Category Archives: nasig

NASIG Election for 2009

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Here is information about this year’s NASIG election…

The NASIG Nominations & Elections Committee is pleased to announce the 2009 slate of candidates for the upcoming election.

Vice President/President-Elect/Past President (3-year term beginning 2009/2010)

1 will be elected.

             Stephen Clark

             Katy Ginanni

             Selden Durgom Lamoureux

             Buddy Pennington

Secretary (3-year term beginning 2009/2010)

1 will be elected.

            Carol Ann Borchert

            Meg Mering

Treasurer (3-year term beginning 2009/2010)

1 will be elected.

            Lisa S. Blackwell

            Dana M. Walker

Member-at-Large (2-year term beginning 2009/10)

3 will be elected.

            Patrick Carr

            Sandy Folsom

            Steve Kelley

            Shana L. McDanold

            Christine M. Stamison

            Naomi Kietzke Young

Ballots
will be available online on February 18, 2009 with voting to be
completed by midnight (EST) March 18, 2009.  Results will be announced
on April 1, 2009.  An email message with voting instructions and a link
to candidate profiles will be sent to members on or before February 18,
2009.

NASIG presentation work

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I am so thankful to have friend Sarah Morris as a partner in our upcoming NASIG presentation. She is always on top of things, always upbeat, always prepared. She has done the lion’s share of moving this whole project forward. Sarah was a 2006 NASIG Student Grant winner and like me is an alum of UIUC GSLIS. She currently works as library systems coordinator (and overseer of all things technical services-related, it seems) at a major international law firm in Chicago.

The theme for this year’s conference in Phoenix, AZ is “Taking the sting out of serials” and our presentation consciously tries to tie into that theme. We’ll be presenting on the topic of “E-Resource Management in the For-Profit World: Soothing the Sting.” There hasn’t been much in the way of past presentations that deal with serials and electronic resources management in special libraries that I can recall so I’m glad our proposal was accepted this year. As always, the coordination offered by the all volunteer efforts of NASIG members of the Conference and Program Planning Committees has been outstanding.

One aspect of our preparation that I wanted to highlight is the fact that Sarah and I have used Google Docs to work out what we want to present in terms of presentation slides, handouts, and outline. This has been the first time I’ve used Google Docs in a shared manner and it really has been easy and useful. What I would have given for such a collaboration tool when working on past presentations! We have definitely come a very long way.

Preparing for the next several weeks

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I’m not sure why this is true but every year around this time life speeds up to hyperspeed and I wonder how on earth I will ever make it through. That’s the main reason why I haven’t posted much lately; I am rather overwhelmed.

One thing I’ve spent time on this weekend is preparing for my upcoming class for the LEEP program at UIUC GSLIS. I love teaching the course but it is a lot of work to prepare for it and to figure out how to make it fresh and new each time. And there is always room for improvement.

Then there is the online course I agreed last Fall to create for NASIG. That is due sometime in July. But even before that I need to complete preparations for my presentation at the upcoming NASIG conference in the second week of June. I’ll actually be co-presenting with friend Sarah Morris and we’ll be talking about managing electronic resources in special library settings.

All work-related projects seems to implode upon themselves at this time as well, and I am scrambling to keep up with lots of stuff there, too. One of my staff members left for greener pastures in March and he is strongly missed!

Sometime soon we will be going on a mini-vacation to do some fishing and enjoy the outdoors so that is something I’m really looking forward to. In addition, Keegan will be out of school soon.

This morning we went to church and I’m glad (as always) that we did, because we received refreshment and encouragement there. This afternoon we went to a few stores and mostly drove a bit in the countryside just north of us over the border into Wisconsin.

The next several weeks will be quite hectic but I know that our Heavenly Father will meet all our needs. Along that same vein, would you please pray for some people in my extended family and friends? My sister-in-law’s brother and his youngest son (age 11) suffered severe injuries and burns in an accident a week ago or so. They and their family need all the support and care they can get. Also, someone I wrote about some time ago, John Fawcett, who has battled a recurrence of cancer for several months, has decided to not continue any treatment. I imagine this means that he could die at any time and I know his wife and young children also desperately need prayer at this time.

NASIG 2008 election results [Updated]

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The results for this year’s NASIG elections were announced a day or two ago:

Vice-President/President-Elect: Rick Anderson

Members at Large:

Bob Boissy
Virginia Taffurelli
Sarah George Wessel

Congratulations to everyone, including those who didn’t win this year and whom I hope will reapply again in the future:

June Garner
Kay Johnson
Meg Mering
Paoshan Yue

[Sorry, I forgot to include Jonathan David Makepeace, a write-in candidate for Member-At-Large.]

NASIG 2008 award winners

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Good news to hear: Today, the NASIG 2008 award winners were announced. Here they are!

Fritz Schwartz Serials Education Scholarship
Alena Jewel Rucker, University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Information Science

Marcia Tuttle International Grant
Stephanie Schmitt, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE

NASIG Conference Student Grant
···Eugenia Beh, University of Texas at Austin, School of Information
···Barbara Birenbaum, UCLA, Department of Library and Information Studies
···Kathryn Machin, Queens College, Graduate School of Library and Information Studies
···Jason Ronallo, Indiana University, School of Library and Information Science
···Pegeen Seger, University of Oklahoma, School of Library and Information Studies
···Nancy B. Thomas, University of Tennessee, School of Information Sciences

NASIG Conference Mexican Student Grant
···Armando Avila-González, Escuela Nacional Biblioteconomía y Archivoeconomía, Mexico City, DF, Mexico

Horizon Award
···Betsy Appleton, George Washington University

Serials Specialist Award
···Marie Peterson, University at Buffalo, State University of New York

Warm congratulations to all. To find out more about each of these awards, go to the NASIG website and look here.

NASIG 2009 conference site announced

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Yesterday I received word that the 2009 annual conference for NASIG will be held in Asheville, NC. I am really happy to hear this because it’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit! Plus, two people I know quite well are on board as co-chairs for the conference planning committee.

Proposing an online course for NASIG

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Last week, Valerie Bross, co-chair of this year’s NASIG Continuing Education Committee (CEC), asked for proposals for CEC funding for the coming year.  I decided to submit a proposal for creating a pilot online course focusing on best practices and case studies for e-resources management.  I don’t know yet if it will be accepted or if it will emerge with a different focus, but I am excited about the possibility of helping to provide an excellent, inexpensive, dynamic, topically relevant online course for the benefit of NASIG.

The landscape for developing an online course has changed quite drastically in the past few years.  Meredith Farkas and colleagues, rightly famous for their excellent work on the Five Weeks to a Social Library online course, demonstrated emphatically that great value can be provided with little direct cost, using existing tools such as Drupal.  I think this is an exciting time and developing or possibly working on something like this fits well with my ongoing love of teaching.

Chicago is a beautiful city

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Chicago is a beautiful city and the following photo shows it.  Yesterday we were at the lakefront to visit the Shedd Aquarium for the first time since March.  It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm but not too warm.  Lots of people were out and about enjoying the day, including lots of people out on boats on Lake Michigan.  This will probably be one of the A nice view of the downtown skyline of Chicago last weekends for boating whether before the fall and winter weather comes.  In this photo you can see the Standard Oil building to the far left (it may be called something else now).  The Hancock Building is peeking out just to the right a little ways.  Lake Point Towers on the far right.  One of these is where Sammy Sosa lived for a number of years.  I remember attending a NASIG conference reception on the top floor of the Standard Oil building in 1992.  It was a beautiful setting and was one of the last formal dinner receptions NASIG hosted.  In a way, I miss those formal occasions!