ENY/ACRL Newsletter, Spring 1996


Table of Contents:


Ice Cream Social in NYC

There will be an ice cream social for the three New York chapters of ACRL during this summer's American Library Association Conference in New York City. The date is set for Monday, July 8th, from 5:30-7:30pm at the McGraw-Hill Headquarters building on 6th Ave.

All current members of ENY/ACRL will receive invitations in the mail during May. Please respond quickly, as an accurate number is necessary for the preparations.

McGraw-Hill is graciously sponsoring this complimentary event, and their location is a short, safe walk from a conference hotel.

This will be a wonderful opportunity to meet members from the ACRL/NY Metro, and Western NY/Ontario Chapters of ACRL and strengthen our connections, as well as a fun event for the ALA-attending members of ENY/ACRL.


1996 Librarian of the Year Award

Elaine Coppola, Social Sciences Reference/Bibliographer at Syracuse University Library, was named ENY/ACRL Librarian of the Year for 1996. She was awarded $250 and a plaque commemorating the award.

Elaine is eminently qualified to receive the award because of her longstanding commitment to the Chapter, to ACRL at the national level, and to the profession of librarianship. She is noted as a "backstage" worker, one who presses forward with tasks that are necessary but not necessarily glamorous. A few examples of her contributions include her work on the revision of the Chapter's Officers' Handbook; her assistance with nominations, even when this was not part of her official responsibilities; her compliation of the law bibliography for ACRL's Law & Political Science Instruction Committee; and her work on the _Guide to Reference Books_ project for which she wrote the annotations for the Political Science subsection and coordinated the submissions from SU for several subsections of the Social Science section.

ENY/ACRL has benefited from Elaine's professionalism for more than 10 years. She served as an institutional liaison, as a member of the local arrangements committee, as Secretary, and through the progression of Program Committee Chair/Vice President, President and Past President. Elaine also has contributed her time and effort at the national level, as Secretary of the ACRL Chapters Council; as a member of the Chapters Council Nominations Committee, the Professional Liaison Committee and the Government Relations Committee.

A brief summary of Elaine's qualities as the Librarian of the Year show that she works quietly and very competently; she serves, encourages and embodies the qualities needed in a superb role model for other librarians. She is truly an excellent librarian.

by Carla List, SUNY Plattsburgh


New York Gateway Group

The libraries at Clarkson University, Colgate University, Hamilton College, and St. Lawrence University have formed a consortium to provide library suers with customized gateway access to CARL UnCover, a database of tables of contents of over 17,000 journals. Each journal title or article citation in the database displays journal holdings information for an individual library, or for the consortium. East library has set up its own policies for document delivery for its users, and users are blocked from ordering journal articles which are available at their own institution.

The gateway also provides access to CARL Reveal Alert, a current awareness e-mail service, in which user-defined searches by author, subject, or journal title can be automatically run against the UnCover database on a weekly basis.

The NYGG service became available in January 1996. For more information, please contact either Sharon Britton, Emily Hutton, Melissa Jadlos, or Natalia Stahl


New York State Library Publications on the Web

County lists of New York State newspapers on microfilm at the State Library are now available through the State Library gopher. From the gopher main menu, click on "Full Texts of Publications of the New York State Library", then click on "New York State Newspapers on Microfilm Available from the New York State Library."

There are 62 text files in all--one per county--and each is arranged alphabetically by city, then title. Each entry includes title, OCLC#, location code, and detailed holdings. At the end of each file the user will find instructions on how to read the information and how to obtain the material through interlibrary loan. The State Library loans all of its New York State microfilmed newspapers except for the New York Times.

The State Library Publications can be found at:

gopher://unix2. nysed.gov:70/11/nyslpubs/nys.newspaper


Minutes of the 1996 Business Meeting

EASTERN NEW YORK CHAPTER
ASSOCIATION OF COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES
MEETING OF THE MEMBERSHIP
March 8, 1996
Syracuse, New York

The meeting was called to order by President Eileen Allen.

Treasurer's Report

Treasurer Pat Adams reported the following:

Checking account balance - $7173.79
Janice Graham Newkirk Research Award Fund - $8500.

She noted that she was completing her service as treasurer and appreciated the opportunities participation in the chapter provided.

Membership Chair

Sharon Britton reported that an experiment to print membership forms in the newsletter to save on mailing costs had not worked. Membership was significantly lower than in the past. She has contacted campus liaisons to assist in reaching those who did not renew. The printing of the directory has been delayed because of this situation. Directories will be mailed.

Government Relations Chair

Barbara Walton noted that she was leaving the Board and that her work on the Board had been rewarding. She directed the members' attention to a handout - a petition sponsored by ALA to promote the Equity on the Information Highway campaign.

Eileen Allen commented that Patricia Breivik, ACRL President, had spoken at Chapters Council about Chapters taking a more active role in this area.

Communications Chair

Eileen Allen reported for Kristin Strohmeyer who could not be present. The writer for the "Spotlight on Libraries" has retired from doing the column. The Chapter would like a volunteer to continue this useful feature. Parts of the newsletter are also available on the Chapter's Web page.

Web Site

"Web Master" Michael Engle reported that the home page was up. Bookmarks with the URL are available. It is hoped that this will facilitate networking, learning, and communication. Included are links to homepages for ENY/ACRL libraries and to the Metro chapter's home page. M. Engle reported that he would make an effort to keep the home page up to date.

Vice President / Program Chair

Barbara Durniak thanked the Program Committee and local arrangements people for the hard work that went in to making this conference possible. She said that a site was still needed for the Fall 1996 conference. The Spring 1997 conference will be a joint conference with the Metro Chapter to be held at SUNY New Paltz on March 21, 1997.

President

Eileen Allen reported on three joint projects that have been undertaken with the Metro Chapter. She noted the initiation of a Web homepage described by Michael Engle and the joint conference planned for Spring 1997 described by Barbara Durniak. In addition to these two, she described an ice cream social to be held at the ALA conference in New York city in July 1996. It is being sponsored by McGraw-Hill and will be held at their building. It will be by invitation only for members of the three New York ACRL chapter.

Eileen Allen also reported on the Janice Graham Newkirk Research Award. Administrative procedures are near completion. They will be published in the newsletter when done. She urged members to be considering research projects. It is expected that the first award will be made in March 1997. Members of the Award Committee are Barbara Via, Catherine Dwyer, and Sean Maloney.

Past President / Nominations Chair

Carla List thanked all those who agreed to have their names placed on the ballot. She announced the following election results:

By-laws change to administer the Janice Graham Newkirk Research Fund - Passed.

Vice President/Program Chair - Lynne King
Treasurer - Susan Zappen
Membership Chair - Jane Subramanian
Government Relations - Karen Ingeman

Librarian of the Year Award

Carla List presented the Librarian of the Year Award to Elaine Coppola of Syracuse University. In making the presentation her comments included among others: Elaine's longstanding commitment to the chapter and ACRL at the national level; specific contributions made to the work of the chapter; her work on an edition of the Guide to Reference Books. Carla concluded her presentation with a summary of Elaine's qualities; "..she works quietly and very competently; she serves, encourages, and embodies the qualities needed in a superb role model for other librarians."

Drawing for Students

Eileen Allen and Lynne King drew the names of students for the winners of the free registration to the next chapter conference. The winners are: Manal Al-Shakhs, Mary Beth Portley, Sarah Burns, and Gary Strubel.

The meeting was adjourned by President Eileen Allen.

Submitted by Rebecca Thompson, SUNY Potsdam


Michael Engle and the ENY/ACRL Web Site

The Construction of the ENY/ACRL Web Site.

As I prepared to write a Web site for our chapter, I needed to answer four basic questions:

To get going, I looked at the New York Metro Chapter's home page. I wanted users to know, up front, what was available on the site, so I decided a simple list would do. I wanted the site to support learning and networking. My first ideas were a contact list of officers with mailto links for sending comments, links to ACRL, ALA, and other chapter Web pages, and a link to the Spring Conference Web site at Syracuse. A look at the chapter newsletter yielded two other possible items for the site--the President's Letter and News from the Field.

I constructed the home page in an evening at home on a Macintosh 7500/100 using BBEdit Lite 3.5 editing software, Netscape 1.1, and a SLIP connection to the Internet. I needed the SLIP connection to access the NY Metro site and copy the URLs for the Metro, ALA, and ACRL sites.

Once I set up the page with the framing tags and title in BBEdit, I constructed a list, installed the links for the external sites, and inserted the text for the links to the pages I expected to construct later. BBEdit makes short work of linking to external sites. I type in the text for each link, highlight it, go to the sites I want to link to, copy the URL into the Anchor extension and click OK. The editing software enters the tags, placing them around the text for each link. I used DIR tags to indent each list item so I could insert sphere icons [greyball.gif] in front of them.

I decided to use a simple gray and silver color scheme. Gray is the default color in Netscape and I had seen gray and silver spheres at several icon sites [for a currently active icon site, see http://www.widomaker.com/~spalmer/ or browse the Yahoo icon list at http ://www.yahoo.com/Computers/World_Wide_Web/Programming/Icons/]. I've always wanted to use the Byzantine-style line GIF I had seen on several icon sites, so I decided to put it at the page top and use table tags to make a frame around ENY/ACRL. The frame gives the ENY/ACRL letters a nice raised-platform effect that looks like a logo.

To make up the contacts page, I typed in the information from the newsletter, tagged it, added the header and footer and linked to the document from the home page. The entire site had now been constructed and checked on my hard disk at home. When I was satisfied with the html documents and had tested the links, I copied the documents onto a diskette.

The next morning, I carried the diskette to work, copied the html documents into the server folder in my office Power Mac, and e-mailed the URL to Eileen Allen. The URL for the home page became the Internet address of my office computer [http://urislib.library.cornell.edu] plus the document name [acrlhome.html]. ENY-ACRL had a Web site.

A few days later, after some discussions on e-mail, Kristin Strohmeyer sent me the text of the News from the Field section from the newsletter already marked up with html tags. It took about fifteen or twenty minutes to copy the marked text into a new page, add the header and footer, and link it to the home page. Then she sent me the marked up text for Member's Library Home Pages, and I edited and loaded it in the same way.

I have tried to be mindful of good Web page and site design, using consistent footers, returns, and headers, and html style in the chapter Web site. I'm working on the Web design committee that reviews Cornell's library sites, and I consider user feedback a very important part of constructing a functional site. Won't you send me your comments at moe1@cornell.edu? Your questions, contributions, and criticisms are always welcome. How can our Web site further our work and communication?

To access the ENY/ACRL Web site, point your browser to http://urislib.library.cornell.edu/acrlhome.html

by Michael Engle


Volunteer Needed!

Spotlight on Libraries

Mary Jane Brustman has retired from doing the 'Spotlight on Libraries' column in this newsletter after many years of wonderful service. I would like to thank Mary Jane for all her work, and for her help with the newsletter during my tenure as editor.

I would like to continue the column, which focuses on one or two libraries and their programs or experiences, but need some help. Would you, or someone you know, like to volunteer to coordinate this column? The newsletter is published three times yearly, so the committment is small, but does include deadlines and spell-checkers!

If you are interested, please contact me at either of the following addresses:

Kristin Strohmeyer
Hamilton College Library,198 College Hill Road, Clinton, New York 13323


Spring Conference Report

Although several registrants were ultimately unable to make it to Syracuse University's E.S. Bird Library on March 8th, 61 people braved the snowstorm to attend the Spring Conference, entitled "Theory into Practice: Educational Pathways for Librarians." The conference, which was co-sponsored by the Upstate Chapter of the Special Libraries Association and the Central NY Library Resources Council, focused on professional development opportunities available to librarians in the course of their careers.

Keynote speaker Ray von Dran, Dean of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, gave the audience much food for thought with his presentation "Competencies for Librarians in the Information Age." He first outlined the stages of change:

  1. Destabilization/loss of focus
  2. Minimization of impact
  3. Questioning of self-worth
  4. Letting go of the past
  5. Testing new situations
  6. Searching for meaning
  7. Integrating the experience

and then offered strategies for dealing with change. Some of the competencies discussed were confidence in problem-solving, adaptability, proactive professional behaviors, development of process skills (methodologies), technical comfortability, and value-based education based on intellectual honesty.

The "Guideposts to the Hiring Process: Selecting and Interviewing the Successful Candidate" panelists offered tips on all aspects of the hiring process, from writing job ads to structuring search committees to conducting interviews. In the afternoon breakout sessions, attendees chose one session from the three offerings. One session explored library internships from the perspectives of both a librarian who has been a mentor and from a MLS graduate who recently completed an internship, a second focused on sabbaticals, and the third presentation, on entrepreneurship, was by Liz Liddy, PhD and Associate Professor, IST at Syracuse University and President/CEO of TextWise, Inc. On the evaluation forms, one attendee summed up the prevailing mood at the conference with the comment "Great in spite of the weather. This is always a good conference. Even weather can't dampen it."

Many people helped to pull this conference together. Special thanks should be given to the program committee for brainstorming its way to a theme and for coming up with suggestions for dynamite speakers, to Sue Price of SLA, who garnered our vendor support, Jeannette Smithee at CLRC, who posted conference announcements and registration forms on about 20 listservs, to the staff at CLRC who handled registration mailings, to Janet Pease of Syracuse University for assisting with local arrangements, and to Nancy Herrington, local arrangements chair, whose attention to detail and calm reassurance regarding the weather helped to make the conference a success.

As always, the program committee welcomes ideas for forthcoming programs. If you have any ideas, or are interested in joining the program committee, contact Lynne King, Program Chair, at 518-270-3106.


From the Editor's Desk

Hopefully, by the time you receive this issue, Spring will truly have sprung! It seems as though Winter has lasted thirteen months this year!

I don't know about the rest of you, but to me, the World Wide Web is, at the same time, both intimidating and exciting. I hope that by putting information and links on the ENY/ACRL Web Site, we can help to introduce web 'newbies' to this new and fascinating tool.

Let us know what you think about the web site. One of the wonderful things about the Web is that it can be updated, and changed. As Michael says in his article, what do you like? What do you want to see changed? Let us know.

Also, I hope to see many of you in New York this summer. I am quite excited about the Ice Cream Social with the other New York chapters of ACRL. As we are doing a joint conference with the Metro chapter next Spring, this is the perfect opportunity to meet some people beforehand. I'll be easy to spot: I'll be the one with the biggest bowl of ice cream and hot chocolate sauce available!

Take care, and I'll see you soon,
Kristin Strohmeyer
kstrohme@hamilton.edu


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created by Kristin Strohmeyer
Last modified April 9, 1996

Eastern New York Chapter
Association of College and Research Libraries
URL: http://urislib.library.cornell.edu/newsletter.html