Budgets, snow and hidden collections

Just back from Denver and ALA Midwinter where it was 12 degrees many days and snowy! Always fun to see friends and go to stimulating meetings and compare war stories. The talk of the meeting was budgets, layoffs, furloughs (do you know that some states do not allow this? South Carolina sure does). Also talk of online database evaluations and cancellations. The publishers and aggregators et al were more upbeat than the librarians. There was a lof of talk about Hidden Collections — collections held only by a particular library — and the need to focus on making those collections available through cataloging rather than the collections that are held by many libraries. I remember Deanna Marcum mentioning in her keynote at Charleston that the Library of Congress was focusing on Hidden Collections. Another tidbit — heard that Solinet and Palinet are merging under a new name Lyrasis.