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Mona Suarez
CHAIR
mona.suarez@ey.com
Daran Bishop
WEBMASTER &
NETWORKING CHAIR
dlbishop@marathonoil.com
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PER Bulletin Petroleum and
Energy Resources Division
FROM
THE CHAIR Welcome to our premier edition of the PER Bulletin online! We are at the cutting, sometimes even bleeding, edge of technology as our division newsletter starts publishing on the Web. Special thanks go to Bulletin Editor Parker Ladwig and Networking Chair/Webmaster Ed Walton for making this bulletin happen. It was very hard missing the annual conference this year and I want to thank everyone who covered for me during my sudden change in plans. Since the conference though, we have not stopped. Many wonderful people volunteered to take on the duties of the division. In a few short months we have created a homepage for PER at SLA’s site, put the Bulletin in cyberspace and moved the listserv to SLA’s server. Look for details on how to access the listserv, if you don’t have access already, elsewhere in this bulletin. A special thanks go to Pam Weaver and the University of Tulsa for hosting our listserv during the past few years. These changes are not only exciting, they are necessary to stay solvent as a division. The cost of creating, printing and mailing a professional looking newsletter was eating up our budget. With most people’s ready access to technology, there was less and less reason to justify the production of our newsletter on paper. A change in the Bylaws was recently approved by the Board. This Bylaw revision will be going to SLA’s Bylaws Committee for approval, then to you, the membership, for final approval. The changes suggested are primarily gender neutral language, making printed ballots unnecessary if only one person is running for office, and legalizing electronic voting. Hang on, PER is starting to move at the speed of light! FROM
THE PAST-CHAIR It’s the middle of summer and I’m experiencing the same feelings I have at the end of a year – anticipation for what’s ahead and nostalgia for the year gone by. This is because my term as Chair is complete and I now move on to my role as Past-Chair. I’m not sure what’s involved in this position but I am confident that I have plenty of colleagues who will help me through it once again. I relied heavily on Edna Paulson during my term as chair an cannot thank her enough. I’m looking forward to the "New Year" with Libby Black as our Chair. She is extremely dedicated, organized and a pleasure to work with. I know this year will be full of many changes that the Division will like. Please remember to contact Libby or Chair-Elect Pam Weaver, if you have any thoughts or comments on the annual conference, membership, the Bulletin or any other items. Contact with our members is crucial to a successful division. I hope that those of you who attended the Indianapolis Conference enjoyed the programs that the Division sponsored. Thanks to the efforts of Seymour Satin, we had very generous support from many vendors. The Division greatly appreciates the contributions of the vendors. I truly enjoyed my position as Chair. It was an opportunity to gain experience in areas that I don’t normally have exposure to in my current position. I never thought I’d be concerned with the IRS and its requirements! Fortunately, SLA has a great staff who can make the most complicated situations more understandable and less frightening. I was sitting in my last Division-Cabinet meeting when the process of Roberts Rules finally made sense! I now think if I was asked to conduct another meeting using these I might actually get it right! I encourage those of you who are considering a position on the board to do it! It is an opportunity that you will never regret. It looks great on a resume too! In early October, I will begin a nine-month maternity leave from my position at Imperial Oil. I am scheduled to return in June 1999 and will remain active in the Division during this leave. If anyone wants or needs to contact me during this time, call me at my home number, which is listed in the Bulletin. Caution, I will be at home with three children under the age of 5, so don’t be surprised if it’s not a quiet conversation without interruption. FROM
THE EDITOR As PER Bulletin Editor, I am both glad and a bit hesitant to blaze the trail with our new format. I’d like to thank Jessica Bray, the former editor, for helping me with ideas, and for the tremendous support from Libby Black, Ed Walton, and Pam Weaver. I am pleased with our contributions to this issue of the Bulletin, especially from Connie Bihon for her articles on the recent SLA conference events. I would also like to thank Ann Coppin for continuing to provide interesting articles on the Internet. Please let me know if there’s anything we can do to make the Bulletin more pertinent to your everyday situation. And, I’m sure Ed would just love any suggestions you might have for improving the format for this electronic version of the Bulletin. Finally, I can always use articles, however brief. I would really like to have more than I can use. This year’s PER Bulletin submission deadlines are: V. 21, No. 2—November 1
for November issue PER
DIVISION INCOME STATEMENT
PER
DIVISION LISTSERV PERforum has moved! After lots of discussion and work with Maurice Harris at SLA, the PERforum moderated e-mail service moved to the SLA server as a fully functional automatic listserv on August 5, 1998. The SLA-DPER listserv is the unmoderated discussion group of the Special Libraries Association Petroleum and Energy Resources Division. The list is intended to be a forum for discussion and communication between SLA members with an emphasis on energy issues. Below are some of the basic commands you may find helpful. This information is also available at the SLA website at www.sla.org/division/dper/listserv.htm. SUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE POST MESSAGE TO LIST Clearly identify the topic of your message in the subject line and repeat your e-mail address at the end of your message (if you don't have a signature file). CHANGING ADDRESSES PROBLEMS? DESCRIPTION
OF THE NETWORKING CHAIR / The Networking Chair is responsible for liaison between the PER Division and SLA on the SLA Internet Services utilized by the Division. Responsibilities include maintaining the PER Website and oversight of the SLA-DPER Listserv. Website maintenance includes creating and modifying the pages for the site, uploading these to the SLA Server, and troubleshooting problems with the site. Listserv maintenance includes maintaining the mailing list, monitoring the postings for appropriate content, and troubleshooting technical problems. CALL
FOR PER DIVISION ARCHIVIST Anyone for Archives ?? If you enjoy history, why not volunteer to handle the PER archives? We have about six records management boxes of materials. Duties include information retrieval, records maintenance and storage. This is an excellent way for someone with limited time to become involved and familiar with PER Division activities. If you would like more information about my activities as archivist, contact: Jan Heagy If you are interested in the position, contact: Libby Black 1998 SLA CONFERENCE IN INDIANAPOLIS MONDAY,
JUNE 8 SITES Scout Reports ( www.scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report
) Metasites and Qualified Directories:
The General Session on Monday morning gave attendees the first keynote speech; it featured Stanley Davis, author of 2020 Vision, Future Perfect and Blurr. He pointed out that the attitude of CEOs toward knowledge management is identical to their attitude toward quality when it first appeared in the business literature. Nevertheless, it is a fact that in today’s business environment wealth flows from innovation not from doing something better; therefore, intellectual capital is very valuable. As that value increases in a more highly technological world, managing business really means managing knowledge. Because communication or connection is today’s most important business tool, knowledge management needs to be a way to connect people and not another collection of information. All businesses are becoming software companies in that they are very information intensive. We are on a moving platform as to information; everyone is becoming a librarian. This revolution means that the professional librarian must redefine his role and this new role needs to be consistent with today’s model of life-long learning where corporations must be educators.
The Petroleum and Energy Division meeting on Wednesday morning focused on document delivery services; it was titled "That Was Then, This Is Now" and speakers were Una Gourlay from R.I.C.E. and Susan Madison from Uncover. University librarians are forming consortiums to provide for specific journal subscriptions and document delivery among the members for expensive titles owned by particular members. However, this option is not open to corporate and other special librarians. These librarians must use document delivery services since they, too, are hit hard by rising journal prices. Indeed, many university librarians are dropping subscriptions and turning to "just in time" rather than "just in case" operations. Changes during the past three years that make this possible are: image delivery for speed and convenience, user acceptance of document delivery, customization by the vendors—such as loading of holdings, and unmediated delivery. Trends in document delivery include: electronic journals, flat rate and/or volume pricing licenses, hyperlinks from databases, publisher mergers, more image delivery, and information aggregators. These massive changes are making it harder and harder to obtain recent journal articles via interlibrary loan and results in high fees charged by the libraries, which do continue to pay the hefty subscription costs for print copies. As more librarians move to electronic journals, interlibrary loan is not a viable service—so that document delivery services will play an even larger role in library budgets in the near future. Issues which need to be dealt with include: 1. Pricing; 2. User location (IP address no longer acceptable); 3. Continued mergers in the publishing field; 4. Consortiums and resource sharing; 5. Security—both for the user as to payment and personal information and for the publisher as to contents and copyright; 6. Standards. Future trends forecast by Uncover include partnering of document delivery services and libraries and the library as an intermediary rather that a depository. INTERNET
CORNER Change is a cornerstone of the Internet. First there were just a few search engines crawling around and a few subject directories for specific areas. Search options were limited. Searches could retrieve vast numbers of hits. In 1995 I wrote in this column that there was no real good way to search for a concept. At that time directory databases, such as Yahoo, and search engines, such as WebCrawler and Lycos, were in their infancy. Then in 1996 I discussed in this column the two types of search tools—1) indices and catalogs, and 2) search engines. Advanced search options were becoming available. Searches could retrieve vast numbers of hits. Now there are more directories, metasearch engines (such as Dogpile) which search multiple engines at once, and advanced search options. A constant is still retrieving vast numbers of hits. However, even that is being tackled by some sites. Ask Jeeves takes a question in plain English, "interviews" the requestor using natural language processing, and then takes the requestor to the site(s) selected as being appropriate. The claim is to provide the site or the few sites that best answer the question. How do you know when to leave your comfortable rut and use a different search tool? Of course there are traditional print publications. But, what is available when print is not handy? Current Cites is a free, monthly electronic publication which monitors information technology literature in both print and digital forms. Upon subscription each issue is sent to your e-mail address. The annotated citations include links to available digital versions of the article. There are two additional services from the Current Cites Web site. "Bibliography On-Demand" allows searching the Current Cites database of past issues for the topics. A search on "Search Engines" retrieved 10 citations from January 1994 to August 4, 1998. A new feature is the "Article Search." This allows searches of the full-text of more than 225 articles available free on the Internet. A search on "Search Engines" retrieved 31 articles. Another choice is the Librarians' Index to the Internet. It is a subject directory with sites selected and annotated by a librarians. Each entry is linked to the cited resource. It has a heading "Searching" and a link to the InFoPeople Best Search Tools Form. The Librarians' Index lists, as of August 4th, under the heading "Searching the Internet" About: 35 Internet resources Comparison charts of search tools abound. Printed charts may become out-of-date. Online charts need to be kept updated. InFoPeople maintains both a Search Tools Chart and a form which allows easy searching of recommended tools. Search Engine Watch is another site monitoring tools and providing evaluations. Ask Jeeves is an interesting search tool. The knowledge base is developed by the Ask Jeeves research staff from questions submitted. The claim is "each answer link is guaranteed to be relevant to the question asked." The response to the question has two parts: first, questions that seem to be similar, and second, links found through the Alta Vista, Excite, InfoSeek, Yahoo, and WebCrawler search engines. One fun option is seeing the list of questions currently being asked. How you ask the question can be very important. The question "Where do I find information about search engines?" did retrieve relevant sites. Their list of specialized search engines even led me to a science fiction search engine. Asking "what search tools are available?" did not retrieve any of the expected sites. There were results for hardware tools, the band Tool, software tools, and Tool, Texas. Asking where I can buy Taos Moccasins got me to the expected Taos Moccasin site, information about Taos, New Mexico, and to Microsoft’s color chart with the "Moccasin"color. Some print resources are also available through the Internet. Ran Hock, "How to Do Field
Searching in Web Search Engines: A Field Trip," Online, v.
22, no. 3, May 1998. Greg Notess, "Internet Search
Engine Update," Online, v. 22, no. 3, May 1998. Susan Feldman, "Web Search
Services in 1998: Trends and Challenges," Searcher, v. 6,
no. 6, June 1998. "Your Complete Guide to
Searching the Net," PC Magazine, December 2, 1997.
sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/ sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/InternetIndex/ infopeople.berkeley.edu:8000/src/srctools.html infopeople.berkeley.edu:8000/src/chart.html www.searchenginewatch.com/ www.hamline.edu/library/bush/handouts/comparisons.html www.askjeeves.com/ www.dogpile.com/
Windows 98 www.microsoft.com/windows98/default.asp www.nmt.edu/~armiller/win98.htm www.annoyances.org/win98/ www.winfiles.com/
www.acses.com/ www.abebooks.com/ www.1001sites.com/ www.bestofasiapaacific.com/ www.digitisation.net.au/ www.nasa.gov/search/index.html stats.bls.gov/ocohome.htm
www.unitedmedia.com/comics/ If you have seen Deep Impact or Armageddon the following sites may be of interest: impact.arc.nasa.gov/ nmnhwww.si.edu/paleo/blast/ www.deep-impact.com/neod/index.html www.nationalgeographic.com/features/97/asteroids/ www.sciam.com/explorations AWARDS Marie Tilson is the recipient of the PER Division's Special Achievement Award for 1998. The award was presented June 9, 1998, at the division’s Annual Business Meeting at the SLA Conference in Indianapolis. The Special Achievement Award is presented to a member or former member of PER for contributions to the Division in any of the following ways: outstanding accomplishment during a particular year; contribution in a variety of roles over a period of years exemplifying leadership and participation; or an outstanding article, book, or electronic information source on petroleum and energy resources. The first Award was presented in 1996 to Barbara Pearson, formerly of Exxon Corporation. Marie Tilson served PER as Chair in 1993-94. Previously she had served as treasurer and chaired the nominating committee. After her year as Chair, she proposed the Special Achievement Award, saw it through Executive Board approval, and chaired the committee which presented the first award in 1996. Besides these offices, Marie has served the division in other roles. In 1995 Marie volunteered to serve as Treasurer for a year when the incumbent had to resign mid-term. She stepped into the breach again in 1996, when the current chair was unable to attend the Annual Conference. With only a few week’s notice, Marie finalized arrangements, made sure programs ran smoothly, thanked sponsors, and mentored the Chair-elect. Marie also organized PER’s 60th Birthday Party, a gala dinner held during the Cincinnati conference in 1993. At the same time she and Marriott Smart compiled and edited Memories of the Past, a history of the division which was distributed to all members. And to round out her service to SLA, Marie has also been active in the Transportation Division and in the San Francisco Chapter, whose Professional Achievement Award she won in 1990. Marie is presently a consultant, providing services to clients in the San Francisco area. She was previously Senior Reference Librarian at Chevron Corporation. Earlier positions ranged from working on the Alyeska Pipeline project for Bechtel to serving as bookmobile librarian in New York state. The members who nominated Marie cited her dedication to PER and its members, shown in her taking on a variety of responsibilities and carrying them out in exemplary fashion. Nominators also stressed her inclusion and mentoring of other division members, always carried out in an encouraging and friendly spirit. The award, an engraved pewter Revere bowl, was presented by Edna Paulson, American Petroleum Institute, Chair of the Awards Committee. Other members of the committee were Sally Fell of BP Research and Michele Sullivan of Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
PER member, Xenia Stanford of Nova Corporation in Calgary, is the winner of the Arizona Chapter's association-wide essay contest. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Chapter sponsored the contest for members to write about their PR efforts. Be sure to check out Xenia's article, "Delighting the Customer: The Role of Information Professionals in the 21st Century," in the July 1998 Information Outlook. 1999
SLA CONFERENCE IN MINNEAPOLIS Session
Ideas If you're like me, you haven't quite gotten through everything that stacked up while we were gone to the SLA Conference in Indianapolis, but it's time to think about the next SLA Conference in Minneapolis. As Chair-Elect, I am responsible for the breakfast programs next June. I'd appreciate your input on what types of programs you'd like to have. Below are some ideas I've come up with.
Are any of these something you'd like? Do you have other ideas? Would you consider participating in one of the sessions as a contributor or as a moderator?
PER is co-sponsoring a Round Table in Minneapolis in 1999, entitled "Merger Mania." We want to know how librarians deal or prepare for this type of change. Many of you may not have experienced outright company mergers but the same dynamics probably happen if you have been outsourced, put under the umbrella of a services company or even have a new boss from a different part of the company. We need a speaker who can tell their story. Please sign up or send me your ideas about people to contact. Thanks,
Below is a preliminary itinerary for our field trip in 1999. Five, count them, five divisions are now co-sponsoring but 3M is only allowing 100 people. Be sure and register early when the registrations opens up next year. Thanks, Several Divisions have contacted 3M about hosting a field trip in conjunction with the 1999 Mpls Conference (I would assume Thursday). Barb Peterson, the Director of Information Services there, asked if I would post this to the conference planners listserv in case there is interest from other divisions. The divisions which have contacted 3M so far are: Pharmaceutical, Petroleum & Energy, and Engineering. 3M suggests they co-sponsor. 3M could probably take two busloads totaling a maximum of 100 people. Tentative agenda:
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