Virginia Chapter of the Special Libraries Association

VASLA
Bulletin

The Newsletter of the Virginia Chapter of SLA                                                                             Spring 2007, Volume 37, Number 4

In this issue:

President’s Message:

Announcements

Program Summaries

·        Spring Program

·        Summer Evening Out

Feature Article:

Stone Soup: What the childhood story has to do with Social Networks and Information Sharing

By Karen King, President Elect, VASLA

Susan Adkins Travel Award Winner Announced

VASLA Membership Organizations

·        National Radio Astronomy Observatory

SEND US YOUR NEWS!!

President’s Message

Dear Virginia SLA colleagues,

2007 is well underway as are plans for future events for VASLA and SLA. Karen King, our president-elect is planning programs and networking opportunities for the coming year, as well as participating in the planning for the SLA Annual Conference in Denver. As the new President, I want to extend my gratitude to those who served VASLA for the past 18 months, especially our past president Becky Carvajal. Becky worked hard to make VASLA a valuable and engaging chapter. Thank you Becky, and all the previous board members, for your time and energy.

My goal for the coming year is to continue Becky’s work and strive for a stronger chapter but a stronger VASLA depends on volunteers. I encourage you to contribute your time, your news and publications, and most of all your energy and ideas towards how VASLA can do more for its members. VASLA is a wonderful opportunity to network and grow professionally and I encourage you to take advantage of it. If there is any way you would like to participate in VASLA, please contact me or any other board member listed at http://units.sla.org/chapter/cva/board.htm and let us know how you would like to become involved.

SLA will be holding its Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado June 3-7, 2007. The conference will create an excellent opportunity for networking, communication, learning and other developmental opportunities for information professionals. I hope to see you at SLA in Denver this June!

--Kathy Soule, President, VASLA

Announcements

VASLA Spring Program, April 27, 2007 - Partnering With A Purpose: The Development of Strategic Partnerships for Libraries   Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia

SLA National Conference, June 3 - 6, 2007 in Denver, Colorado http://www.sla.org/content/Events/conference/ac2007/index.cfm

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://myweb.usf.edu/~catherin/SARC_IV/index.html

Program Summaries

Spring Program

Partnering With A Purpose:

The Development of Strategic Partnerships for Libraries



Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia

Friday, April 27^th, 2007

Join us for the spring program that will begin with an overview of the elements of a partnership, a discussion of the foundations for partnership development, and basic steps of forming a partnership. The discussion will continue with ideas for evaluating partnerships, managing partnerships, and mitigating problems of partnerships.

The program will include a presentation by Jeanne Liedtka, Executive Director, Batten Institute, and Johnson and Higgins Research Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School; a case example presented by Ken Winter, Librarian for the Virginia Transportation Research Council; and discussion facilitated by Karen King of the Darden Graduate Business Library at the University of Virginia. Our session will be based on the book “Partnering With A Purpose” that was written by a Virginia librarian Barry Trott and his co author Janet Crowther.

Schedule:

9:00am-9:30am                     Registration and Welcome Coffee

9:30am-11:30am                    Program

11:45am-1:00pm                    Luncheon - Abbott Dining Room

Registration is available online at SLA Survey Monkey at

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=197123663358

Deadline for Registration: Tuesday, April 24^th, 2007

Registration Fee: $25.00 Program fee includes parking pass for garage, lunch buffet held in Darden Abbott Dining Center. Please make checks payable to VASLA and bring with you to registration.

Driving and parking directions will be sent by e-mail to participants once they are registered for the program.

For more information contact Karen King at kingk@darden.virginia.edu or by telephone at 434-924-7321.

Summer VASLA Evening Out to the Shenandoah Shakespeare’s American Shakespeare Center

July 11^th 2007

5:30pm                      Meet in Staunton, Virginia

5:30-7:00pm              Dinner (location to be determined, Dutch treat)

7:00pm-7:30pm        Transition to Blackfriars Playhouse

7:30pm-10:00pm      Performance of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” comedy at Blackfriars Playhouse

Hold the date of Wednesday July 11^th for the VASLA summer evening out. Registration details will be available in Mid May. Blackfriars website: http://www.americanshakespearecenter.com

Feature Article

Stone Soup: What the childhood story has to do with Social Networks and Information Sharing

By: Karen King, President Elect, VASLA

Do you remember a childhood story or maybe you were told a similar story to the one I learned called “Stone Soup”? The story goes like this…. there was a village that was starving and did not know how to feed itself. A person in the village spoke up and stated that they could feed the entire village with a pot of stone soup. The villagers watched as the person started a fire in the village center and built it up high. Once the fire was burning he recruited someone to continue feeding the fire with wood to keep it going. Then he asked around the village to find who had the biggest soup pot available. The pot was brought to the fire and water was added. As the water began to warm over the fire, the person went to the river near by to find three big smooth stones. They recruited some villagers to carry the stones to the soup pot and place them carefully in the bottom of the pot. Everyone stood around looking at the pot as it began bubbling away with the water and the stones. After a little while, one villager decided to offer a carrot to add to the soup, so they left and quickly returned with the carrot. Carefully slicing it into rings they dropped the carrot into the bubbling soup pot. Someone else remembered that they two potatoes and another family recalled their onion. Soon the villagers had created a wonderful pot of hearty soup that was shared by all.

The Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Special Libraries Association (RMSLA) is the host chapter for the upcoming SLA Annual Conference that will be held in Denver. As the host chapter they are responsible for the local arrangements details. There are many aspects of the conference planning that they are handling. One of them is to share local information with the conference participants. The RMSLA decided to build a wiki to share local information. Over the last five months the members have one by one been sharing their favorite restaurants, sights, shopping ideas, and activities. In the end I think they served up a wonderful mix of information about the Denver area. I encourage you to visit their wiki and see what you think.

Looking at the RMSLA conference wiki I wonder if there is a wonderful pot of stone soup that the Virginia Chapter could create together. Are their topics that the VASLA could cover in the creation of a wiki that would be helpful to our members or to a broader audience of SLA members?

The RMSLA wiki for the Denver SLA Annual conference can be found by visiting the chapter website and clicking on the link that is listed in the president’s message under “the local arrangements wiki”. Check it out! http://units.sla.org/chapter/crmt/index.asp

Susan Adkins Travel Award Winner Announced

Congratulations to Julie Beamer of the Virginia Historical Society who is the VASLA Susan Adkins Travel Award Stipend winner for 2007. Julie will be attending the upcoming SLA Annual Conference in June that will be held in Denver Colorado.

About Susan Adkins

Susan L. Adkins, Information Specialist at NASA Langley Technical Library, died in a plane crash on March 1, 1998 in Hampton, Virginia. Over the years, she was active in developing strategies for delivering scientific and technical information to the aerospace researcher’s desktop. This was particularly true with regard to the full text of old NASA reports. In addition to her work at Langley, Susan served as Director and chaired several committees for the Virginia Chapter of Special Libraries Association. She was also a member of AIAA. While her professional publications concentrated on CD-ROM information, her other non-fiction writings covered topics ranging from family to flying to the mechanics of bubbles. Besides being a librarian, a writer, and a pilot, she also loved to travel and take pictures. (VASLA Bulletin, Spring 1998)

VASLA Membership Organizations

National Radio Astronomy Observatory

By Megan Nunemaker, Astronomy Librarian

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Library was last profiled in the Spring 2005 VASLA Bulletin. Many exciting things have happened since then! First, the construction at the Charlottesville Library is complete. This construction more than doubled the size of the library. With the new space, the library collection was centralized, making management of materials much easier for the Charlottesville staff. This extra space was appreciated when the Tucson library was closed, and many of its materials came to Charlottesville. The addition also provided a large lounge area which is an extremely popular gathering place!

In the last two years the NRAO Library has also experienced many “virtual” changes as well. First, the Library’s website, www.nrao.edu/library, received a complete overhaul. The site now provides access to the NRAO OPAC, NRAO publishing statistics, news items of interest to the radio astronomy community, and many other library offerings. Many of these items are provided via mouse-over menus to decrease the number of clicks needed to access each resource.

Also updated is the NRAO ILS. Previously, the ILS used was InMagic. In mid-2006 the NRAO Library switched to EOS.Web, a fully-hosted MaRC ILS system. This same system also houses the RAPs and Theses databases, used to track the publishing output of NRAO instruments and staff.

As the NRAO plans to celebrate its 50^th Anniversary this June, the NRAO Library feels it has much to celebrate as well. The NRAO Library staff will continue to strive to make the Library as modern as possible, continuing to offer more and more electronic services. The pinnacle of this will be our service to our new location in Chile; we expect to fulfill all the research needs of the staff there virtually, without opening a branch library in Chile.

Two years and so many changes! Visit us online, at www.nrao.edu/library, or visit any of our physical locations. The NRAO Library staff will be glad to see you!

**Want to see your library profiled in the next VASLA Bulletin? Contact Christian Pascasio, christian.pascasio@rich.frb.org, or Megan Nunemaker, mnunemak@nrao.edu.**

SEND US YOUR NEWS!!

Have you:   Attended a seminar? Published an article? Received an award? Been elected or appointed to an office or committee? Traveled out of the state or country?

TELL US ABOUT IT! WE WANT TO HEAR WHAT OUR MEMBERS ARE DOING!

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Send your news to Megan Nunemaker or Christian Pascasio:

Megan Nunemaker
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
mnunemak@nrao.edu

Christian Pascasio
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond
christian.pascasio@rich.frb.org

VASLA BOARD MEMBERS

President:

Kathryn Soule
University of Virginia
soule@virginia.edu

Treasurer:

Carla Lee
University of Virginia
carlalee@virginia.edu

President-Elect:

Karen King
University of Virginia
kingk@virginia.edu

Director:

Lorraine Sitler
UNOS
sitlerlc@unos.org

Past-President:

Becky Carvajal
GlaxoSmithKline
carvajal6@cox.net

Director:

Beth Blanton Kent
University of Virginia
blanton@virginia.edu

Secretary:

Janet Holly
Virginia Military Institute
hollyjs@vmi.edu

This page was updated on April 24, 2007.

For further information, please contact: Julie Beamer, VASLA Webmaster, email: jbeamer@vahistorical.org

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