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Mona Suarez
CHAIR
mona.suarez@ey.com
Daran Bishop
WEBMASTER &
NETWORKING CHAIR
dlbishop@marathonoil.com
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 May 1999 / v. 21 n. 4 Petroleum
and Energy Resources Division FROM
THE CHAIR Looking back, 1998-1999 was a year of accomplishment for the Petroleum & Energy Resources Division. Some of our steps were small and some were big; altogether, we really moved forward. Look at our progress during the past year:
Everything did not always go as planned but we got through the obstacles and we had fun. Extra kudos go to Ed Walton, Networking Chair, for bringing us into the 21st Century; Parker Ladwig, Bulletin Editor, for four great PER Bulletins and Pam Weaver, Chair-Elect, for being both mentor and student. Stephanie Dueck, Joy Greene, Connie Riley, Edna Paulson, Emily Arrowsmith, Nancy Bourque, and their committees; all of these people supported the Division through their important roles. I think that the petroleum and energy business pushed hard on each and every officer and chair this year. Our personal lives didn't stand still either; parents left and babies arrived. Despite all the chaos, everyone did their best to deliver for PER. I was blessed to work with the best team of people ever. Thank you! CALLING
ALL VOLUNTEERS! The Petroleum and Energy Resources Division needs a few good people to fill committee positions for the 1999-2000 SLA year. Below are descriptions of the positions we need to fill. If you are interested in contributing your expertise to the benefit of PER, please let me know which of the positions you would be willing to do. Thanks!
Includes Webmaster and Bulletin Editor. Time involved is about three to five hours per month. Could be co-chaired. You will be the liaison between the SLA web site and PER. Duties consist of sending updates to the PER Web Page, including the PER Bulletin, and doing any housekeeping for the PER List. You don't need to be able to write HTML but experience in updating a web site is a plus. Due to the expense of printing and mailing
the PER Bulletin, we have tossed the paper and are going
virtual! The Bulletin is being published via the SLA web
site. The editor can now focus on writing and publicizing
our activities. Financial Development Chair Calls vendors and gets financial sponsorship
for the Annual Conference and other activities of the Division.
This is a fun job for anyone who likes to shake the tree
and count the apples! Most of the activity is between now
and January. Time involved depends upon how convincing you
are on the first contact. Membership Chair Greets new members by phone or mail,
welcoming them to the division, answering any questions
and directing them to our PER Bulletin and the PER List.
You will get to monitor the implementation of the SLA membership
search engine. This is a chance to be on the cutting (hopefully
not bleeding) edge of technology and benefit the division
as well. Archivist Learn all of PER's deep, dark secrets.
Must have space to store some boxes. If your Library is
going virtual, here's how you can satisfy your yen to collect
paper. Public Relations Chair Sound the alarm to the membership on breaking issues. Brainstorm on marketing ideas for the Division. This job is wide open and could use a creative mind. FROM
THE EDITOR Here, finally, is the last bulletin of my tenure. As you may have noticed from Pam’s Call to Volunteer’s, I've at least been successful in eliminating my job. Well, not exactly. The Editor’s duties will now be rolled into those of Networking Chair—this makes a lot of sense to me because the two offices are so intimately connected. I hope that I have been responsible for providing articles of some interest to you over the past year. Moving forward, I think our next challenge as a division will be to get EVERYONE involved. Yes, this means not only you, but that colleague of yours who says that he’s a member, but never has served as an officer, been to any of the PER meetings, or looked at the Web site. I know Pam already has this as one of her top priorities. Please feel free to provide any advice or suggestions. Thanks to all of you that provided articles—please keep them coming! PER
DIVISION BALANCE SHEET
SPEAKERS
AND SPONSORS SPICE UP PER PROGRAMS We would not have an annual conference
without the support of many generous sponsors and without
our exceptional speakers who speak for gratis. Please contact
the following speakers and sponsors at the Annual Conference
in Minneapolis. If you aren't going to the Conference, let
them know that we appreciate their support. Sponsors API EnCompass Speakers Mary Ellen Bates, Bates
Information Services PER
DIVISION SLA CONFERENCE SCHEDULE No changes made to previously published schedule
REPORT
OF THE NOMINATING COMMITTEE The Nominating Committee is pleased to announce the following candidates for Division office for the 1999-2001 term: Chair-Elect/Chair: Edward W. Walton (Caltex Corporation, Irving, Texas) Secretary: Donald R. Wulfinghoff (Energy Institute Press, Wheaton, Maryland) As provided in PER's bylaws, since there is a single candidate for each position, the election will be held at PER's annual business meeting on June 8, 1999. I would like to thank everyone who suggested names to us and everyone who considered running, and especially the other members of the Nominating Committee, Connie Bihon and Linda Musser. AWARDS
COMMITTEE REPORT The Special Achievement Award goes to Pam Weaver, primarily for her work as moderator of the PER Forum. She will be presented with a gift and a certificate at the business luncheon. She was nominated by Connie Bihon. The Student Stipend Award goes to Laura McLellan, a student at Kent State University. Her essay was chosen out of six entries. Laura will recieve $500 towards conference expenses, tickets to all PER events and a Tea in her honor. NETWORKING
CHAIR / WEBMASTER REPORT The host site of the PER Discussion List (SLA-DPER) was transferred from The University of Tulsa Petroleum Abstracts server to the SLA server this year. We want to express the Division's gratitude to The University of Tulsa Petroleum Abstracts for their donation of time and equipment for hosting this service for the past several years. We especially want to thank Pam Weaver, who coordinated the list and coordinated the transfer of the service to the SLA server. The transfer of the SLA-DPER list was handled seamlessly. After the transfer, the list continued to work without any problems for a couple of months. In January, a problem was detected with the listowner notification system. Error messages that were supposed to be sent to the listowner, who is the Networking Chair, were not being received. Therefore, people who requested to be subscribed to the list were ignored, errors from the list were not being corrected, and the listowner was blissfully unaware of a problem. After weeks of troubleshooting, SLA's IT Dept. finally determined that the email protocol used by my company's email system was not compatible with the server's requirements; therefore, I had to use an email system outside of my company to communicate with the system. This corrected the problem. Statistically, there are 140 PER Members currently subscribed to the list. That is less than 35% of Membership of PER. The exact number of messages sent to the list is not available. We will track this number next year. A rough estimate would be around 200 messages; however, this may be a generous figure. This is the year that the PER Division abandoned itself to the electronic age. The PER Board decided it was time to transfer the publishing of the bulletin from hardcopy to electronic format. The electronic format was to be made available to PER members via the Internet. Hardcopy format would be made available upon request. Coordination efforts between the Bulletin Editor and the Networking Chair became a focal point for making this happen. I must applaud Parker Ladwig's professionalism and cooperative spirit in facilitating this task. Reviewing statistics for the bulletin pages on the website is alarming. The system for collecting statistics details the exact number of times a webpage has been "hit". However, it does not tell if the hits are from the same or different users. Therefore, the number of hits includes users who may have looked at the page during different session as multiple hits. This causes the number of hits to be more than the number of people who have actually looked at that page. The average number of hits on bulletin pages for this year is 50. For example, the most recent bulletin, published in March, has had a total of 49 hits for the months of March and April. This means that somewhere between 10-12% of the Division members have looked at the most current Bulletin. In order to put the bulletin on a website, the PER Division needed to create a website for the division. The PER Board established the criteria of a simple, functional site without a lot of bells and whistles as the main specification for the site. The desire was to have an easy to use, fast site that would not take a lot of time to locate and access information. I believe that we met this requirement. A prototype site was developed and redeveloped over the course of two months. A "final" site was rolled out in August 1998. Reviewing the statistics for the website as a whole is more alarming than the bulletin pages. The number of user sessions is a good indication of how many people actually logged onto the site. The range of user sessions by month varies dramatically, from a low of 7 to a high of 130. The months of higher usage can be correlated to the months that a bulletin is published. The average number of user sessions is 65 per month. The number of user sessions has steadily increased since the inception of the site. The highest user sessions have occurred in the last 3 months. This looks like a good trend, until you evaluate the most frequent users. Over the last three months, more than 50% of the hits on the site are by the 4 or 5 most frequent users. The most frequent users are generally a search engine indexing the site, the Webmaster, or a PER Officer. For example, in the month of April, there were 90 user sessions. Of that number, 43 users were from 5 users. 4 of these 5 users were search engine indexing the site. The other 47 were from individuals. This means that the average number of users per month is more like 30-32. That means, for a division with a membership of over 400 people, less that 10% of the members are actually using this tool. This has been a year of great change for the Networking area of the division. However, I believe that next year there will be just as much change. Vision for the year:
INTERNET
CORNER As information professionals we have been used to considering copyright issues and placing subscriptions to publications. Obtaining materials through licenses and not through purchases, prior to electronic products, was not the usual procedure or was limited to a very few publications. Also, our client base could be easily defined as "employees," or "students," or "professors," etc. which would access the print product at defined location(s). Now client bases can be "full time employees, part time employees, contract staff, consultants, etc.," or "students, visiting or guest students or professors, etc." and are located in a single organization/institution at a single location or in a single organization in multiple locations, or are in multiple organizations in single or multiple locations. As electronic resources have become a part of our offerings to our customers, licensing has become more common as a way of obtaining materials. It is now necessary to understand licensing and its relationship to copyright and subscriptions. The following are brief definitions of the three terms: Copyright - The right granted by law to an author, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of "original works of authorship" that are fixed in a tangible form of expression. According to the U.S. Copyright Office, "the fixation need not be directly perceptible so long as it may be communicated with the aid of a machine or device." Subscription - The right to receive a product or service for payment by purchase or lease. It is usually a purchase made by signed order for a specified period of time. License - Permission from the copyright owner to use all or a portion of a copyrighted work for a particular purpose during a specific period of time. It is usually a written contract that defines explicitly the rights that the licensor is granting to the licensee, subject to certain conditions and obligations. Licenses may be negotiable, somewhat negotiable, or not negotiable. Shrink wrap licenses printed on the wrapping of software purchased by the user are an example of non negotiable licenses. Most licenses provided by vendors are standard ones that are only somewhat negotiable. It is important to read and understand the license and all attachments. The following are some questions to consider:
SLA and ARL presented a distance learning videoconference on March 4, 1999, on "De-mystifying the Licensing of Electronic Resources." Identical post-conference resources are available from both organizations at their Web sites. This includes a checklist for understanding licensing agreements, glossary of licensing terms, and a bibliography of published and electronic resources. The ARL has an additional Web page with other resources concerning licensing issues. A second videoconference on "Effective Negotiating of Electronic Resources" was announced for October 14, 1999. http://www.sla.org/professional/license.shtml http://www.sla.org/govt/diglic59.html http://www.arl.org/scomm/licensing/resources.html
http://www.arl.org/scomm/licensing/index.html
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/
Articles http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/mar/coffman.htm Sites http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/InternetIndex/newsites.html http://www.world-petroleum.org/ http://www.eurunion.org/ http://edgarscan.tc.pw.com/ http://www.prars.com/ http://www.cdc.gov/nchswww/default.htm http://stats.bls.gov/ http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/crh/respref.htm http://www.oanda.com/converter/classic http://www.webwombat.com.au/intercom/newsprs/index.htm http://mapping.usgs.gov/www/gnis/ http://164.214.2.59/gns/html/index.html http://edcwww.cr.usgs.gov/webglis http://www.rff.org/
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