NFAIS always has an interesting speaker for its Miles Conrad Memorial Lecture. I just noticed that in 2005 this was James P. McGinty, Vice Chairman of Cambridge Information Group on What it Takes to Gain “Mindshare” from the Perspective of Academic Librarians. He reports on a survey of US and European academic librarians asking their opinions on various issues. Some of these, since he is an information vendor, are about preferred relationships with vendors, and it also includes perceptions about changes in academic librarianship, importance of difference factors (e.g. involvement of academics) etc.http://www.nfais.org/publications/mc_lecture_2005.htm
NFAIS has a good site, and they put up slides from their events (which focus on the information industry) pretty promptly. NFAIS used to be the (US) National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services but they ditched the full form of the name some time ago and now just say that "NFAIS seeks to be recognized globally as the premier membership organization for groups that aggregate, organize and facilitate access to information".
Photo by S. Webber: view from boat between Torcello and Burano, Italy, Dec 2005
