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| The Newsletter of the Virginia Chapter of SLA | Summer 2007 , Volume 38, Number 1 |
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President's Message So much to do – so little time! Summer is typically thought of as a time to get caught up on all the projects and activities that get set aside during the fall and winter. I’m rapidly coming to the realization that this is a complete myth. We are half way through the summer and so many things have been happening in VASLA and SLA within the last several months, it’s difficult to know where to begin. VASLA was well represented at the SLA Annual Conference in Denver in June. It was an excellent conference with two amazing keynote speakers. Al Gore opened the conference with an impassioned and engaging talk at the Opening General Session. He talked about Iraq, personal stories, anecdotes and kept information technology and information management as the important link to addressing critical issues like the climate crisis and government issues. Also during the Opening General Session were the presentations of awards and scholarships. One of the 2007 recipients of the Diversity Leadership Development Program award was our very own VASLA member, Cheryl Jacocks-Terrell (Biomedical Research Librarian, Philip Morris USA). Congratulations Cheryl! Cartoonist Scott Adams keynoted the Closing General Session. He showed and told hilarious stories behind several of his strips, then answered audience questions. In between the two keynote speakers were many information sessions that were extremely informative and useful. As I said at the beginning of this piece - so much to do, so little time! Check out the SLA conference blog for more information on everything that took place in Denver. The 2008 SLA Annual Conference will be held in Seattle June 15-18. Be sure to mark your calendars. The VASLA Board met in early July to plan for the remainder of the year. Karen King has a wonderful schedule of programs for September and December. In addition, Networking Dinners are being planned for the Blacksburg, Charlottesville, Tidewater and Richmond regions for late August to early September. Stay tuned for more details. The primary discussion for the Board meeting was exploring new ways to enhance communication to and amongst VASLA members. We will be adding new membership features on our web that will allow us to find people in our state by location, communities of practice, and specialties. Our aim is to get people connected with one another to network and to talk about relevant issues. I will also be sending out monthly updates about anything that is going on in our chapter. If you have any information that you would like to share with our community such as announcements, job openings, etc. please don’t hesitate to send them to me. As we provide new tools for communication, I encourage you to take advantage of the opportunities available to us and connect with your colleagues and become more engaged in VASLA. I look forward to seeing you at future VASLA events. Have a great summer. VASLA Fall Program, September 28, 2007 - Jill Stover, Virginia Commonwealth University's Undergraduate Services Coordinator will present on Web 2.0 tools and applications. Location to-be-determined. SARC4@2008, February 28 – 29, 2008 in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Surreal Landscape: Information Professionals Mastering the Challenges of Time & Space. Co-chairs for this event are Cynthia Barrancotto (cbarrancotto@accesssciences.com) and Sharon Schwerzel (sschwerz@mailer.fsu.edu). Visit site: http://units.sla.org/regconf/sarc4/ Spring Program Summary Most likely, we will all form partnerships during our careers. We are all familiar with mentoring, and probably have had many mentors in our life. We also have our informal partnerships, the peers we choose to spend our time with to discuss topics of interest. Also possible are professional partnerships, those between our libraries, other departments within our institutions, and even other libraries and librarians, such as those we foster at our meetings. Jeanne Liedtka, Executive Director, Batten Institute, and Johnson and Higgins Research Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School spoke to VASLA’s Spring Program attendees about her research into partnerships at the corporate level; many of her findings can be applied to libraries. Jeanne compared a successful partnership to a rocket leaving Earth’s atmosphere; much preparation and energy is needed for the rocket, or partnership, to have a successful mission. You can read Jeanne’s research in the Academy of Management Executive, 1996 Volume 10, Number 2, pages 20-34. Ken Winter, Librarian for the Virginia Transportation Research Council, presented a case study to attendees. Ken has been struggling to form either an active regional, but preferably national, network of transportation libraries. Unfortunately, regional exclusivity has made it extremely difficult for Ken to find willing partner libraries, a key step in creating a successful partnership. Are you ready to form your own partnership? Karen King’s “Partnering with Purpose Activity Worksheet” will get you started! Re-energized, but Sprinting is No Longer an Option I’m beginning my conference tale at the end, rather than the beginning. Our flight from Denver to Detroit was delayed 45 minutes, which left us 15 minutes to sprint through the airport to make our connection to Richmond. We landed at Gate 64 and had to get to Gate 6. That’s right, Gate 6. Winded by the time we reached Gate 48, we stopped for a breather at the Departures screen and saw to our relief that our plane had also been delayed and wasn’t leaving for another half hour (it wound up not leaving for another two hours). We could now proceed at a more normal pace. As I observed when we collapsed into the seats at the gate, “I haven’t sprinted through an airport in ten years; it’s beyond me now. I was going to write about how the conference had re-energized me for my job -- now I don’t know what to talk about.” So I suppose I’ll have to start at the beginning. We arrived in Denver on Saturday afternoon. The weather was great and we had plenty of time to check in, dump our luggage in our rooms, have a late lunch and go to registration to pick up our stuff and get ready for the city tour that night. I’d been looking forward to this trip for a while. I was starting to feel worn down at work and was hoping to hear about some new things, or just get some new ideas. Anything to jump start my enthusiasm again. And day by day, the conference did just that. Sunday arrived, which was the official start of the conference, for those without conference, division, chapter or CE responsibilities. A troop of Aztec dancers opened the INFO-EXPO Hall (aka the vendor hall). When they asked for audience volunteers, our own Karen King led the group in a modified Bunny Hop. The vendor hall was huge (it always is) and I was happy to find over a dozen vendors I could legitimately talk to (as a database and digital collections specialist in a historical society, finding appropriate vendors to talk to can sometimes be a challenge.) But there were a lot of new companies there, including Google, which was great to see. The Keynote Speaker at the Opening Session was Al Gore. Granted, he was talking to a very friendly audience, but the man is a wonderful speaker, with a great sense of humor. His talk combined funny anecdotes with thought provoking statements on the world in general and global warming in particular. As one of my friends put it, “He’s become an Evangelist for the global warming movement.” It was a wonderful way to start the conference. Monday’s opening session was more low-key, but still interesting. It was a semi-open discussion with Stephen Abram, SLA President-Elect and VP of Innovation at SirsiDynix, Eugenie Prime, recently retired from Hewlett-Packard, and Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information. The best idea to come out of the discussion was to have SLA place advertisements on the value of librarians in business and trade publications that our bosses read. If you think this is a good idea, send an email to an SLA director. If there’s a groundswell of support, we may see it acted upon. After Monday’s General Session, the battery of programs began. They were all good and the hard part was picking out which to attend. I went to sessions on “Bringing our treasures to life” with the British Library, Ebooks and ebook challenges presented by Ingram Digital Group, and a host of others over the next three days on searching tips, digital preservation, management, digital rights management, and podcasting. And then there was a lot of time spent in the vendor hall, chatting with our own vendors and those I wish we’d buy their products so they could be our vendors. But it’s always neat to see where technology has taken us, what’s now available, and what can be done to solve various problems and issues. By Wednesday morning, we were pretty tired. Fortunately, the Closing General Session speaker was pure entertainment. Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert”, shared stories and cartoons, leaving us in stitches. We also had a preview of Seattle, site of SLA 2008, which looks great. I want to go! Finally, we were homeward bound. The conference had given me many new ideas, new ways of thinking about old issues, and possible solutions to try. We may never own that wonderful $100,000 book scanner, with the special cradle and the automatic page turning arm, but who knows, some partnerships may be possible. I’m ready to face the world again. So, the conference did re-energize me – But, sadly, I think my days of sprinting through airports are over.
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