SLA 2009 – Day 4 – Tuesday

Early morning – session at 7:30 am

7: 30am -- More With Less: Successful Time Management Practices

11: 30am  --Solo Librarians Division Business Meeting Luncheon

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12:30 Interdisciplinary Science and Its Impact on Information Professionals

1: 30pm  -- Working Smarter: Creating a Virtual Assistant

5pm  -- All Sciences Poster Session and Reception

9 pm -- Information Technology, Leadership and Management, and Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Divisions Open House: The Embassy Ball

with visits to the exhibits mixed in.

 

 

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SLA 2009 -- Day 3 - Monday

Slept in this morning. First session not until 9 am.

Went to first choice – ROI 2.0 corporate libraries – seemed like a long ad for an ebook vendor. left and went to second choice – Radical Reference – not what I thought at all. Too left wing for me.

Went to third choice – social networking analysis with Jay Liebowitz – this one was a great choice. Mapping of social networks to determine communication channels and interactions to locate bottlenecks and unconnects

At 11 am went to “moving up the ladder when there is no ladder to climb”. Jeanne Miller of UMICH was first speaker. Hildy Dworkin in NY city government was second and Karen Rescik was third. Very interesting and provided some good ideas to try.

Between all sessions I went to the exhibit hall and met people, learned about potential services, etc.

Migraine caused me to miss Canadian Reception and Elsevier Reception. Went to Solo open house and IT open house as they were in my hotel.

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SLA 2009 – Day 2

Got to sleep in today.  Rain was predicted, but the weather has remained beautiful. Sunny and clear.

Had a few things to print and had a bit of problem with the Kinkos systems, but worked it out.

Solo Division Board meeting at noon. Went well. I am secretary and hope to have minutes finished in the next few days.

Went to the exhibits for most of the afternoon. Talked to many vendors and picked up some quality swag.

Skipped the keynote because my head was not good. Stayed in and rested.

Went to SciTech Poster session

Knowledge Management Reception

LMD

and IT receptions.

SLA 2009 Day 1

5:00 am Woke up in Oakville ON

5:30 AM - Picked up by Airport Limo and whisked off to Toronto Pearson International Airport for a 8:00 am flight (we must be at the airport 2 hours before international flights and no matter what some people think, USA is still an international country)

5:50 AM - Checking in

6:20 AM - Sitting in boarding area waiting

6:25 AM - Drinking a Tim Hortons coffee and enjoying a toasted everything bagel with herb and garlic cream cheese

7:15 AM - Getting US cash from ATM in terminal

8:00 AM - On plane

9:10 AM - In Washington DC

11:15 AM - Checking into Washington Renaissance Hotel Downtown

1:00 PM – Headed for Convention Center. One block away.

Computers down at registration at conference centre. Back up shortly. Computer tells me to go to “badge pickup” – ???? – no signs, no nothing with that on it. What it really means is “Talk to person behind desk to get tickets and bag”.

1:30 PM – sandwich, chips, and Diet Coke (my hotel is all Pepsi, bummer) from upper level conference snack booth ($12) and wading through stuff in conference bag. Put badge together, checked tickets, read programme, etc.

2:00 PM – in 2010 New Orleans Planning Meeting!! Guess who is keynote speaker next year – James Carville and his wife (I guess you US people would know her, but all I know is she is the other party from him and I don’t even know which party he is [yes yes, I could look it up, but it does not really matter that much to me]) I do not follow politics but this is a very interesting choice. Guess Brad Pitt was unavailable :)
Met Hildy Dworkin and Rene Shoemaker, my fellow SOLO exec members.

5:00 PM – in Renaissance bar/restaurant having drinks and dinner with Hildy and Rene.

6 PM – on bus tour of Washington – see photos on Flickr, as I won’t post them all here :) I took this one. It was a very nice day for a tour. Too humid and no water available. Herded all over and meeting the same herds, I mean tour groups, over and over at each landmark.  (Note to tour company – water the livestock occasionally)

Met a bunch of very nice ladies on the tour!!

9:30 PM -  heading  back to hotel, hot and thirsty

The rest of the evening was checking email, finding minutes for Sunday’s board meeting, putting feet up and off to ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ by 11PM. An early night, perhaps the last :)

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Sharing SLA 2009 Personal Conference Planner information

A tweet on Twitter from Jill Hurst-Wahl about not being able to share SLA Conference Planner information started this chain of thought.

Google calendars are easily shared, posted and updated from exported data from other calendar programmes. I knew last year I exported my conference planner, imported it into Outlook and printed the pages in a more user friendly format.

I knew the same could be done for Google calendar.

• Start in your planner. Click the button to “Export to Outlook” and save the file somewhere you can remember. This creates a CSV file.
• open Google calendar (http://calendar.google.com)
• create a new calendar if you want, or import the items into your existing one. I created a new one called SLA 2009
• Click “settings” on the “My calendars” box and choose “import calendar” under “My Calendars”
• Browse to the file you saved above, choose which Google calendar to import into and Import.

Under calendar details for this calendar you now have options to share it, post it, etc. Here is mine. You can see I still have a few decisions to make as to which sessions I will be attending. You can update it by exporting from the Planner and importing into Google calendar again and not allowing duplicates.

Enjoy

Purina Walk for Dog Guides

 

My family, including our Dog Guide Foster Puppy AJ, will be participating in the Purina Walk for Dog Guides on May 31, 2009 to help raise funds for the training and placement of Dog Guides.

AJ is our second foster puppy.

All Dog Guides are provided to eligible candidates at no cost. Funding for Dog Guide training is 100 per cent obtained from donations and no government funding is received. Dog Guides Canada has already provided their specially trained Dog Guides to more than 1300 men, women and children from ages eight to 88. With your help, more people can experience the mobility, safety and independence a devoted Dog Guide partner brings.

You can help by giving an online gift by credit card by clicking 'Donate Now'.

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My Fundraising Goal

$1,000.00

Raised so far $825.00

Photo management software

I have been looking for quite some time for good great software that is free low cost, user friendly, downloadable (i.e. not a web based system like flickr, webshots, etc.), has commenting features, and does not need a lot of admin knowledge.

I have read a number of articles, checked out discussion lists and downloaded many trials.

Here is what I have found so far:

Omeka – this looked great. I got all excited. Then our IT people informed me that you need to have running Linux, Apache, PHP5 and MySQL5 and they were not willing. All that is beyond me. If it is not beyond you, this looks like a perfect solution.

“Omeka is a free and open source collections based web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators, and cultural enthusiasts. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability. Until now, scholars and cultural heritage professionals looking to publish collections-based research and online exhibitions required either extensive technical skills or considerable funding for outside vendors. By making standards based, serious online publishing easy, Omeka puts the power and reach of the web in the hands of academics and cultural professionals themselves.”

Gallery – This one also looks good, however it also requires PHP and a web server, etc.

“Gallery is an open source project with the goal to develop and support leading photo sharing web application solutions. The Gallery project develops open source software licensed under the GPL, and is maintained and developed by a community of users and developers. The development is a distributed effort, with collaboration from around the globe. The team is well organized, with weekly meetings, and constant communication. Serving millions worldwide, the Gallery project is the most widely used system of its kind. Gallery is free to download and use.  Gallery is also the name of the main product, an online photo album organizer. Gallery gives you an intuitive way to blend photo management seamlessly into your own website whether you're running a small personal site or a large community site.”

Extensis Portfolio – this one is not free, but it is reasonably priced. However it also got some less than rave reviews. I’ll have to try the demo. It is used by a few very well know places.

Canto Cumulus – no pricing on their site.

“Search and find images across your entire organization. Cumulus makes it all available and searchable by subject matter, creator/photographer, campaign, model or any other custom metadata you define— even if the original image source is offline. Cumulus makes it easy to share all your images, or just those you choose. Provide easy self-service access to the latest approved version of every image you want to distribute… in whatever resolution or format your users need.”

Microsoft Expressions Media -- $199

This one got bad reviews, so I did not spend too much time looking at it. Perhaps a demo??

IDimager – at $129 for the professional this one looks very good. It has all the features I was looking for. It has a free 30 day trial so that is next. One feature that I am really lookign forward to is “area tagging” like in FaceBook. You can then tag people in the photo directly so everyone knows who is who.  Other features are: Revolutionary search system; Fast image collecting; Versioning and Stacking; Area tagging; Relational labels; Easy metadata management; Archiving; Open architecture; Unicode™ support

“imaging software that is complementary to your digital imaging equipment. Its many features will make it easier to maintain the large number of photo files that you will produce. Some feature examples are: acquire images from a digital camera, browse, organize, catalogue, version control, archive, edit, e-mail, print, find, slide shows, publish images to the Internet... and more.”

 

 

Article I found of great value -- Systems for Managing Image Collections  http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/stillimages/advice/systems-for-managing-image-collections/

Fake Journals

via http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/03/merck-and-elsevier-p.html

Merck publishes, basically a marketing document, as a journal. Elsevier does the actual publishing.

 

What is NOT wrong with this?

Goodbye friends

Some of my friends have been deleted.  If you are one of them, please don’t take it personally. I was running out of time in the day to read it all.

I reduced my Facebook friends list by about half. I also reduced the number of people I am following on Twitter significantly. But the one reduction that will buy me the most time, is cutting my subscriptions on Google Reader by about 65%. 

I figure the really important news will be retweeted and reblogged by someone I do follow.

So,  farewell old friends…..

Library Society of the World “Shover and Maker Award” winner

 

I thank you all for your confidence in me and my abilities. Without you I would never have won this prestigious Library Society of the World “Shover and Maker” award, let alone been nominated for it.

I have been a shover and a maker for many years and am finally rejoicing that someone else has recognized my unique talents.  See: http://www.shoversandmakers.net/sm-award-winners-2009  I should be there somewhere.

 

After a degree in chemical engineering and a masters in library science, I am now in my 22nd year with Xerox. I am located in the postmodern structure at the corner of Winston Churchill and the QEW in Mississauga, ON, CANADA.

This last year, in order to win this award, I completed the following – among other things:

• updated internal library web pages
• negotiated contracts with a number of big name library suppliers
• developed and implemented a system to import all the MARC records for our ebook collection (over 12K titles) into our library catalogue
• worked really hard at understanding US/Canada corporate copyright agreements
• learned how to build things in Second Life
• twittered (tweeted?) like mad
• designed/implemented/populated a database of courses and conferences in our area of interest with web interface
• supported engineers, chemists, physicists, etc. at two locations in two countries, thousands of miles apart, and kept most of them happy
• attended SLA in Seattle
• championed a library booth at an internal technical conference
• found someone else to handle the interaction with the US government’s iEdison system
• got a new laptop with vista and had them uninstall it and install XP
• won an internal award for my community work (foster family for Dog Guide puppies)
• won $100 gift certificate from SLA for completing the 23-things project (months have gone by and I have not seen the money though)
• became webmaster for CFUW Oakville

Twitter - http://twitter.com/carolyne/
Facebook - www.facebook.com/people/Carolyne-Sidey-Darimont/508741970
blog – http://carolyne-stuff.blogspot.com
second life – CarolyneSidey Xerox
Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/carolyne/
Webshots – http://community.webshots.com/user/cdarimont
meebo – _carolyne_
email – carolyne (dot) sidey (at) xerox (dot) com 
          library (dot) blogger (at) gmail (dot) com

Ada Lovelace Day : Ruth Adams

Just who is Ada Lovelace you may ask and why am I posting about her.

To honor the birthday of Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, 1500+ people have signed a pledge to profile a woman in technology on March 24.  This is my contribution. Many people are blogging about her and other women of science. Ruth Wilson of the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology emailed to let us know that their guest blogger from today is the great-great-great niece of Ada - Honora Smith, Operational Research and Management Science at the University of Southampton.

Ada Lovelace, according to Wikipedia:

“Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815, London – 27 November 1852, Marylebone, London), born Augusta Ada Byron, was the only legitimate child of George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron. [the famous poet, Lord Byron] She is widely known in modern times simply as Ada Lovelace. She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.”

I have chosen the first women from Canada to be granted a patent – Ruth Adams. She was granted a patent in 1855 (before Canada was Canada) for a Reverse Cooking Stove – one of only 490 issued that year.

From List of Canadian patents from the beginning of the Patent Office, June, 1824, to the 31st of August, 1872 (1882)

No. 492-ADAMS, (R.,) of the City of Toronto, in the County of York, for a "Reverse Cooking Stove." Quebec, dated 20th January, 1855.

I found very little about our Mrs Adams. I looked in every reasonable resource on my local library’s database site. None had any information on Ruth Adams. I did find her name misspelled as “Addams.” The best place for information was inventivewomen.com (http://www.inventivewomen.com/library/library_ruthadams_on.shtml) where she has a full page. This is her only invention, but from the language and drawings in the application, they assume she was well education and bold enough to try.

“Ruth wrote, "My invention has the following advantage over other cooking stoves in use... cleanliness, beauty and convenience. Cleanliness, the smoke and ash are so secured that no inconvenience can arise therefrom. Beauty, as even the foot and kettle can be kept bright and clean. Convenient, as it's parts can be used within the whole."”

She was married (Reverend James Adams) and lived in Toronto. Her husband was from Esquesing, Halton Co. (where I currently live – now Oakville, Milton, Georgetown – Esquesing being near Georgetown) She had been widowed by the time she submitted the patent application and there is no mention of children.

21 years

Today is my anniversary at Xerox.

21 years ago!!

FIS2132H - The Literature of Science and Technology

Went into Toronto yesterday to speak to the  FIS2132H - The Literature of Science and Technology  class at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information Studies.

I want to thank Patricia Meindl for inviting me. Patricia is teaching this class and is the Chemistry Librarian for UofT.

Other invited speakers were Kathryn FitzGerald from MaRS and Leila Fernandez, Science Librarian at York University.

They were a very interested class, asking relevant and probing questions. I enjoyed seeing the UofT campus again – some things have changed, much is still the same after 28 years. (28!!! OMG)What is always the same are the BBQ Pork Buns at the Yung Sing bakery on Baldwin St.    Delicious

I am a winner!!

 

Just received this email:

Thank you for participating in SLA’s 23 Things. I am pleased to inform you that you are the recipient of $100 for completing all 23 Things. The prizes were generously donated by Dialog and Dow Jones.

At the SLA Leadership Summit in Savannah, 23 names were drawn from a hat and the 23 Things winners were announced to resounding applause. In addition to $100, you will also receive a PDF certificate of completion signed by SLA 2008 President Stephen Abram and CEO Janice Lachance to show [to] your management!

Congratulations on completing all 23 Things! Your hard work is an inspiration to our members and your new skills will be a benefit to you and your organization.

Sincerely,

Stacey Bowers