This year, my paper “Doing Library Business in India: A Success Story” won the Best Conference Paper Award at the Special Libraries Association’s annual conference held in Seattle June 16th through 19th.  This year’s conference theme was “Breaking Rules, Building Bridges”, and my paper was honored for innovative ideas and contribution to the scholarship of the SLA organization.  In line with the theme,  the paper describes how Franklin Templeton Library turned challenges of globalization into opportunities while breaking some rules and building bridges between the U.S. and Indian information professionals. 

To present the paper at the conference, I decided to “break another rule”: instead of PowerPoint I used idea maps.   And it worked!  Using MindManager, I put together two simple maps: a cover map and a presentation map.  Instead of a dozen or so PPP slides, I had two slides with a single click in between (helped me to stay focused).  I also think that more holistic and visual representation of key points helped my audience to see a big picture and details at the same time.