So I did wander around the conference a bit talking to vendors and getting some stuff.

Totebags – I threw out/recycled most of my vendor totebags before I aquired a knitting habit, and now I actually could use a few totebags to store random bits of yarn for the projects I’m working on. It looked to me like Demco had the coolest totebags because they were large, and blue, and had extra outside pockets. There were some nifty totebags from Viz that were advertising Shonen Jump. I’m sure all the cool YA librarians scored the Viz totebags. I wound up with a basic black totebag from Other Press and I filled it with:

A mini-watering can (this was the big what the heck item from the conference)
Advance copies of Tamora Pierce, Cornelia Funke, Gregory Mcguire, Louise Erdrich, Paulo Coelho, Robin Hobb, and Alice Hoffman. I think I was most excited about the Cornelia Funke book Inkspell, because I loved Inkheart and am excited to read the sequel.

Comic book/Graphic novel swag was not as good as it has been in the past, I thought. There were a bunch of recycled free comic book editions of comics. I think the best quality swag came from ADVManga, if you signed up for information about their anime club, you got copies of Yotsuba& and Cromartie High School. Those were the best free manga by far since both titles are so funny.
DC was giving away massive first volumes of CMX titles. I already had Land of the Blindfolded (my favorite CMX title) and The Swan (old school ballet manga) but I picked up From Eroica With Love, Musashi #9, and Gals.
Viz and Tokyopop were giving away their usual compilation preview volumes, and I picked up the preview magazine for Shojo Beat. I also got a couple marvel and dc comics, and the free comic book day issue of Owly.
The best pens were from xrefer, their pens light up with purple light, which is quite fetching.
Vendors:
It sounds like CSA is going to implement an author information feature for their databases at some point in the future, which will provide a brief biographical sketch, picture when available, institutional affiliation, etc. This looked very cool and I could see it really coming in handy when working with students. Someone from Ebsco said that they were also planning a similar feature.
I wasn’t sure what to think about aquabrowser. Some of the search results and functionality did look more like what you would expect from a web search engine than a library catalog, which I think is a good thing. You can look at it at the Queens library catalog. I wonder about server loads and response times, because it sounded like the aquabrowser can sit in front of another ILS system. I also wonder how the suggested searches would scale in a university library with a very large collection.