spending days or even much
Longer as they try
To recall the reason why
But, alas, with scant success
How they got into such a mess
On a more serious note, I spend a huge amount of time looking for grants and scholarships in the health sciences to list on the site I work on, ScanGrants and my dream federated search application (by the way, federated search is the ability to search many databases simultaneously instead of slogging through one after another in tedious succession) would be one that would search through ScanGrants and various other free online listings of funding opportunities such as that offered by Duke and that of Britain’s National Health Service and that would also be able to seek out any funding opportunities offered by the many disease advocacy organizations listed by such admirable groups as NORD – the National Organization for Rare Disorders and the Genetic Alliance.
What is needed is a powerful search tool that would enable research scientists that don’t have access to powerful platforms such as Elsevier’s SciVal Funding or Community of Science to be able to leverage free resources such as ScanGrants and the others I have listed. There are free grant listing databases, but we need a federated search tool so that researchers who are not affiliated with wealthy institutions can find funding quickly and easily so that they can get back to work on science, which is in the interest of all of us given that we will all be patients someday.
Thank you, Abe Lederman of Deep Web Technologies and Sol Lederman of the Federated Search blog for sponsoring this contest.
Go for it, potential contestants!
