NMRT

I can't believe that it's already middle of March. School have been crazy, especially LIS 2001 and Ontology presentation. I do not want to hear word "ontology" ever again and I am looking forward to the end of this semester, which happens to be April 28th, my birthday, yeah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also, I just got an email that I have been nominated for the 2007-2008 NMRT committee: Member Relations, something I am looking forward working on:)

Travel Oregon Book Blog

Since Oregon is one of the states will be traveling this summer or fall, I started checking this blog.

It was created by the Oregon State Library and the Oregon Tourism Commission.

Web 2.0 Video and Science.gov 4.0

This YouTube Web 2.0 video was posted on the CALIX and I thought it was funny. Also, since I am taking Government information class and assignments , this announcement from LITA was helpful: Science.gov Version 4.0 Launched

LIS 2001

I just posted something on week 6 discussion board for the sake of posting. Ah...I have nothing to say about authority control, this is a very frustrating class for me.....

Librarians, Government and Google

In my class on Government Information we were given an article comparing government sites search engines. My favourites are: Google government search and USA.GOV

I have also found this article interesting: it discusses how librarians are using Google.

ALA Midwinter 2007

REPORT FROM THE ALA-2007 MIDWINTER MEETING

SEATTLE, WA

This was my first ALA meeting and for the sake of keeping my blog alive I am posting the report here.

Friday 01/19/2007

Ribbon Cutting Ceremony and Booth Attendance

5:15 pm- Washington Convention Center

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 University of Pittsburgh where I am getting my MLIS, for my research papers and I love it, especially “cited by” part.

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, Fairmont Olympic Hotel

This session drew a lot of people: the room was packed and it was definitely worth while attending it. There were three presenters:

• North Carolina State University, which implemented Endeca: http://endeca.com/ on the top of their ILS and their patrons use in most of their searches. Apparently it’s a wonderful search tool which has multiple buttons to tweak, has relevance ranking, spelling suggestions and has about 11 buttons for faceted navigation or Boolean searching(Amazon.com have 5?)
• 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 James Madison University liked it.

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 University of Washington was moderating the meeting and since she was looking for volunteers to clean the manual, I and Gabriella Reznowski from Washington State University volunteered.

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

5^th 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 University of Texas. There were 5 questions sent in advanced to participants:

- “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.

Chat and more

Okay, first of all I hated the chat on Thursday: all that "me" business takes twice as long and by the time you are asked the conversation is moved on, oh.. frustrating!
I went to Seattle (which is a beautiful city, though Pittsburgh is still my favourite!) last week for ALA Midwinter and here are some pictures. Also thanks to Sophie for her enthusiasm and encouragement in walking across downtown. It was cloudy on Friday and my hotel wouldn't let me check in early, so I went to the Space Needle for a tour.Saturday was a busy day because I tried to visit as many conferences as I could, so when I had a little break I went to the Pikes Place Market, where they have all kind of produce and even Russian food (unfortunately I didn't get to eat it)

Holidays

It was great to have our week long holiday break: no commuting and running after the train, no driving in traffic! One full week of sleeping in, drinking hot chocolate in the morning and sitting by the fire, ah... The only problem is that all of us are now sick. It's like a bad luck: all of us had stomach flu for Thanksgiving and for Christmas it's a cold:(

Freezing cold

I turned in all my assignments last week and signed with relief. Now, I am waiting for the grades. And actually Dr. T got his out: I received A-, for which I am really, really grateful, since I barely had time to do any research for the papers and mostly got them done night before the second(!)due date. I thought I'll get plenty of time with my mom visiting in September/October, but we just keep on doing things in the evenings and on the weekends, which was great, except the quality of homework which suffered badly:( Now, I am waiting for Sue's grading and so far I have 70 out of 100, with two more assignments graded. My grant proposal was checked as "completed", no grade, was it so bad??:( Well, I have to sit and wait. And it's freezing over here at work, brrrr and all of us are sneezing and coughing...I am looking forward to Friday..

TechSoup

While I was finishing my grant proposal for LIS 2700 I found an interesting site This site discusses a lot of topics we cover in our classes: digital divide, open source software, content management.

Thanksgiving

We had the worst Thanksgiving ever! Grandma died from a massive heart attack a day before and though we thought that something like that may happen, no one thought it was going to be so soon. She was 89 and a super-nice person.
Our family also got a stomach flu: my mother-in-law first, then my husband and now it's my daughter. I am coming with it too and I still have to write a paper on economics of scholarly publishing and HIV/AIDS key articles, authors and publications.

Information Literacy Librarian

I loved this blog. Check it out! Or this too: it's a hilarious search engine!

Councilor bloggers

Through NMRT I received email with blog sites for the Councilor bloggers, which I am adding to my blog: Michael, Rochelle, Rory, another Michael and Heidi

DogPile

One of my wonderful colleagues showed me this site and I loved it. She compared it to Dialog, where you can search several databases at once.

ERIL

I can't believe that it is almost the middle of November; time flies! Here is a site I found to be interesting because it deals with electronic resources: Electronic Resources & Libraries

Internet Public Library

I found that this site: Internet Public Librry is quite interesting. You can get links to all kind of subjects from early childhood education to clam-chowder recipes.

Love Libraries from UK

I saw a campaign Love Libraries on Amy's and Justin's blogs and thought is'a good idea to post it on mine.

Why do we need librarians

One of my class-mates (BF) posted this on the DB, I thought it was interesting.

Delta sucks

Not so long ago I saw a web page dedicated to bad customer service from Delta Airlines and what do you know, last Friday everything described on that site happened to my mom. Her flight was delayed for 4 hours, then she and other passengers were placed in a Ramada Inn Hotel in New York. Not only Delta Airlines staff didn't help anyone with carrying luggage to the bus, but they also issued fake food vouchers, which hotel did not accept. So, my mom and bunch of other moms from Ukraine were pretty much starving through the night.

Follow up on GWLA response

One of my colleages passed this along: Momentum for Open Access Reseacrh