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.

Another good site for Toronto weather info is The Weather Network, the Canadian equivalent of The Weather Channel in the States. The Toronto weather link is here. The long term forecast suggests the weekend will be 24-25C (~75F), with thundershows, meaning it will be quite muggy as well.

Thanks to Sara for the kind words.

A word of warning for those of you needing to take public transit to the conference. In Toronto the Good, subways only get started at 9am on Sundays. Also, many bus routes that run the rest of the week don’t run on Sundays. You can check those schedules here.

Here’s the final agenda for the Computer Science Roundtable at the SLA Annual Conference in Toronto. It’s Monday June 6 from 11:30am to 1:00pm.

1. Introductions
2. IEEE Announcement
3. The incredible shrinking Computer Science Department: the effect of declining enrollments on collections and services
4. Information Literacy Instruction for Computer Science students: is it needed, how to convince faculty and students of its value
5. Open Access, Google and CS scholars’ information seeking behavior
6. Safari and other technology ebook packages
7. Lecture Notes in CS: print or online only?

I would be very grateful if someone could volunteer to help me take notes. You can contact me at jdupuis at yorku.ca.

Canadians are obsessed by the weather. Perhaps it’s because we so often experience all four seasons in one day. In any case, the weather in Toronto at the beginning of June should be pretty good (mostly just spring and summer), with highs in the low 20′s. Celcius that is. Fahrenheit, that’s low 70′s.

The Environment Canada page for Toronto is here. You can also just type”weather toronto” in Google. To get the weather delivered to your desktop via RSS, rssweather is fun as is BlogLines‘ new weather feed. Once you’re actually in Toronto, the best place to get up-to-the-minute weather updates on tv is CablePulse 24 on channel — you guessed it — 24. More normals, averages and extremes than you can shake a stick at here.

From a PAMnet Post by William W. Armstrong:

Presenters have now been selected for the Poster Session, “Better Understanding Your Users,” being cosponsored by the Chemistry, PAM, and Sci-Tech Divisions at the upcoming SLA meeting in Toronto. A list of the presenters along with titles and abstracts of the presentations can be found on the Chemistry Division web site