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Hi All- we just got a few spam comments so I turned on comment moderation. Comments are encouraged and I'll approve them quickly. Please e-mail me if you have any questions or need help - cpikas {at} gmail {dot} com or the e-mail address listed in the PAM member directory.

Information Today blogged us!

There's a good review of the E-books on Steroids and Ruth Kneale's Spectacles session.

Updated 6/11: Julie Arendt's poster session is also blogged there!

Astronomy Roundtable I

A brief bulleted list of discussion topics that came up at the Astro RT I, moderated by Joe Murphy and Sara Russell Gonzales:

* DOI and page number issues and changes. Do we mind if page numbers go away? (Consensus seemed to be yes!) Lots of discussion about this one.

* Introductions around the room.

* A notice that the core lists of astronomy and physics books need to be updated.

* Anyone using PhysMathCentral? (Like biomed central.)

* A notice that the Yerkes Observatory library has been officially closed.

* Does anyone do chargeback or recovery fees to departments for information services provided by the library and/or staff? (Several places do.)

* Institutional repositories - is anyone putting in astronomer's data sets? (Brief mention of the NVO and VSO.)

* Poster sessions and topics.

Gold Digger's Ball

For more pics, see the SLA Blog entry... these are just my PAM-specific ones! What a blast - I think we should do this every year!

Thank You, PAM...

...for helping me make my session "Spectacles: How Pop Culture Views Librarians" such a success. You helped pack the room - we were SRO by halfway through! It's thanks to this division and your excellent support that I'm able to carry on like I do on the topic, and I really appreciate it. PAM Rocks!

Book Discussion Group

We had a lively discussion about the book, "Einstein's Enigma, or, Black Holes in my Bubble Bath", Tuesday night at the Colorado History Museum. While only three participants actually finished the book, their discussions and insights have prompted at least this reader to plan on finishing the book!

PAM Achievement Award Winner

Congratulations to Bob Michaelson for his PAM Achievement Award!

Chamberlain Observatory Tour

As Christina has already posted, the tour was fabulous! Many thanks to Joe Kraus for setting it up. There was a heavy sprinkling of non-PAM folks who are science geeks who also signed up the tour. It was great seeing Saturn through the historic 20-inch telescope.

Chamberlain Observatory

Chamberlain Observatory
Originally uploaded by cpikas

Fabulous trip to the observatory. We all got to see Saturn and learn all about this historical site. See the virtual tour at: http://www.du.edu/~rstencel/Chamberlin/

Its been a great conference, see you in the am, then in Seattle!

Hope to see many of you at the ebooks on Steroids panel way too soon, now!
Its been great out here, thanks to Joe for being an awesome host!
Here's some crazed human gliders (I prefer AN ENGINE!) on Lookout Mountain, as a goodbye.

So okay I've been dared to do this...(INSPEC girls)

Our hotel's (Courtyard by Marriott) Net connection was DOWN, all day today! Finally up tonight!
So I'm behind on posting.
That's my reason (ha! excuse perhaps?!) for not posting this sooner...INSPEC's Wild West party was like a late night saloon, wild!
The dancing girls were actually quite nice young ladies, and we had fun posing with them....
(Christina please erase any inappropriate comments?!)

IOPScience PACS Tags Cloud

Interesting that IOP, like EV2 of late, is incorporating delicious, connotea, etc. type tagging and the display of "tag clouds," a visual really grabbing my imagination!
Here's a, kind of dark, but edited, screenshot from the IOPScience presentation yesterday.

IRC Panel

It was so great to actually have Shahid Soroya here!
I was excited to be part of the Board when we reviewed all the worthy applications.
Huge excellent work done by Nisa, Joe, Bob, Shahid himself and others to make this happen!
Here is Shahid's intro slide.

Also great to learn more about Hinari, Oare, et al. Hope USC could do something alone these lines!

As Laurel said, great session!

Annual Business Meeting: PAM Really Rocks!

The business meeting this morning was an all around good meeting. Minutes of the past year were reviewed and approved, as was a proposed change to the governing document. The treasurer's report was also presented. (Details will appear here or on PAMnet later.) The PAM Award was presented to Bob Michaelson (more on that later, including photos), and after brief reports from various committee members and an update on the 2008 conference planning by Parker Ladwig, our illustrious chair Joe Kraus surprised many of the members with a thank-you certificate for division work throughout the year. These included pieces of fossilized dinosaur bone, and meteorite chips - as the saying went, "PAM Really Rocks!"

Thanks to APS for their sponsorship of our breakfast meeting.

International Issues in Developing Countries

There was a good turnout for this session. I was sitting next to Jane Kinney Meyers, who won an SLA award yesterday for her work creating the Lubuto Library Project.

The IMA winner, Shahid Saroya, gave an interesting presentation on his institution and the HEC National Digital Library in Pakistan.

Evivva Weinraub from Yale spoke on the OARE project, providing free access to research in the environment for developing countries.

Daviees Menefe from Elsevier talked about their involvement in the HINARI (health research), AGORA (agricultural research) & OARE projects.

View from the PAM Suite

View from the PAM Suite
Originally uploaded by cpikas

Suite (or is that sweet or sueeeeeeettt!) Retreat... come on over.

PAMwide Roundtable Speakers

Thanks again to Zari Kamarei, Pat Viele, Donna Thompson, and Tony O'Roarke for speaking at the PAMwide Roundtable!

Networking Breakfast

Some photos from the Networking Breakfast:

PAM Early Bird Dinner

Some photos from the PAM Early Bird Dinner:

Synergy Session

I just attended the opening general synergy session with Eugenie Prime, Clifford Lynch and Stephen Abram... very energetic and enjoyable discussions about where we are as a profession, and where we are going. Questions ran the gamut from "how can we persuade business leaders that we are worth investing in?" to "how do we create the best user experience?", through questions about what is SLA going to do as an organization to support and promote librarians. The answers from the panelists were passionate and emphatic, and many of them looped back to the same basic answer: we need to have confidence and courage in ourselves, the strength to present that confidence when we provide results to our users, and the courage to present ourselves as necessary and important to our user community and upper management. There was also a lot of discussion about new technology tools and how we can take advantage of them, including the social networking aspect. Another common consensus was that we need to take ourselves to the users and not wait for them to come to us.

All in all a good way to start what promises to be a very busy day!

Al Gore keynote

A few notes, since I'm in my room early, with slight tummy trouble.

• Sorry, but the light was so low my shots did not turn out. (Also the stage is ill-lighted; when walk-about speakers like Gore would leave the podium, one could not see them that well on the projected screens due to the dim light!) {Or, is it just my old eyes?!}
• Anyway....as expected, Former VP/Pres. (!) Al Gore was VERY well received! Also as expected (per my colleague MFM who's heard him before) he had lots of self-deprecating jokes. They were pretty funny, however, and he stopped just before they got to be too many, in my opinion.
• LOVELY to have a keynoter who gets it re librarians! [In stark contrast to John Waters, whom I used to like, at ACRL, not even mentioning libraries/librarians!!]
• Apparently pals w/ CEO Janice LaChance, from both their Beltway days
  
• "I'm a recovering politician; on about the 9th step" [making amends]!
• Librarians "now more than ever" in net info glut age
  
• Information<->Democracy<->Freedom a recurring theme for him since journalist days
  
• a middle quarter to third on global warming, but mostly info themed
• Glad I went!
  

Scitopia

INFO:
Frederick Dylla, new AIP Pres., launched, then there were marketing language oriented remarks from Barbara Lange of IEEE then ? did a live demo for us. I agree, Christina, there is lots more for them to do!
The basic search screen is shown here. Very basic, but the cleanness is nice.

Random Notes:

• But it is an interesting start for a cross-disciplinary when you mean engineering and physics, mostly, search.
• Actually, I am thinking of promoting Scitopia as a basic international PATENT search engine. We learned in response to Randy's question that one cannot search by patent classes ("yet" the vendors said; and, to be fair, it is beta), but nevertheless the fact they index and link to USPTO, AND EPO and JPO, makes it attractive!
• Also, like the OSA and SPIE additions...I can see some of our engineers could like this for cross platform (more than the physicists I am thinking)
  
• The "today's clippings" has GOTTA go as the name for marked records! AND they GOTTA have a "my Scitopia" so one can save these results.
• Of course, the societies' databases to which they link do have personalization functions, and lots of the other stuff we were all asking for....
  

Scitopia Launch

A bunch of PAM members attended today's launch lunch. There were also a lot of our sponsors and vendors there (hi all!).

My notes are on my blog but I thought we should open some conversation here or on PAMnet about this new thing.

I think there were pretty mixed reactions including uncertainty over how this fits in with other things, things that haven't been added to it yet, a few interface choices we could quibble with...

What did you think? Give it a try and leave comments here.

Newcomer's Luncheon

The Newcomer's Luncheon, held at the historic Brown Palace Hotel, was an enjoyable time with tasty food, good talk, an impromptu historical lecture on the hotel, and several first-timers dipping their toes into conference waters. Welcome to you all! We had some pictures taken - sadly the ones from my camera didn't turn out so well, you can see some dark and shady blobs behind the flags. (So much for the new camera's ability to take distant photos!) I hope one of the other folks who gave Dennis their cameras got better shots - we'll post 'em if we do! Thanks to Turpion for their sponsorship.

"A butte, and right purty, too"!

The road to Golden has lots of
sites to recommend it!!

Union Station is lovely....

One of the nation's many beautifully classic (at least from the outside, my friends from Queens U. and I did not venture inside) Union Stations is in Denver.
Along the excellent 16th Street Mall, with the GREAT free, hybrid vehicle buses!
Ours for dinner tonight was crowded but friendly.
Denver seems a friendly city; chatty folks to my now-LA-accustomed ears!
8-)

Beware the blue bear?!

Or, maybe he's our hero,
holding up the
convention center?!

Here's our book discussion tome....

Here's the book we'll be discussing! (See post below.)
I'm not sure the narrative device works, but more on that Tuesday night!
8-)

And here's a closeup of the welcome sign....

Nice Welcome to Denver!

The Baggage Claim/Ground Transport "Terminal" at DEN is surprisingly lovely!

The SLA welcome sign looks great behind the fountain!