Alane Goes to Washington, D.C.

Tomorrow, I am heading to Washington, D.C. to attend the World Futures Society conference. 

We often get asked now how we went about researching, compiling and writing the Environmental Scan because people are interested in doing similar work within their own environments as a part of strategic planning processes. And we tell them...but I am going to make you come back later and read how we did it because it deserves its own story.

But I am going to this conference that will be attended by "professional futurists" so that I can learn about techniques and tools that real environmental scanners use. I'll be in 2 full-day classes before attending conference sessions so I should have some interestings things to share... although perhaps not as interesting as Jessamyn's posts to her DNC blog.

Alice has been on vacation in New York city , and George has been incommunicado in meetings for the last two days. Alice may have stories from NYC. She did wonder, in an email to George and me, whether OCLC needed a NYC-based blogger, so she must have had a good time.

Look for a new edition of the OCLC Five Year Information Format Trends report very soon. OCLC published the first one in 2003, and I, along with a bunch of other staff, have been working on the 2004 version. We're just about done--it's down to the incredibly tedious but necessary work of checking commas and triple checking numbers and facts. And I am very grateful for Brad "Mr Chicago Style Manual" Gauder's eagle eye.