From IoP Publishing: PAM Division Open House Photos now live

Sharice Collins from IoP just announced that the photographs from the open house are available online at the address linked above.

sla2005

Toronto, General Impressions

Thanks to everyone responsible for such a fine conference.

Toronto is a great city. The trees are a lasting impression. Elm, Oak, Maple, Birch, Beech, Aspen, just beautiful.

Some fine beers are available, Sleeman Cream Ale, Keith's Pale Ale and Upper Canada Dark. The last was served at the hospitality suite. Thanks IoP.

I have a return ticket for the Airport Express. If anyone could use it, send me an e-mail. I'll want a SASE.

Lunar and Planetary Maps

I'd like to add this announcement to Christina's excellent overview of my talk, the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) is making available digital versions of lunar and planetary maps. If you have any unique maps in your collection you would be willing to share, please get in touch with us. Also, if you have a team that could use an on-line map, let us know.

Notes from Astro II

University of Hawaii at Manoa Flood
Phyllis Tabusa

Photographs are available on the U of H library website. 9” of rain in 6 hours, 50 year flood, debris formed a dam at a bridge, then washed over the banks.

Gov docs – 95% lost. Comprehensive depository library since 1907. Also a UN depository.

Library school class trapped in the basement. They had to throw a chair out of a window and climb out over broken glass.

Tips:
• Keep backup files off site
• Hire someone to do the documentation and replacement
• Look at the Library Disaster Planning Handbook

They’ve got some donations from BYU (Oahu) and UN. But will not be able to replace a ton of things that are local to Hawaii.

ADS Update
Donna Thompson, H-S CfA

myADS
• Notification service
• http://myads.harvard.edu (also from query page)
• registration for two different products, weekly or daily e-print notification
• weekly notification

• e-mail for each database (astro, phys, preprint)
• toc updates for a list of journals,
• can login and retrieve a query or run the saved query on demand

• Daily e-print (new articles)

• RSS
• E-mail

• FAQs

• Not run exactly every week, more like every 10 days
• Old articles recently added to the database will appear as new articles

Historical Literature
• With a grant, hired some students to work on getting metadata for old volumes
• Missing journals – even if not on their list! Send her an e-mail.
• If you get a request for a specific journal you would like to see in ADS let her know.
• ESA-SPs are in progress getting scanned (yay!)
• She needs old ApJ Letters from the 1970

Harvard Sciences Digital Library
Michael Leach
Experiences with an institutional repository

Issues:
• 7 months behind schedule
• Inability of new version to use math/phys symbols in title
• Handle system (permanent url) – won’t operate through a firewall right now. Alternatives to handle system aren’t accepted by d-space
• Click through copyright/license (not tested in Mass. State law)

• Research articles (so authors have to obey those rules for original publication/publisher)
• Data sets
• Learning materials
• Serials
• Videos
• Theses

• Logo issues, name issues with administration

Non-issues:
• Getting content – researchers are lining up impatiently to give content (exception of math community)
• Content is ps or pdf almost exclusively
• No conflict with ADS

Databases
• High demand to store datasets
• How do you do it so it’s usable

Policies and Procedures
• Useful to the community
• Agreement on policies has been easier than expected
• Best practices

Big Questions
• Relationship to google print or google scholar?
• Relationship to non-science libraries
• Virtual journal or virtual subject overlays envisioned haven’t really happened
• Relationship to metasearch or federated search
• Redundancy and preservation
• How to get the man-hours to really support this

MMST – multi-mission at space telescope
International Virtual Observatory – collections of datasets
NAS – recent report asking what will be done to preserve these large datasets
DAS – at NASA GSFC digital assets system using a customized version of Dublin Core, Goddard Core.

Weblogs at the Library
David Bigwood, http://tinyurl.com/8kg57

• Easy to do
• Inexpensive
• A good way to distribute information in multiple formats automatically (IM, SMS, e-mail, RSS)
• Particularly helpful for new acquisitions lists
• Keep in mind

• Less formal – but check spelling, grammar, etc.
• Keep it up to date – don’t let it get stale, probably at least once a week
• Write for your readers – what do they want to read and need to know

• RSS

The whole point of weblogs is to tell our stories to our constituencies.

Note: Here are the PAM blogs I know about
Individual, professional (there are at least a couple of personal ones which I'm not sure the owners are advertising? feedback?)

• Christina (mine!) http://christinaslibraryrant.blogspot.com
• David http://catalogablog.blogspot.com
  
• John http://jdupuis.blogspot.com
  
• Catherine http://englib.info
• Randy http://stlq.info
• Sara
  

Organizations

• LPI Recent Additions to the Library Collection at the Lunar and Planetary Institute
  New & Noteworthy
• Univ of Hawaii, Manoa (abandoned?)
  
• Georgia State
• UCSD
• Drexel: drexelphysics.blogspot.com
  drexelbioscience.blogspot.com
  drexelmath.blogspot.com
  drexelchemistry.blogspot.com

I'll try to add to this when I'm a bit more awake

Edited: 6/13/05, 5pm (Eastern), added linking for blogs, fixed some bullets

Astro Roundtable I: Liz and Pam displaying the t.p.

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Originally uploaded by cpikas.

This has lessons in astronomy for your... down time?

Attendees of the Astro Round Table

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Originally uploaded by cpikas.

We took this picture to really feature Brenda who is center front. A copy will be sent to the archivist and others

Notes from Astro I

Mystery author Alex Brett of the Morgan O’Brien series came and spoke about her reasons for becoming a fiction author and how she came to write her newest book, Cold Dark Matter. She has a science background and experience working in labs. She appreciates the moral dilemmas inherent in scientific research. This particular book had very interesting beginnings. A missing talented physicist who may have disappeared behind the dark curtain during the cold war, the fruit machine, moral ambiguity, and scientific fraud all became the seeds of this book. I’m going to go find a copy! (Thanks Liz B for arranging this!)

LISA V
Donna J. Coletti and Uta Grothkopf
2006, the week after SLA, 3 days long at Harvard. Reception at Harvard-Smithsonian CfA. Check the web page for updates.

Science Organization Committee: common challenges, uncommon solutions
Keynote: Dr. John Huchra, H-S CfA

Program
1) Virtual observatory and what’s in it for libraries – bibliometric studies on ADS, datasets, metadata
2) E-journal swamp
3) Changing publishing sector – open archive, traditional journals, institutional archives
4) Preservation/ archiving/ historical session
5) Beyond ADS and Google – use of commercial databases, hidden literature, Google print and Google scholar
6) Cutting edge technologies – e-metrics, OPACs, blogs/wikis
7) Creative librarian – outreach, marketing

The call for papers will be sent out soon. If your subject is not listed, submit anyway.

Lowell Observatory Logbooks Digitization Project
Antoinette Beiser
They’ve received a grant to conserve older logbooks containing original observations, drawings, etc., 1894-1925, because the originals have been deteriorating. The logbooks are currently being scanned at 72dpi and 400dpi and entered into a database. Scans will be linked to the text of the notebook. Higher quality will be available for a fee. For photos - no thumbnail, just a lower res copy.

They get about 50 requests a year for items found in their archives
http://www.lowell.edu/Research/library

Changing World of the Astronomy Librarian, 1973 to Present
Brenda Corbin, US Naval Observatory
Brenda gave a wonderful overview of her time as the Naval Observatory librarian and the changes in technology that dramatically changed how she conducted her work. She had some great slides with pictures of punch machines, typewriters, catalog cards, and dumb terminals.

Learning Astronomy in your Bathroom
Liz Bryson
Liz showed a roll of toilet paper developed in Japan to teach astronomy. English versions include on on the life of a star and telescope pictures. Liz will provide the URL to order.

Toronto to Denver - JCDL05

Yours truly left lovely Toronto early in order to take in this conference, which I do not ordinarily attend, but decided to this time for a variety of reasons.

Just went to a very well-presented panel entitled "Is Digital Preservation an Oxymoron?" There is a paper track called Use of Digital Libraries in the Sciences.

I will write a small note to PAMers as the experience here seems relevant.

Safe travels all.

Physics Roundtable

My imperfect notes:
Physics Roundtable 11:30
Moderated by Skye Thomsen

Paul Canning, IEEE, http://www.ieee.org/patentcitations
IEEE hired a consulting firm to do a(nother?) study of patents referencing IEEE documents. They looked at the set of patents from top patenting organizations and then all patents related to 7 areas related to IEEE.

The point is that patents are valuable property for the university or company, IEEE documents are heavily used for patents. We should all buy IEEE (which we probably all do).

I’m perhaps a little less tolerant of this discussion, because they’ve really hit this point home over the last year or so. Besides, IEEE is probably the most highly used resource my organization has, so this discussion is irrelevant – we’ll always have some access to it.

Steve Moss, V.P., IOP Publishing
IOP Pricing Initiatives OR What you always wanted to know and were not afraid to ask.
1) why doesn’t IOP have e-only
2) bundling, why are we forced to buy in packages
3) book publishing sold to TandF (losing money, needed to re-invest as a society-based publisher)

There will be four models/choices:
1) Existing
2) Access to IOP’s database (e-only, full archive, all published research, tiered pricing – multiple criteria including GNP of a country, limited perpetual rights, probably only 10-15% more than current)
3) Access to a segment of the database (same as 2 but customized by subject, probably less than we’re paying now)
4) Open access? – abstracts, current papers (30 days free), best papers, certain journals (New Journal of Physics), 1-3 years for new titles, developing countries, back years (eventually)

Question from the audience – if I want to keep what I get, but cancel print, can I get a discount? No – IOP didn’t increase when they turned on electronic access, they kept the print price and added e on at no additional cost so can’t in a business sense do it.

NB: he hopes to lower prices or lessen the annual prices increases (now btwn 5-6%) after divesting of the books and the journals that are now gone to TandF

Segments: via PACs codes and otherwise

Molly White – ditch low performing titles? (answer: membership org, niche titles with strong need from a small group) stop introducing new titles? (answer: not that they’re shopping around to find a new publisher, have needs from the members and demand…. Maybe will stop adding new journals to packages)

Peggy Dominy – do you really need new journals at all, can you just publish the articles and put them in the pot? (answer: professors need to publish for tenure and have a measure of impact of the publishing platform – can we move that to a subject related board instead of a journal-tied board)

-- can’t you just get together with other publishers to only have one new (say, physical biology) title? (answer: they are trying)

Emily P – beta test, user testing? (answer: slow roll out, maybe 2006-7, maybe early adopters as beta)

Karen (UC Davis) – cost of refereeing as a percent of total production cost? can you post it to PAMnet? (he’ll try if it’s not too confidential)
Stella Ota – where did the funds come for the e-access? (answer: not really sure, IOP the institute made an investment of funds for other sources)

David Stern – you have kept costs low while doing some really innovative things… applause

Other topics:
Why keep the print?
• Preservation
• Quality
• Publishers aren’t keeping the print, no national repository for some countries to keep an archive
• Color images born print aren’t well reproduced in digital
• E-versions aren’t complete – errata, ads, editorial info
• Own vs. rent or license
• Integrity of the articles – Elsevier pulled an article
• ILL rights are very confusing for electronic licenses (it’s cheaper to buy the article from a doc delivery place than ILL)

Why ditch the print?
• Strong pressure for space
• Access from away, searching, multi-media
• LOCKSS
• Cost issues

Question: publishers promise that they will give a copy of all of the archives to a national library or repository should they go under -- what if a for-profit goes bankrupt and those are seen as assets that must be sold to pay creditors?

Prime real estate on campus: keep the print there or move the print off site

MIT: risk management method of keeping or ditching print

Price adjustment for the overlap in backfiles?

Punch list for electronic license negotiations

Designing library of the future:
• Combining circ and reference
• Computer and meeting spaces fewer stacks
• Locking mailboxes at the departments
• Open space available for departments to use for social meetings and their meetings

Communications of the division
• Vendors and comfort using PAMnet -- can they contribute by themselves, ask us to post for them, or stay quiet
• Vendors could use PAMnet as an announcement place – not a place to actually conduct the conversation
• When giving feedback to questions on the list, probably good to state where you’re coming from
• If we do a CoP it will be behind a firewall and will limit participation (I suggested a wiki, maybe)

Designing Space

• less room for reference
• one-on-one consultation areas
• curate and not be visible

New Roles for Librarians

• teaching PIM -- using bibliographic managers, etc.
  
• databases?
  

sla2005

A Good Time Was Had By All at the All-Sciences Reception

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Originally uploaded by cpikas.

It was at the Steam Whistle Brewery behind the conference center

General Session Notes: Gary Hamel

This will probably be a bit long and rambling, but I was asked to put them here instead of on my blog.

9:50am

Gary Hamel, author of Leading the Revolution, visiting professor, London School…

“Facing Up To The Future: Helping Your Organization Thrive In A World Of Accelerating Change”

While information needs are the same (search, find, use), the hegemony in information sources is gone.

Compared University of Phoenix to conventional public university – the public universities were late in distance/part time/continuing adult education and consequently lost market share (=money). Many of the large companies like Coke failed to react quickly enough to new markets and have lost a lot of share.

The distance between winning and losing has never been so short.

Pace of change accelerates, so must the pace of “strategic renewal” (for companies and industries, both). Turnarounds are celebrated in management books, but if you think about it, can only happen after failures to act. Companies need to not get in the situation where a turnaround is necessary.

Automatic, spontaneous, reflexive… does this describe change in your company? (Huh?) He wants us to fight entropy (doesn’t that kind of mean that we’ll try to fight the laws of thermodynamics?) I think reflexive (aka reactionary?) change in a company is probably bad.

Companies need to have better intelligence, analysis, and quickly act. Instead, companies try to avoid or dismiss unpleasant news and ignore it. Then rationalize, then mitigate, and finally confront. Companies stay way too long in denial.

• Success is temporary
• Filter out the filterers (the yes men who keep the bosses from hearing bad news)
• Positive vision, look toward the future with expectation and hope

Returns on incrementalism going down when compared to returns on innovation. It’s not the data or cognitive ability, it’s the ability to be contrarian or think outside of the box. He wants the librarians to enable this in our organizations

Where does innovation come from ?
• Unexamined dogma
• Unexploited trends
• Unseen assets
• Unvoiced needs (reference interviews?)

Challenge the orthodoxy
• Surface the dogmas
• Find the absurdities
• Go to extremes (look for a 98% improvement instead of 5%)

Leveraging discontinuities
• Find the fringe
• Amplify weak signals
• Look for the big picture (pattern recognition, customers are better at finding what they need than companies are at making what customers need)

Unvoiced needs is understanding how the customer feels – empathy, borrowing from other industries

Summary:
• Variety leads to resilience, lots of ideas to keep a few good ones
• Markets are resilient because money can be reallocated quickly to the next big thing
• Distributed power as in a democracy enables resilience
• Faith leads to individual resilience
• Cities are resilient because they offer the opportunity for serendipity

SLA members should raise value-add by being
• Court jesters (speaking truth to power)
• Mindset engineers
• Future-seeking radar
• Decision architects
sla2005

Go Alison!

IOP did a 60-second interview with a PAM member. Thanks again IOP for the computers, suite, food... etc.!

Gary Price: The Newest and the Best from the One Who Knows

Finally a room almost large enough to contain the hoards of librarians here for Gary's Talk. There were only about 30 people on the floor in the back of the biggest room!

Here's a brief rundown of what he spoke about. I got here a little late and so am sitting on the floor in the back, unable to see the screen. Luckily, Gary is good at describing what’s going on.

Books:
Google print -- Brand new books full text in electronic form from the publishers (similar to Amazon’s search inside the book). Limited amount can be seen. This is really a sales tool for the publishers

Google library -- Digitizing books from major libraries. Public domain book (in U.S. 1920 and up, outside of the US 1900 and up). Not full text either.

Internet archive – 1 million books, can be printed, can see the whole thing.

U Penn’s Online books page – index of full text books available online. Includes NAP and Project Gutenberg

Google Scholar (see Jacso’s review)

Google video (from tv, searchable, but can’t actually watch the video)

Backlinking:
Google: link:www.page.whatever , can’t use an additional syntax with this
Yahoo: link:http://www.page.whatever , CAN use an additional syntax

Yahoo:
Start with http://search.yahoo.com and customize it for your needs. Remove tabs as necessary.
News crawls 7k sources (3k more than Google)
Yahoo images – embedded results. IOW if you’re doing a search for something that it thinks refers to a picture, it will return image results.
Y! Mindset – slider bars like the smart sort product comparison pages to re-rank
Mobile search product – and can export search results directly to cell phone

Ask Jeeves:
Smart answers – natural language tries to answer your question, offers refinements, vertical searches

MSN:
New database, cached pages, instant answers

Exalead:
Proximity search (yay!). Look for Mary Ellen Bates’ review (and my notes from CIL2005)

Gigablast:
Site search also can create a specialized search where it will only search the list of sites you specify

A9:
Meta-search, but tends to be a little complicated for the average users. See, though, the A9 yellow pages, which are cool, and have pictures of the businesses and virtually walk the street. (look at pages jaunes photos de villes – with pictures of 6 European cities

Search Engine Overlap:
Ranking.Thumbshots.com – visualize overlap
Dog Pile

Specialized Databases:
GlobalSpec – engineering.
ZoomInfo – used to be Eliyon, they also sell a commercial product. You can claim your own profile
Scirus – science
Indeed – federated jobs database with alert service (note for CI types!)
Smeal – business, focused crawl of the open web of scholarly business info
CiteSeer – computer science, similar to Smeal, ps or pdf or html full text, link to the author’s home page
Melissa(? Missed this) -- stats lookup, ready reference, home sales in a zipcode
RedLightGreen – from research libraries group, search bibliographic records for books, export citations to certain formats, create login and associate yourself with a library
Reference Extract – meta search ask-a sites from

Dynamic Query Modification:
Google suggest (see the labs page) – works as you type
AOL – current engine is Google. AOL gives smart box suggestions. New shopping service “pinpoint shopping” maps your search to a controlled vocabulary

Meta Search:
Clusty – dynamic taxonomy creation (IOW not mapping to a controlled vocabulary). See the government tab.
Needle search toolbar – can create a toolbar for any other search page. (firefox only)
Copernic – same for IE

Mobile:
Sem@code – hold your camera up to a barcode and it will search for information (cool!)
Mobot – take a picture of something and it will search for it (the idea with this or another service eventually for you to take a picture of a street sign and have it find restaurants)
Bloglines for mobile

Misc:
Podscope – searches podcasts, keyword searches words spoken in podcasts (tv eyes? technology)
Topix.net – news
Rocketnews – 12k sources
Diplomacy monitor
MedlinePlus – weekly update of new sites added to MedlinePlus by NLM.
TV Eyes video from Bloomburg – search and see clips search in Yahoo with site:tveyes
TotalRecorder – record streaming audio on your computer (copyright issues apply)
Cryptome – gov docs that might be removed from the web. Includes an archive of satellite and aerial imagery from USGS, etc.

Random Notes from the PAM Business Meeting

PR toolkit for PAM
Survey via surveymonkey for strategic planning

Physics translations-
Bob Michaelson
Link from dpam page. Updates to the database.
Resources for the history of physics S. Brush University of Maryland list of classic papers and edited collections and translations into/out of English. List became a basis for the PAM list. Newer translations in the open literature since 1972 added. Expanding now beyond physics to chem. physics, etc. These are things you can get to readily (not stuck in some archive box in the “translation center”)

Jarhbuch Project – PAM Division Award
(digitization, commentary, MSC codes, indexing, translations of article titles into English, linking to scanned full text – more than 15k now). It’s freely available or as part of Zentralblatt Math.

Kris Fowler -- PAM Achievement Award
Amazing work from her. See her fabulous book on Using the Mathematics Literature, numerous publications on the math literature, work on the government documents, etc.

Some Sunday sessions

I went to the Academic Librarians Roundtable on Sunday morning and the session was quite good. It opened with Dana Roth continuing his long series of presentations on exchange rate profiteering by certain European publishers. The RT part of the RT had each table discussing one of three topics and reporting back to the group at the end. The topics were: OA/institutional repositories, strategies for outreach librarians and virtual reference. Each topic generated some interesting ideas from the tables. The breakfast was good but quite basic (scrambled eggs, potatoes, pastries). I guess convention centres aren't noted for their budget value meals.

Another Sunday session was the SciTech Vendor update, featuring three presentations on document delivery by CISTI, The Linda Hall Library and The British Library. The presentations themselves were quite standard marketing pitches, outlining their various collections and ILL services. Each was done quite well -- it's hard to see how anyone could go wrong using any of the above services. I did learn a few interesting things, however. I'd always thought the Linda Hall Library was a for-profit doc delivery service, but I was wrong. In fact, it's a privately owned not-for-profit public library (in Kansas City) which was set up in 1946 by the wills of Herbert and Linda Hall. It operated in their home until 1956. Learn something new every day.

The other interesting bit was a story told by the BL presenter. The BL, according to the presenter, has always been viewed as the source of last resort. If no one else has it, many will finally try the huge and eclectic BL collections and find it there. Well, apparantely recently someone was researching the history of the design of coffee percollators. How to find that kind of weird info? Well, the BL has an extensive collection of old department store catalogues!

At the end of the session, someone in the audience basically asked the BL representative why someone should choose them instead of CISTI. I would like to commend both the BL and CISTI reps for handling the situation diplomatically. No blows were exchanged.

IOP hosted great open house

Seemed like a lot of folks were having fun in the Division Suite this evening at the IOP sponsored Open House.

Here's Jill, Bridget, Pete & Laurel in the suite:

CS RT

First of all, thanks to Sara for the kind words about the RT. I think it went pretty well. I was quite happy that so many places are experiencing better enrollment numbers that we are at York and that I've seen reported in the media. I was even happier that the discussion morphed into something else altogether, about the growing interdisciplinarity of the computing fields. The number of attendees really pleased me, as we were up against a bunch of other scitechy sessions, particularly the Poster sessions and the Blogging panel. Thanks again to ACM for sponsoring the session.

Something on your pillow

Well, this is the first time this has happened to me at SLA. I am staying at Holiday Inn on King. A nice, but modest, conference hotel. Elsevier has arranged to place a commercial message on my pillow: a postcard suggesting I should enter their contest, and also purchase Scopus.

PAM, Chem, Sci-Tech Poster Session

We got a lot of traffic at the poster session this morning - I was presenting on electronic resources & the visually impaired patron. I also saw David Stern and several other PAM-ers posters but couldn't ger around the poster area to see them all.

CS RT

A few kinda random notes on the CS roundtable held earlier today.
* Well attended ~ 30 or so!
* John Dupuis was a lively moderator, good choice/good volunteer. Personally I wish more folks had talked, but we had some good discussions on several of John's agenda points.
* Many refuted John's allegation that CS depts. are shrinking; instead, many universities (majority in attendance were academics) have *growing* computer science depts. and/or curricula. In fact, some consensus that interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary programs w/ a cs angle are rapidly proliferating. Some places, e.g. Penn State, Dartmouth, are establishing new interdisciplinary centers w/ a CS angle. Some consensus that CS graduate/masters' students are the biggest CS group and/or library users at many campuses (CS and EE grad. students are the biggest Sci & Eng library users).
* Spinoff discussion on growing "informatics," "bioinformatics," etc. programs at universities.
* Another spinoff discussion on interdisciplinarity is changing acquistions budgets and selecting. Some competition betwixt selectors. Some consensus that collaboration is ultimate goal, and it is starting to work at many places.
* Vendors in attendance included of course sponsor ACM, as well as IEEE, Computing Reviews, and others. Sorry I did not get them all. All reps. were interactive and pleasantly low key but participatory.
* A bit of a discussion on institutional repositories sparked by ACM rep. asking if he should "lose sleep" over IRs. Consensus seemed no, that indexing/making available local grey lit (tech repts etc) was first job of burgeoning IRs. I was surprised more institutions did not/do not have IRs. (USC has an IR Task Force which I'm on, we decided to ASK faculty FIRST before simplying building it and hoping theyd come). Queen's here in Toronto has a new one called Q-Space, presumably a D-Space implementation?
* IEEE, Karen Wilkonson (sp?) announced that Xplore interface has been newly revisied - new Guest Login includes one free search; All PDFs are now fully fulltexted indexed, so keyword searching is more powerful. "Soon" they will have conference alerts, which many wanted. (i.e. can sign up to get an alert when a new conf. proceedings added.)
* John reported that Springer has now compiled a spreadsheet of all their lecture notes series that are available in Online versions; one can ask them for this. I hesitate to post the Springer rep's email here; those interested could ask John, or me, or others from PAM. Springer plans to update this spreadsheet quarterly. Still not as good as an alert, etc.
* Penn State has a CS librarian/selector who is now spending lots of time on his wireless laptop in the (CS? Eng? sounded like a specific dept.) info commons, and is coming to be the go-to library guy for CS questions, pretty cool.
* Google Scholar: ACM and IEEE are allowing total spider crawling; ACM bought results placement as part of the deal, other publishers are, too. A way to make "vetted" content more quickly available on the nondeep Web.
Well, there are folks waiting for this workstation, so all for now!
Sara T.

Weblogs & RSS

I'm amazed that there was such a turn-out for the session on Weblogs this morning. SRO and then turning them away. I'd have thought it was old news by now. I was only going hoping to bump into some folks. But it was too crowded for that. Are there still that many people wanting info on weblogs? Strange.

The session on RSS was well done. What I took away was that there is a steep learning curve. Folks don't know what it can do and the terms are foreign. Also it is so tied up with blogging that is another bunch of terms and concepts to understand. Maybe we should try to separate it from weblogs and figure out ways to make it easier to understand. Our patrons will never get it if skilled trained information professionals are struggling.

thx to IOP!

in the suite now, lovely computers and folks from IOP, thanks so much!
hope to take notes on/at the cs roundtable.

opening sessions, a few obs

* kinda cool-ly flashy - rock music, verilights, etc.! 8-)
* tapscott on transparency - one key point i took away, analogy-wise, is that info SHARING (transparency) for power is becoming the norm, rather than info HOARDING (opacity). resonates w/ me because i became a libn, and operate as a libn, by SHARING info, blabbing, in a focused way to all, managers, staff, users, etc. those few in our profession who get power by info HOARDING (and it IS power of a sort) have always REALLY annoyed me!
* tapscott himself was quite low-key, but he grows on ya.

(prawn or shrimp) and disease and metal*

Ok. The title is a little wierd.... I was trying to think of a title for the box, and this appeared as a choice. Must have used it for some database search. Anyway, that reminded me that I went to the the Kama Classical Indian Cuisine ( 214 W. King I think -- (416) 599-5262 http://www.toronto.com/infosite/304128/). They had shrimp in one of their dishes. Went Sunday evening, and we had great food and service.

IEEE Breakfast Session

I attended the IEEE Breakfast session this morning, and blogged it to STLQ. Rather than reprint the whole thing here and take up valuable space, you can read my report here. May be of some interest to the Physics people...

Computers in the Suite

Thanks to the wonderful IOP we've now got two working computers in the PAM suite in the Intercontinental. We've also got a massive switch with tons of open ports (no wireless) so drop by with your computer and cable and participate in the blog.

Technorati?

ok, help? I've done everything I can think of to get our blog to appear higher in Technorati -- basically I've resorted to posting each post to del.icio.us with the sla2005 tag. Does anyone know if it won't take the tags if they're part of the post form?

Oh, btw -- headed to the PAM suite now... apparently I didn't figure out how to set the alarm last night :(

SLA2005

1st impressions of toronto plus restaurant rec

* the men (in taxis, hotels, restaurants, stores) are exceptionally nice w/out in any way seeming to hit on one

* lake ontario is beautiful as are the parks along it - more low key than chicago's lake front, but also nice

* Joe Badali's, a family owned Italian restaurant kitty corner across from the convention center is lovely - cute building with old wood floor, old multicolored tile floor on the other part kind of long and narrow but also spacious, and fantastic waiters and maitre de/owner who treated my systems thinking colleagues lorri and rebecca and lorri's mom and me just wonderfully - humor, quick service, scrumptious food (try the appetizer size butternut squash ravioli) - highly recommended!

air canada

in fairness to air canada, while they were kinda rude and not helpful to the lot of us at lax, the flight attendants on the plane were exceptionally nice and we actually got *food* on the red eye flight, unheard of!

scifi

sf seems kinda appropriate for a blog post!

tonite -mon- scitech eng and it are hosting a science fiction open house at the fairmont royal york, upper canada room, w/ authors robt sawyer karl schroeder and robert charles wilson.  hope to see you bloggers there!

 well, so far i know that the Sat noon air canada lax flight (holding judith from eos, yours truly and at least 4 others coming to sla) was cancelled due to equipment failure, then they rushed us to american who wouldn't let us on the plane even though there were 12 of us there (no time) then back to air canada then the red eye flight arriving sat at 6 am.  aaargh!  also the champaign, il flight that had lian running from one end to the other there AND in detroit and missing a flight by 2 mins.  you'd think the airlines could do this folks its not rocket science.  oh well, everyone i know is finally here and acounted for.  here's hoping *none* of us have hassles going home!!

Take-away Toys from the Exhibits

One could have obtained a reasonable number of ball-point pens, all distinct in design, yet restricting to one color: red.

Molly and I compared what ended up in our bags. I mostly have pens, because I am a complete nut when it comes to pens. Perhaps the most creative thing Molly had was a collapsible plastic water bottle (Mergent). We agreed that SIAM's robotic diode reading light scores high. Well worth the time spent filling out their survey.

I like to look at periodical issues from titles I don't see regularly. Today's example: Journal of Neuroscience (SfN). SfN is offering a toy brain eraser, which is about the size of a walnut. I looked at another not very relevant title to my scope, Journal of Biol. Chemistry, just to see if the issue size is close to the size of the Manhattan phonebook yet.

Intro of Mary-Lynn Bragg to PAMers

Mary-Lynn is a person whom I have come to know through my work on Computing Reviews. She is a librarian whose day job is with Information Express and Reviews.com; she is also an officer with the San Andreas SLA chapter.

I had not realized that she hails from the fair province of Ontario, where we are all happily conferencing now.

Blogging is an activity not foreign to M-LB as she writes for SFist.com.

I'm looking for her to show up at PAM Open House Sunday evening.

Notes from the PAM-wide Roundtable

We just came out of the PAM-wide round table moderated by Susan Fingerman of JHU/APL. Look out in the upcoming PAM Bulletin for the full set of notes. Here are some highlights:

• Based on the results on the SLA bylaws change, PAM may/will change the start/end date for the terms of the officers to correspond to the fiscal calendar -- See Cynthia Holt
• Programming of the conference is changing to de-dup the sessions. PAM may also add a new position to assist the officers in conference planning.
• New Logo: is absolutely fabulous. There are 2 versions designed by an IOP graphic designer on donated time. We can see them on the PAM site or printed in the PAM suite. Please provide feedback. We can accept either of these, keep what we've got, or ask for changes to these
• Douglas F. from AIP clarified the situation discussed on PAMnet with regards to MAIK Nauka (sp?) journals.
• Physics Today -- they are trying to figure a way to both keep it strictly as a bene. of membership and provide some better online access. They may offer it full text online with a 12 month embargo. Stay tuned.
• Intereresting discussion of "information commons" and what that means. This needs more attention, so I'll try to post more later.
• I've gotten the e-mails of several more potential PAM bloggers and invites have been sent. If I missed you, e-mail me at cpikas {at} gmail {dot} com.

DPAMers with Skype ids? Just Curious

While I see that David Bigwood has an id on Skype, I wonder whether any
others in PAM do. I do. But will not type it here. Many librarians
may not have conference call capability at their work phones. Would
use of Skype be helpful to them?

Session Cancellation - Open Access in Developing Countries

The International Issues session "Open Access in Developing Countries", scheduled for 3:30 PM on Monday, June 6, has been cancelled because 2 of the speakers were unable to be here.

Debra Bailey is looking into using the time to meet for an informal discussion of international issues in the same location.

Messis -- Thumbs up!

Many thanks to Barbara Chu for arranging to most pleasant evening dinner for DPAM. There was a great turnout, for everyone to say "hello" again. Marvelous kick-off to the meeting.

The registration lines aren't too long now...

100_0891
Originally uploaded by cpikas.

Room Changes!

Fair warning all -- there are a lot of room changes this year. When you go to check in there's a printed out sheet (2 sides in 10pt font, arranged by hotel first, then by date). They're also on the main conference blog.

Here are some that look like they are more likely to impact dPAM stuff:

• First-timers and fellows: now in 107
  
• Chem, Sci/Tech, PAM poster session: now in Theater Foyer
• SLA contributed papers: now in 104C
• Establishing a Weblog on your organizations intranet: now in 106
• Gary Price: now in 106
• New Web Tools: now in 106

Testing email post

Hi PAM Blog:
Hopefully this email post will work.
Kinda cool option, tho' if I have email I probably have access to blogger...

--
Sara R. Tompson, MS
Science & Engineering Team Leader
Information Services Division
University of Southern California
Science & Engineering Library, SSL-304, MC 0481
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0481
213.740.8700 * fax 213.740.0558 * sarat@usc.edu
http://isd.usc.edu/~sarat/
_______________________________________________________________
"Aviation, this young modern giant, exemplifies the
possible relationships of women with the creations of science."
Amelia Earhart, Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana, 1935.

Internet Access at Holiday Inn on King

For anyone staying at the Holiday Inn on King in Toronto, Internet access is free in the rooms, but you need a network cable to connect to the dataport, as wireless access isn't offered.

Stickers for our Badges

Will look like this:

The sticker will fit on the bottom of your badge holder without covering your name, etc.

If you like, you may copy this image and use it as a button on your blog, too. You can get your sticker from me at the Early Bird Dinner, the suite, and other assorted dPAM events.

Cynthia has posted the social dance card to PAM net. If you are also a member of Sci/Tech, Engineering, Materials, or Chemistry please take a look at the new issue (May 05) of SciTech News for a combined dance card. My copy arrived yesterday so hopefully you all will have yours this week.