SLA 2024 Annual Conference & Expo

Conferences are an important resource for gathering industry intelligence through the sharing of knowledge and experiences among attendees. There are also insights to be discovered from analyzing the technical programs or conference proceedings, categorized as grey literature. The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate how a corporate library/information organization can play a role in competitive intelligence by data mining the technical program abstracts from conferences for competitive intelligence insights. The presenter will discuss methods of analyzing the various data fields such as author and affiliation collaborations, concept mapping, and historical perspectives by leveraging analytic software tools. A case study will also be used to illustrate how the ExxonMobil library partners with SMEs to analyze technical program abstract data and how it fits into a broader systematic competitive intelligence “playbook” for organizing conference attendance, synthesizing, and communicating useful information to internal stakeholders.