As Christina has already posted, the tour was fabulous! Many thanks to Joe Kraus for setting it up. There was a heavy sprinkling of non-PAM folks who are science geeks who also signed up the tour. It was great seeing Saturn through the historic 20-inch telescope.

Chamberlain Observatory
Originally uploaded by cpikas

Fabulous trip to the observatory. We all got to see Saturn and learn all about this historical site. See the virtual tour at: http://www.du.edu/~rstencel/Chamberlin/

Unfortunately, due to a combination of housekeeping turning down the volume on the clock radio in my room and some medication I took for a headache last night, I missed the first part of today’s sessions.

I got to hear the last half of the member forum to discuss issues being considered by the board of directors. Dav Robertson reported on Sue Johnson’s effort to raise money for Muhammad Yaquib Chaudhary.

DC SLA is asking for your financial support for our colleague, Muhammad Yaquib Chaudhary, Library Director of the University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. The entire campus was destroyed by the the Kashmir Earthquake in October. (see http://www.ajku.edu.pk/ ).The amount we can raise from individuals, chapters and divisions in SLA will be primarily a symbol of our personal support to him, but it would let him know we care and realize what he is facing. We expect he will use it to move what books and library shelves can be salvaged to Islamabad, where he has been personally tasked by the President of the university to find temporary quarters for the university, and living quarters for staff and students.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact Sue Johnson, Sueojohnson@hotmail.com; or 301-299-8268.

This session also included a brief report of SLA’s involvement in the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Janice Lachance attended the Summit in Tunisia in November 2005.

The next session was the Division Cabinet meeting. One member asked about the delay in getting membership rosters in a timely manner. John Crosby reported that due to changes in staff, they lost the capability to do certain reports and there were some delays in getting other information out. SLA will be bringing in a new database administrator, which should fix this problem. Daniel Lee reported on the Technology Review Advisory Report; that task force will be doing an inventory of technology used to support divisions and cabinets. After this meeting, I got a chance to meet Mangala Krishnamurthy, a PAM-er and member of our International Relations Committee.

We then had lunch, where the Board of Directors Candidates gave brief speeches. PAM member James Manasco is running for Chapter Cabinet Chair-Elect – he mentioned Liz Bryson & PAM’s welcome at the first SLA conference he attended. Online voting for board candidates will begin January 23, 2005 and end on March 3, 2005 at 5:00 PM EST. The slate of candidates this year is excellent. Be sure to vote!

After lunch, we had a session on fundraising, one of the responsibilities of office for Division officers, a report on the SLA Public Relations Committee, and a session on the Value of Membership by Jill Calabria, the Director of Membership Marketing. PAM members will not be surprised to hear that networking and learning and the two benefits of SLA members most frequently mentioned.

The Thursday Summit began with an excellent keynote address by Doug Lipp. As the former head of training at Disney University, he had excellent examples of creative strategies for leadership, teamwork and service. He is the author of Even Monkeys Fall From Trees. His keynote address discussed obstacles and opportunities to sucess. He described the importance of walking in the shoes of our clients and coworkers, describing his experience as a Disneyland street sweeper, pirate on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and as Tigger.

The second part of his talk was on the “Magic of Exceptional Leadership”, discussing the balance of leadership, teamwork and service needed for successful leadership. What I found most interesting was his description of the various balancing acts that work for success – art and science, quality and quantity, skills and attitude, and maintenance and risk taking.

The afternoon session was a choice of two breakout sessions presented by Leadership Outfitters. They were the trainers at least year’s Leadership Summit, and I was looking forward to this. I went to “The Triple Whammy: Change, Communication and Conflict“. This was an interesting session, with several brainstorming activities related to the 3 themes. It included a few communication techniques for working with the 4 types from the Effectiveness Institute – the controller, the analyzer, the stabilizer, and the persuader. Joe Kraus attended the other session, but I haven’t had a chance to ask him what he thought of it.

The day ended with a very nice reception hosted by the Texas chapter at The Downtown Club, a very nice site on the 49th floor of the Shell Plaza, with good food and a great view of Houston. We got a chance to see PAM’s own Debra Bailey at the reception.

My day at the Summit started this afternoon at the open session of the Board of Directors Meeting. Nothing earth-shaking here (except for Dav Robertson’s report of the Natural Disasters Task Force, which included some information on an SLA member library was destroyed by the Kashmir earthquake last fall – see the IPANDANET blog for details). Other reports included brief updates by the Baltimore and Denver program planning chairs, the acceptance of the 2004 SLA Audit report, a report on the SLA Board succession process (as SLA transitions to a January-December calendar), and a report by the Research Now Task Force. The Board meeting is scheduled to continue on Saturday.

I then attended the SLA Baltimore planning session. SLA expects this conference to be as big or bigger than Toronto, both in terms of number of attendees and in the number of sessions (13% more sessions). I also had time to verify a few details with other conference planners on some of the sessions we are cosponsoring. The Maryland chapter is working on a updating their Baltimore 2006 website with more information for Baltimore conference attendees, and has a blog they will be using to post more information for Baltimore attendees.

Finally, I attended the Denver conference planning session (while PAM Chair-Elect Joe Kraus is our official planner for the conference, I hope to share of the lessons learned I’ve made during the Baltimore planning). This conference should be interesting – I heard some interesting ideas being floated by the various science divisions, including sessions on avalanches, nanotechnology, open access (a perennial favorite) and I heard something about beer (I believe they want to take advantage of some of the 80 different beers brewed in the Mile Hile City). The Denver conference is June 3-6, 2007.

I will be blogging the SLA Leadership Summit in Houston.

The Summit starts with an open session of the Board of Directors meeting this afternoon.

Later this afternoon, our Chair-Elect, Joe Kraus, will be attending the Denver Program Planners sessions and I will be attending the Baltimore Program Planners session.

Laurel Kristick
Chair, Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division

University of Hawaii at Manoa Flood
Phyllis Tabusa

Photographs are available on the U of H library website. 9” of rain in 6 hours, 50 year flood, debris formed a dam at a bridge, then washed over the banks.

Gov docs – 95% lost. Comprehensive depository library since 1907. Also a UN depository.

Library school class trapped in the basement. They had to throw a chair out of a window and climb out over broken glass.

Tips:
• Keep backup files off site
• Hire someone to do the documentation and replacement
• Look at the Library Disaster Planning Handbook

They’ve got some donations from BYU (Oahu) and UN. But will not be able to replace a ton of things that are local to Hawaii.

ADS Update
Donna Thompson, H-S CfA

myADS
• Notification service
• http://myads.harvard.edu (also from query page)
• registration for two different products, weekly or daily e-print notification
• weekly notification

• e-mail for each database (astro, phys, preprint)
• toc updates for a list of journals,
• can login and retrieve a query or run the saved query on demand

• Daily e-print (new articles)

• RSS
• E-mail

• FAQs

• Not run exactly every week, more like every 10 days
• Old articles recently added to the database will appear as new articles

Historical Literature
• With a grant, hired some students to work on getting metadata for old volumes
• Missing journals – even if not on their list! Send her an e-mail.
• If you get a request for a specific journal you would like to see in ADS let her know.
• ESA-SPs are in progress getting scanned (yay!)
• She needs old ApJ Letters from the 1970

Harvard Sciences Digital Library
Michael Leach
Experiences with an institutional repository

Issues:
• 7 months behind schedule
• Inability of new version to use math/phys symbols in title
• Handle system (permanent url) – won’t operate through a firewall right now. Alternatives to handle system aren’t accepted by d-space
• Click through copyright/license (not tested in Mass. State law)

• Research articles (so authors have to obey those rules for original publication/publisher)
• Data sets
• Learning materials
• Serials
• Videos
• Theses

• Logo issues, name issues with administration

Non-issues:
• Getting content – researchers are lining up impatiently to give content (exception of math community)
• Content is ps or pdf almost exclusively
• No conflict with ADS

Databases
• High demand to store datasets
• How do you do it so it’s usable

Policies and Procedures
• Useful to the community
• Agreement on policies has been easier than expected
• Best practices

Big Questions
• Relationship to google print or google scholar?
• Relationship to non-science libraries
• Virtual journal or virtual subject overlays envisioned haven’t really happened
• Relationship to metasearch or federated search
• Redundancy and preservation
• How to get the man-hours to really support this

MMST – multi-mission at space telescope
International Virtual Observatory – collections of datasets
NAS – recent report asking what will be done to preserve these large datasets
DAS – at NASA GSFC digital assets system using a customized version of Dublin Core, Goddard Core.

Weblogs at the Library
David Bigwood, http://tinyurl.com/8kg57

• Easy to do
• Inexpensive
• A good way to distribute information in multiple formats automatically (IM, SMS, e-mail, RSS)
• Particularly helpful for new acquisitions lists
• Keep in mind

• Less formal – but check spelling, grammar, etc.
• Keep it up to date – don’t let it get stale, probably at least once a week
• Write for your readers – what do they want to read and need to know

• RSS

The whole point of weblogs is to tell our stories to our constituencies.

Note: Here are the PAM blogs I know about
Individual, professional (there are at least a couple of personal ones which I’m not sure the owners are advertising? feedback?)

• Christina (mine!) http://christinaslibraryrant.blogspot.com
• David http://catalogablog.blogspot.com
• John http://jdupuis.blogspot.com
• Catherine http://englib.info
• Randy http://stlq.info
• Sara

Organizations

• LPI Recent Additions to the Library Collection at the Lunar and Planetary Institute
  New & Noteworthy
• Univ of Hawaii, Manoa (abandoned?)
• Georgia State
• UCSD
• Drexel: drexelphysics.blogspot.com
  drexelbioscience.blogspot.com
  drexelmath.blogspot.com
  drexelchemistry.blogspot.com

I’ll try to add to this when I’m a bit more awake

Edited: 6/13/05, 5pm (Eastern), added linking for blogs, fixed some bullets

100_0946
Originally uploaded by cpikas.

This has lessons in astronomy for your… down time?

100_0948
Originally uploaded by cpikas.

We took this picture to really feature Brenda who is center front. A copy will be sent to the archivist and others

Mystery author Alex Brett of the Morgan O’Brien series came and spoke about her reasons for becoming a fiction author and how she came to write her newest book, Cold Dark Matter. She has a science background and experience working in labs. She appreciates the moral dilemmas inherent in scientific research. This particular book had very interesting beginnings. A missing talented physicist who may have disappeared behind the dark curtain during the cold war, the fruit machine, moral ambiguity, and scientific fraud all became the seeds of this book. I’m going to go find a copy! (Thanks Liz B for arranging this!)

LISA V
Donna J. Coletti and Uta Grothkopf
2006, the week after SLA, 3 days long at Harvard. Reception at Harvard-Smithsonian CfA. Check the web page for updates.

Science Organization Committee: common challenges, uncommon solutions
Keynote: Dr. John Huchra, H-S CfA

Program
1) Virtual observatory and what’s in it for libraries – bibliometric studies on ADS, datasets, metadata
2) E-journal swamp
3) Changing publishing sector – open archive, traditional journals, institutional archives
4) Preservation/ archiving/ historical session
5) Beyond ADS and Google – use of commercial databases, hidden literature, Google print and Google scholar
6) Cutting edge technologies – e-metrics, OPACs, blogs/wikis
7) Creative librarian – outreach, marketing

The call for papers will be sent out soon. If your subject is not listed, submit anyway.

Lowell Observatory Logbooks Digitization Project
Antoinette Beiser
They’ve received a grant to conserve older logbooks containing original observations, drawings, etc., 1894-1925, because the originals have been deteriorating. The logbooks are currently being scanned at 72dpi and 400dpi and entered into a database. Scans will be linked to the text of the notebook. Higher quality will be available for a fee. For photos – no thumbnail, just a lower res copy.

They get about 50 requests a year for items found in their archives

http://www.lowell.edu/Research/library

Changing World of the Astronomy Librarian, 1973 to Present
Brenda Corbin, US Naval Observatory
Brenda gave a wonderful overview of her time as the Naval Observatory librarian and the changes in technology that dramatically changed how she conducted her work. She had some great slides with pictures of punch machines, typewriters, catalog cards, and dumb terminals.

Learning Astronomy in your Bathroom
Liz Bryson
Liz showed a roll of toilet paper developed in Japan to teach astronomy. English versions include on on the life of a star and telescope pictures. Liz will provide the URL to order.