At the American Library Association Midwinter conference in San Diego last month (where it was wonderfully warm and sunny, compared to the 8-12” of snow dumping outside my window at the moment), we ran a promotion for librarians, which we called “We Sing Sea Shanties on the Show Floor”. When librarians signed up for a free trial of ShipIndex.org, I’d sing them a sea shanty, right there on the convention floor.

Folks from Perkins Library, at Hastings College, filmed the first shanty I sang, then posted it to their Facebook page. They also promoted their ShipIndex.org trial on the campus radio station! Very cool.

Anyway, it was a rousing success, and we’ll do it again at the ACRL conference in Philadelphia, at the end of March. If you’re attending, please make a point of visiting us at Table 155. Bring your IP ranges, and I’ll sing you a shanty!

We’ll also be at the following conferences and gatherings:

• SCELC Vendor Day, March 3, Los Angeles. I’ll also be the keynote speaker at the SCELC Colloquium the day before, but I won’t be talking about ShipIndex. Instead, I’ll talk about an idea I have for improving the way libraries manage electronic resources – especially the niche ones, like ShipIndex. So, it’s relevant to ShipIndex but it’s more of a proposal of something I’d like to see someone else build than a pitch for ShipIndex. Those occur on Thursday, the 3rd, at 10:50 and 1:40.

• Association of College & Research Libraries Conference, March 30 to April 1, Philadelphia. We’ll be at Table 155, and will be offering our “We Sing Sea Shanties on the Show Floor” promotion. We may also have some great maritime fiction to give away.

• National Genealogical Society Conference, May 11-14, Charleston, SC. Here, we’ll be talking more about our individual subscription offers. Charleston is a great city; this should be a fun conference. We had a great time at NGS last year.

• American Library Association Annual Conference, June 24-28, New Orleans. The biggie; many thousands of librarians, vendors, and others. This will, as usual, be a great time. Plus, I’m getting an award.

If you attend any of these conferences, please come by and say hello! If you know of other conferences we should attend, please let us know; we’d be interested to hear about them.