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Professional Development Column
by Tom Clark, thomas.clark@sun.com

Once again, we're able to bring you what's happening in the Professional Development world of SLA thanks to the generous sponsorship of Thomson Dialog.

Quantum2 is Dialog’s leadership development program, and they offer several free virtual seminars throughout the year. Please check out their offerings at http://quantum.dialog.com/workshops/. Dialog is pleased to continue this tradition of offering sessions in person. If a group is interested, there is no charge for the session or the travel and you can choose the workshop that suits your needs. Contact betty.jo.hibberd@thomson.com to secure your date.

SLA Boston will be presenting a professional development seminar by Cynthia Cheng Correia, titled "Intelligence Source Collection: From Paper to People." Cynthia, a Principal of Knowledge inForm, Inc., is an author and frequent speaker on Competitive Intelligence. Join us for this hands-on workshop to learn: 1) the roles of Published Source Collection and Human Source Collection; 2) researching human sources and settings; 3) how and when to use human sources; 4) techniques for effective source interview and 5) trade show collection. For more information and registration instructions, see http://www.sla.org/chapter/cbos/meetings/fy06/intelligencesourcecollection.html.  

SLA's Professional Development Center offers virtual seminars as a part of their Virtual Seminar Series  (http://www.sla.org/content/learn/learnmore/distance/2005virtsem/index.cfm). SLA Boston is seeking volunteers to host these SLA virtual seminars and will provide the funding for hosting these events. Please contact Tom Clark (781-442-0288; thomas.clark@sun.com) if you are interested in hosting one of these seminars.

Factiva , in partnership with SLA, offers one-hour professional presentations designed for organization or association meetings. The Factiva InfoPro Resource Center (http://www.factiva.com/infopro/resource.asp) provides ten guides based on SLA's Competencies for Information Professionals, in addition to tools, examples, reading, white papers and presentations on specific development topics.

For more information on Professional Development in our world, see a vast collection of articles at The Librarian and Information Professional's Career Development Center at http://www.liscareer.com. Also read Lisjob's newsletter, Info Career Trends (http://www.lisjobs.com/newsletter/index.htm) and blog, Beyond the Job (http://librarycareers.blogspot.com/).

If you have any professional development ideas you'd like to share - program ideas or interesting items for this column, please send them to me at thomas.clark@sun.com

Tom
President-elect, SLA Boston