Fairfield County Chapter Bulletin

The Bulletin of the Fairfield County Chapter

Of the Special Libraries Association (SLA)

President’s Letter 2

Letter From the Editor 4

The Insider – What Board Membership is Really Like 5

Exploring the Possibilities of Information Portals 6

Translating Skills into Job Opportunities 7

Client Server Computing Comes Home 8

Search Geek 11

My original thought was to write on 'Professional or Peer mentoring' as the crux of my 'professional discussion'. As I searched the SLA web site and as I kept going in circles (I never did find 'The Mentorship Handbook: A Guide for SLA Chapters and Divisions to Establish Mentorship Program'.). I began to think of professional as related to our work environment and to our personal lives. At that point, I decided the majority of the members in SLA understand mentoring and the value it brings to our professional and personal life and that we often 'mentor' and do not recognize when we are mentoring.

As the FCC/SLA President and as a professional, I do encourage all of the FCC/SLA members to be conscious of 'peer mentoring' especially in these turbulent times of transition and rapid change. We need to continue to be supportive of our professional peers as each of our organizations/companies is in different stages of change. (I have not addressed the 'student mentoring' which is another topic for another time.)

As my time and yours is very precious, I believe the more important 'professional' topic to address is another aspect of that 'supportive of each other' that is a significant part of our professional membership in a volunteer organization such as FCC/SLA.

As you know this is the time of year FCC/SLA looks for members to 'step to the plate' and assume positions on the FCC/SLA Board. The Nominating Committee, Libby Allen Knapik, Eve Mountford, Shirlee Schwarz and Debra Kaufman, each of whom have given time and effort in the recent past, volunteered to find FCC/SLA members willing to be on the Board. The Committee had difficulty in finding persons who felt they had the 'time' to give. This is not a new issue or concern; however, it does seem to be growing. We do not appear to have eager, willing members ready to step forward. Understandably, many of you have young children and/or major work initiatives or commitments. This is not an isolated concern; however, I would like to see us turn this around. How do we do this?

I realize the FCC/SLA Chapter has not had a significant influx of new members - 'fresh faces' so to speak. Many of you have served in various positions on the Board and have given a great deal of time through the years. For your leadership and continuing efforts, the FCC/SLA applauds you.

How do we reach those who have not volunteered? How do we ask those members who have given time over and over again to give again?

I am not sure of the answer. Are you?

This FCC/SLA Board and their President had a mission this year.

A mission to simplify, to expedite and to create a new way to carry on the tasks and responsibilities of each Board position, some of this mission has been accomplished. This must be continued. I believe this may be an answer.

Make each position on the FCC/SLA Board less demanding, less time-consuming, more fulfilling and 'fun' and SLA Professionals will want to participate. Using another 'baseball' analogy - "Build it, and they will come!" We need to build the FCC/SLA as a new, exciting viable forum for Information Professionals.

Give us your ideas; give us your support. How do we make this 'real for you', exciting to participate fully and not just attend selected 'programs'? Let us make 'professional' in FCC/SLA mean more than just attending a meeting!!!!

President Nicole Stamatelos Gartner Group

President-elect Jim Smallwood GE Capital

Past-President Sandra Lahtinen Gartner Group

Secretary Mary McPherson Kelley Drye Warren

Treasurer Jack Stevens Pitney Bowes

Director-at-Large

& Professional Deonna Taylor AIG Financial

Development

Products Corp

I recently saw an magazine article discussing successful business professionals in their 30s. They felt washed up and threatened by the 20-somethings to such an extent that these otherwise normal individuals were resorting to plastic surgery to stay competitive on the job. The thing that horrifies me the most is that I did not find the story that surprising.

Myself a 30-something professional, it is a concern I have heard voiced from friends and colleagues anywhere from their late 20s on up. One would hope that they be judged on that skill set, not just appearance. Even still, experience alone is not enough. In this "age of E" ongoing professional development takes on a whole new importance. It’s not just about getting ahead, it. Particularly as many us expect to work into our 70s to retire even somewhat comfortably.

So what is most important ? Industry expertise ? Aptitude in your functional specialty, e.g. reference, indexing, etcetera ? People skills ? Project management proficiency ? Internet and computer competencies ? A Spirit of Entreprenuerialism ?

We were fortunate enough to have two speakers on this issue at the last chapter meeting, and their comments are covered in the story Translating Skills into Job Opportunities.

In this issue of the Fairfield County Chapter Bulletin, we seek to communicate some views on that issue, and to generate discussion overall. On a related topic, we are also interested in your opinions regarding life balance issues, a subject we will address in June.

This issue is being mailed as an attachment to those members who are on the list serv, and will be available on our web site as well. However, going forward, you will need to go to the web to view the Bulletin. We will publish again at the end of June, and wrap up some key finding from the annual conference. The publication dates for the 2000/2001 calendar will be posted sometime in late summer, so you will know when to check for the new issues.

As always, your feedback is welcome. Please note that constructive suggestions followed by the offer to help implement those ideas are acted upon more expeditiously.

GE Financial Assurance, Asset Management Services Group

777 Long Ridge Road; Building B # 3044

Stamford, CT 06927

I have been a member of the Fairfield County Chapter of the Special Libraries Association for the past 15 years and have attended the Chapter meetings often. Over the years I have really enjoyed participating in meetings, programs, and "networking" with my fellow librarians.

But there was more the FCC had to offer me-- the opportunity to serve on their Board.

For the past two years I have served as Arrangements Co-Chairperson and continue to do so. To be honest, when I was first invited to serve on the Board several years ago, I turned down the offer. I was hesitant to commit the time and effort necessary and worried about my ability to plan and organize the Chapter meetings. Who wants to willingly take on more work?

The good news is that last year, when I received the second telephone call from Libby Knapik asking that I serve as a board member, I accepted the challenge and currently serve with my fellow co-chairperson, Shira Honigstein.

I quickly found that making arrangements for a Chapter meeting involved more than just finding a "neat" place to eat with enough space to accommodate a large group and entice members to attend. There are many variables to consider when planning an organization event. Besides offering good food and charming atmosphere, an establishment has to be functional for the presentation of the evening’s program. After finding a suitable location and choosing a date, we prepare and mail the program announcements to the members. The paperwork continues as responses are received, culminating with the arrival of meeting night—which, in itself, holds tasks and responsibilities.

For all the time involved and nervousness that things won’t go exactly as planned, in the end it is an incredible experience. The satisfaction of a successful meeting coupled with feelings of personal reward at a job well done make all of the work and worry more than worthwhile.

As an active board member I also attend regular board meetings. These meetings provide an opportunity to work with others, to make suggestions, and to exchange ideas to enhance our Fairfield County Chapter. I have come to truly enjoy our gatherings as they give each of us a chance to be heard. All of us are an integral cog in keeping the Chapter in existence.

I would like to encourage others in our Chapter to serve on our board. Take an evening to attend one of our regular board meetings—they are open to everyone. Through seeing the process in action, you, too, may want to become involved as a board member.

Shira and I will be serving as Arrangements co-chairs for one more year, 2000-2001. Midway through our next year we hope to introduce two members from our chapter to the "Arrangements Team." This would be an excellent opportunity to ease into a position on the FCC. It is a job you will find immensely gratifying and one that I will certainly miss. Please let us know if you are interested in joining the team!

Speakers included Susan M. Klopper (Arthur Andersen), Howard McQueen (McQueen Consulting) and Steve Arnold (Arnold IT), with Anne Caputo of Factiva as moderator. Susan focused on the overview and description of portals; Howard the characterization of an effective tool; and Steve closed with the forecast and outlook going forward. At two points the panel answered questions (phoned/faxed in) from all across the U.S.

For the portal novice, it provided an excellent introduction to the topic and more experience participants found the discussions thought provoking, but not new material. The session was not targeted to the experienced programmer.

A key questions centered on the distinction between a portal and an intra/internet site. The consensus was not entirely clear, although the "vertical" -- e.g. the niche – concept seemed to be the distinction between portal and intra/internet. Specific vendors were discussed as well, though not in great detail. Concerns such as soaring user expectations and copyright precedent were introduced.

In the final analysis, as with any new tool, portals should be seen as a means, not an end. It is probably fair to say that most of us face issues of virtualizing (at least) parts of our facilities, and to compete with competition (be it actual or merely perceived) from the net, we need further education on this topic, which the bulletin hopes to provide in coming months.

Although Factiva (a.k.a. Dow Jones) sponsored the session nationally, local access was paid for the chapter. Thanks again to Norwalk Community Technical College for providing the space as a courtesy. Gunnar Sahlin obtained the facilities and Alan Anderson set up the technology for the satellite linkup. Champion International did not charge us for printing / binding the materials. Deonna Taylor (AIG Financial Products) and Bill Langham (Champion) organized the event. SLA’s Strategic Learning and Development Center of produced the session.

Recently, librarians (or however we choose to call ourselves at the moment) have been hot news. Web Overturning Image of Book-Filling Librarian, (bizjournals.com/washington). Demand for Librarians Hits an All-Time High (Wall St. Journal). Whatever happened to the Class of ‘93 – aka world’s richest librarian (at Yahoo) -- (New York Times) .

In addition, Library Journal noted in their May 2000 issue that 40% of librarians would retire in nine years or less, 68% in fourteen or less. The number of library school graduates is down from the peak of approximately 6400 in 1974, and has come back from a trough of around 3000 in 1989. By 1998 we were back to around 4500. Interestingly, the only graduate degree earning less on average than an MLS was in journalism, according to a LJ survey. Computer engineers earn almost double. Since 1997, jobs available have outpaced candidates, as opposed to the 70-97 period, with the exception of the years 84 and 89.

Even with the wealth of opportunities available today, 44% of survey respondents said that if they were graduating today, they would not pursue a profession in librarianship, or equivalent terms. A Wall Street Journal Job Almanac ranked our profession as 245 out of 250, based on growth potential of salaries, promotions, etcetera. We were preceded by jobs such as garbage collectors, cashiers, mail carriers, forklift operators, guards, fishermen and carpet/tile installers. While many of us might like to think of ourselves as Katherine Hepburn in Desk Set, that positive portrayal is rare.

Companies are willing to pay for the 'right' skills. How do we translate skills into job opportunities? What are you worth? What does all this mean for the professional in terms of demand, skills and salaries? Shirlee Schwarz of Library Consulting Services and Jeanne Fishman of TPFL spoke to these issues as chapter members enjoyed an excellent dinner at the Norwalk Inn & Conference Center.

QUICK HITS While there are more than a few unfilled positions in the tri-state area, most call for highly specialized skills, often in a unique configuration/combination. Indexers are hot again – no surprise there with the growth of inter/intra/extra-nets. Webmaster and other programming skills such as html, xml and x-html are highly valued. Many of the growth opportunities in the region are with consulting and financial management firms. Niches such as school librarians are raising salaries to compete for employees. Telecommuting, is on the rise, but only after one has earned their spurs at an organization, and generally not full time.

Bottomline, employers are still looking for strong functional skills, but also require greater technology literacy and stronger business acumen. It becoming more common to ask for work samples, generally writing or project design / management. TFPL has actually created a list of job titles and the characteristics and skill sets that employers have matched to that function. It provides somewhat of a vision of employers’ expectations in the 21^st century. While the possibilities are exciting, they require us to make a dedicated effort to move forward, continue expanding our skill set, and be flexible and open to change.

Although client-server computing¹ has been part of our work lives for years, until more recently a similar computing solution has not been either readily available or, indeed even necessary at home.² For one thing, the cost of PCs was prohibitive enough to keep most households down to a single PC. Add to that all the related peripheral devices such as printers, scanners, video cams, speakers, fax machines and home computing has become a serious investment in time and dollars. Oh, and how could I forget monthly Internet access charges!

In addition, if you have school age kids between the ages of 7 and 18, you likely find that there is a struggle for use of the family PC. In our family (with 2 middle schoolers), the PC is in use more than 10 hours a day, whether it’s Net surfing, administering web sites, chatting online, purchasing groceries each week, sending and receiving email, writing papers, designing newsletters, telecommuting, and the list goes on. At some point you realize it’s time to add another PC. Until now, however, there were two obstacles: high cost to add another PC and the inability to network PCs at home to leverage their strengths.

Thank you Gordon Moore

As the cost of a PC continues to plummet, thanks to among other things, Moore’s Law, the cost of a pretty decent computing setup is hovering around $1,000. And that includes lots of essentials like a printer that can double as a fax and scanner, etc. As a result many families are beginning to purchase a second home PC. Great, except for the fact that, unlike PCs at work, there has been no cheap and easy way to really network them to leverage the ability to share a printer, files, software and Internet services.

2000 has seen the introduction of affordable solutions to this problem in the form of phone line based home networking that is both affordable and practical. Installing such a system, makes it possible to network all the PCs in your home so your family can easily share a printer, files, engage in multi-player games and, perhaps best of all, simultaneously access the Internet without paying for another account. What a concept!

But, does it work? Is it affordable? Do you have to be a geek to make it work?

The short answers: Yes. Yes. No.

Does it work? Absolutely. I recently purchased Intel’s AnyPoint Phone line Home Network kit for an existing PC and a new PC purchased for my teenaged daughter. Total cost was about $175, which included hardware for both PCs and a couple of lengths of phone cable and phone jack splitters. The bottom line: in less than two hours we had both PCs fully networked, sharing one printer and running simultaneously on the Internet. And we did not need to be Cisco certified system solution providers to make it all work.

While you may be thinking that $175 is not that cheap, recall that we added Internet access for a second PC at no cost. Had we paid for a second Internet account (and we are using a cable modem service costing about $40/month) that would have added an additional annual cost of almost $500. But using the Intel system, we completely avoided that cost in favor of a one-time hardware fee.

Lest you think we are doing something illegal in circumventing the need for a second Internet account, think again. Internet Service Providers, like AT&T At Home, are themselves promoting systems like Intel’s AnyPoint, advertising there is no need to pay for a second internet account! Cool, huh?

Basically, the system taps into your home’s existing phone lines and uses them to network your PCs (up to 10 on Intel’s system). The network runs at 1 megabit per second (Mbps), which is fast enough that, at least for my setup, there is no noticeable degradation in system response, whether on the Net or just computing locally.

The hardware portion is deceptively simple and easy to install. We had one system installed at the factory (on my daughter’s new PC), we purchased the other as an external device for our existing PC. The external unit stands about eight inches tall, three inches wide and an inch thick with a couple of LED indicator lights on its front. The back has connections for the link to your phone line, your modem and the USB (Universal Serial Bus) connector to your PC.

As long as you’ve got 18 MB of free disk space, 8 MB RAM or more, a CD-ROM, a Pentium based PC, phone lines in your home, a modem or cable modem and Windows 98 OS, you’re good to go. (BTW, you don’t have to have a USB port, although you will need at least a free parallel port.)

Once you make all the hardware connections, which consist of plugging in phone lines to the appropriate jacks and connecting the USB cable, you run the software that glues it all together. One PC is registered as the Server, i.e. the PC "serving" files, acting as the Internet gateway, providing printer access. The other PC or PCs are registered as Clients, i.e. PCs requesting files and services from the Server. You even get to personalize the name of each PC on the network. Our Server is called MomDad.

I can only speak for Intel’s AnyPoint system, but if its representative of other manufacturers; the installation was a breeze. The setup was straightforward and did not, by and large, require significant understanding of the ins and outs of computer networking.

With our network in place we avoided the need for two printers, two Internet accounts and, two high-capacity Zip drives. The total one-time cost of all those approaches $800 (not to mention that ISP costs are ongoing).

If you’re thinking about adding a PC at home or if you are tired of fighting with your kids for access to the PC or Internet because you’ve only got one PC, take a hard look at client-server computing at home. Getting networked has never been easier or more affordable. In the long run you’ll end up saving time, money and aggravation. You may even kick yourself for not having tried it sooner!

2. Certainly, Apple Computer led the way early-on in home networking but it involved running special cables and other hardware to support the network.

3. The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed.

Ambiguity: the bane of researchers

If you’re a researcher, you learn to live with and adapt to it on a daily basis. We’ve all got war stories about client research requests that are vague, ill defined or perhaps very difficult to precisely define. One of the worst nightmares can be when the keywords we have to work with are themselves ambiguous or fraught with multiple meanings.

Did you mean irritation, moths or code?

Suppose you’re doing Internet-based research on housing, or bugs, or Java. Each of these terms has multiple meanings, each of which could either derail a search or at least clog it up with unnecessary, unrelated hits. What to do?

Until now these kinds of searches could eat up a lot of a researcher’s time. Search engines did not do a very good job of recognizing or sorting out problems associated with words having multiple or ambiguous meanings. But a new search engine promises to change all that.

Enter SimpliFind

How it works

"After you enter a term into the search field, SimpliFind attempts to match the term to a proprietary relational knowledge base called SimpliNet™ that automatically generates word meanings. If the term that is entered is recognized, the SimpliNet database retrieves a list of meanings and generates a pull-down menu based on those meanings. You are then asked to choose a meaning that will be used to help the search engine understand the original search term. For example, if you enter "Java," the SimpliNet database will generate a list of meanings for java (i.e., coffee, programming language, and island). You will then have the opportunity to select the appropriate meaning or, if none exists, enter a new meaning."

Could you expand on that?

"SimpliFind uses the SimpliNet database to choose related words (e.g. espresso, latte for coffee) based on the search term and your chosen meaning, and it uses these related words to create an expanded query. Thus, if you enter "Java" and select coffee as its meaning, SimpliFind will retrieve a number of related words from the SimpliNet database and append these words, along with the chosen meaning, to your original search term."

A new arrow for your search engine quiver

Check this out. SimpliFind also allows users to define their own word meanings and save them for future use. So, for example, if your company or group or industry has a unique use of a term, you can actually customize SimpliFind so that it recognizes your custom definition of that particular word. Now that’s customer focus with a capital "F"!

Of course, the clever folks at SimpliFind also realize that you may not want to precisely define a word at all because what you are trying to do is determine what other meanings exist for a term. In that, all you need do is tell SimpliFind that your word "has no meaning." In that way, the search engine will allow all meanings through its filters.

Industrial strength searching

SimpliFind actually conducted research on how people interact with search engines. They’ve constructed their front-end to reflect their research findings. They discovered that people are, for the most part, reluctant to enter more than a single term in a field when constructing a search. With that in mind, the SimpliFind added an Advanced Search capability. Initially the search engine presents the user with a Google-like search window: a single blank field into which the user enters a search term. Once the initial term is entered and analyzed, the uncluttered SimpliFind interface adds a new blank criteria field, making it possible to build up search criteria to create a robust and highly focused search strategy.

The low-down and output

Once SimpliFind has analyzed each search term and helped to focus its particular meaning it quickly executes the search to retrieve relevant hits. Here’s is a sample, based on a search for "hot java" of what SimpliFind output looks like:

A quick comparison

The same search on Google produced the following results. Note the two inappropriate hits included in the results.

www.execworld.com/ GoogleScout www.gaykiss.com/

Admittedly, this represents just a quick example, but give this search engine a try and you’re likely to find all kinds of clever ways to improve and enhance your Internet search techniques and results. As the size, scope and complexity of the Net increases sophisticated search tools such as SimpliFind are a welcome addition to searchers looking for ways to cut through all the clutter to find answers.

A Caveat

One aspect of SimpliFind that remains undefined, at least as far as I could determine from the SimpliFind web site, was the issue of sources. It is unclear how extensive SimpliFind’s Internet searches are. At this point they are not making any obvious claims as to how broad and deep their search engine goes. Bear this in mind as you begin to use the tool.