Monday, June 13th has turned into an informal KM Day at the up-coming Annual Conference of the Special Libraries Association in Philadelphia.

Strategic knowledge professionals and KM specialists planning to attend the conference will want to mark their programs to take advantage of these sessions.

A 10.00 AM SLA Spotlight Session features Larry Prusak, Professor of Practice at Columbia University and a member of Columbia University’s M.S. in Information and Knowledge Strategy Program Advisory Committee. In the Columbia program, Professor Prusak teaches “Collaboration and Networking Issues and Methods.”

In the SLA Spotlight Session Professor Prusak will speak on “Knowledge in Judgment: Making Good Decisions.” The session is based on a book Professor Prusak is writing with Tom Davenport that looks at the context in which decisions are made and discusses how we cannot rely on one frame of knowledge or experiences, but instead need a whole range of knowledge to exercise good judgment and make good decisions. Prusak will speak about cognitive diversity, durable good judgment, and associating with others who may not agree with you, and will provide some tips for those in the information and knowledge industries.

A 4.00 PM program sponsored by Reprints Desk, for which SLA’s Information Technology Division is the Lead Division, features Guy St. Clair, SMR President and Subject Matter Expert for Columbia University’s M.S. in Information and Knowledge Strategy Program. Also a member of Columbia’s Advisory Committee for the program, St. Clair teaches “Leadership and Management in the Knowledge Domain” and “Entrepreneurial Knowledge Services.”

For the SLA Conference, St. Clair will speak on “The New Knowledge Services – The Next Decade.” St. Clair’s presentation is described in the conference program: “Organizational and corporate management requires a unified approach to knowledge sharing. For efficiency and effectiveness, an enterprise-wide knowledge strategy must be provided, a practical approach to managing knowledge. Discreet functional entities cannot meet this need and an institutional knowledge culture, engaging all functional units (since all units develop and share knowledge) must be in place. In this presentation, Guy St. Clair describes the new knowledge services – a practical way to deal with knowledge – that meets these needs.”

Also at 4.00 PM, the SLA Knowledge Management Division is sponsoring the KM Cafe: Competencies and Careers. This interactive discussion will focus on key skills necessary for successful knowledge professionals, university programs available to develop KM skills, certification programs, job opportunities, and more. Speakers are Anne Rogers, Director, Scientific Knowledge Services at Cargill, Denise Chochrek, Senior Knowledge Analyst at Frito Lay, Heather Hedden, Senior Taxonomy Analyst, Project Performance Corporation, and Kenneth Wheaton, Web Services Librarian, Alaska State Court System.