REPORT FROM THE ALA-2007 MIDWINTER MEETING
Friday 01/19/2007
Ribbon Cutting Ceremony and Booth Attendance
5:15 pm-
Since I had a meeting later on I stopped just at the few Vendor Booths:
Serials Solutions: http://www.serialssolutions.com/home.asp the “provider of e-resource access and management services”, whose representative passed several brochures for Lana Litvan.
Scopus by Elsevier: http://www.info.scopus.com/ a “database for scientific, technical and medical information, containing approximately 13,000 journal titles from 4,000 publishers, and abstracts going back to 1966. It provides searching capability, linking to full-text sources, cited references, saved search and alerting feature, and is the most comprehensive A&I database of scientific literature ever assembled”
USC do not have this, but I have been using it through the
Electronic Resource Management Interest Group
6:30 pm-7:30pm, Hilton Seattle
This interest group was discussing a white paper on “feasibility of propagating financial data across platforms, where the ILS and ERMS come from the same or different vendors”, here is the white paper
Saturday 01/20/2007
Next Evolution in OPAC’ sand Search Engines
10:30 am-12:30 pm,
This session drew a lot of people: the room was packed and it was definitely worth while attending it. There were three presenters:
- King County Library System, WA implemented Aquabrowser: http://www.medialab.nl/index.asp?page=aquabrowserlibrary/overview it’s a searching tool, independent from the ILS. Besides being very visual it also uses associations, spelling corrections, discovery trail and translations pulled from the MARC fields.
- James Madison University, VA presented their study on usability test of Ebsco Basic and Visual search tabs. Only one percent of Ebsco done in visual search, though fifty percent of patrons at
Slavic and East European Section of ACRL (SEES)
4:00 pm- 7:00 pm, Westin Hotel
This was SEES Automated Bibliographic Control chapter and though most of the committee members were absent, the rest of the team provided a lot of information, plus delicious pasties from the Russian Bakery at the Pike Place Fish Market. One of the issues was the cleaning of the Slavic Cataloging Manual at: http://www.indiana.edu/~libslav/slavcatman/
Diana Brooking from
New Members Round Table (NMRT) Social
7:00 pm- 8:30 pm
This was waste of time and I wished I signed for some more productive events.
Sunday 01/21/2007
5th Annual Electronic Resources Breakfast
8:00 am – 10:00 am, Grand Hyatt
This breakfast was sponsored by Ebsco and moderated by Jill Emery from the
- “New feats of flexibility: what do you do when your ILS is purchased by a completely different ILS vendor, especially when you’ve already implemented an ERM system? Does this/should this change how you manage your e-resources?” This discussion was mostly revolving around Endeavour’s Voyager, since most of the participants use it in their libraries and I got an impression that they are not very happy with it.
- “Can OCLC create a cooperative knowledgebase for managing e-resource resolution? Is this idea coming too late in the game or right on time?” The representative from OCLC mentioned that they’ll be happy to do that if there is really a need.
- “What does the Wiley buyout of Blackwell mean for us after 2007? How can we better manage these content mergers?” The discussion was revolving mainly about negotiating licenses and approaching faculty members, who are editors of the periodicals with problems regarding online access.
- “NextGen search interfaces: how to best accommodate the e-content that isn’t quite standards compliant but still of value to users”.
- SUSHI’s a great appetizer but what other statistics do we find we need that we’re not collecting in regards to e-resources?
ACRL Presidential Candidates Forum
11:30 am- 1:30 pm, Westin Seattle
The two presidential candidates were Erika Linke and Scott Walter, who answered questions from the list, such as visibility of libraries on campus, scholarly communication issues, and key issues facing the academic libraries in the next two years. What I found interesting was that Scott Walter has been heavily citing works by Jerry Campbell. Both candidates also agreed that institutional repositories for faculty are not working very well right now because of the need to publish in the peer-reviewed publications for the tenure.
