Silicon Valley Chapter | SLA

Event: Solo Librarians Meeting At Ricoh Innovations - May 15, 2007

The Solo Librarians of the San Andreas Chapter of SLA invite you to their next meeting on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 6 P.M. Anyone with an interest in small libraries is welcome, including students and recent grads in the MLIS programs.
 
The meeting will be held at Ricoh Innovations on Page Mill Road near Highway 280 in Palo Alto. (See directions below)
 
Rowan Fairgrove, the librarian at Ricoh, will be both hosting the meeting and doing a presentation of Second Life as it relates to libraries.
 
Below you will find a link to Second Life as it is being used at SJSU SLIS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-9zt3Sd7oc
 
As usual, we will be starting with a light meal—probably pizza/ salad. The food will be purchased with your attendance in mind, so if you are planning to attend please notify Eric Kristofferson at [email protected] or (408) 522-6697 no later than Friday the 11th of May.
 
Please note that May 15th is just a little more than two weeks away, so you need to make a quick decision if you wish to attend.

SJSU Student Internships

By Beverly McLeod, Student Relations Liaison, San Andreas Chapter

This semester 84 SLIS students are participating in internships at 75 sites in Northern and Southern California, gaining practical experience to supplement their academic studies.  Ten of these students shared their initial experiences in the Spring issue of the student newsletter, The Call Number (http://slisgroups.sjsu.edu/lissten/call_number/2007/Spring07CallNum.pdf). 
Internship program coordinator Jane Fisher is actively soliciting new sites; if your organization could use an intern, contact her at [email protected].

Notes from the San Andreas Chapter Blog Launch Party - March 28, 2007

By Alpidia Barraza, MLIS, President, Synergized Info

Wednesday evening's San Andreas SLA Chapter meeting entitled, "San Andreas Chapter Blog Launch Party" was hugely informative.

The meeting began with brief presentations by blog co-editors Mary-Lynn Bragg and Claudia Cohen. The co-editors reviewed the Chapter's new blog, touting the fact that the San Andreas Chapter is only one of a handful of SLA chapters incorporating blog technology into their communications strategy. Of the 58 SLA chapters, only seven or eight chapters have blogs.

The highlight of the evening was speaker Michael Sippey, Vice President of SixApart.

While Sippey's presentation gave an overview of SixApart's four blogging products, Sippey spent a significant portion of his presentation addressing the unique functions and benefits of blogging.

SixApart has four blogging products categorized by market focus:
(1) Typepad and (2) Movabletype are geared towards the professional and business users; while
(3) Live Journal and (4) Vox are geared towards the consumer market.
To learn more about each product see SixApart's website at http://www.sixapart.com/

Sippey defined blogging as the "next generation website." A few of the features unique to blogs that Sippey mentioned included:
1. Blogs are easy to update.
2. Blogs are automatically categorized and archived.
3. Blogs enable conversation with your audience.
4. Blogs get the message out via web, RSS feeds and email.

San Andreas Chapter Solo Librarians Upcoming Meetings

We are looking for topics for upcoming meetings that would be of interest to Solo Librarians. We were fortunate to have Nancy Blachman speak to us at our last meeting about her Google Guide. If you have suggestions about a topic or a speaker, please contact us.  If you have experience with a new service or technology (such as RSS feeds), and would be willing to make an informal presentation, that would be even better!
 
This is your organization and here is an opportunity for you to let us know what you would be interested in seeing in terms of networking, general meetings, vendor presentations, facility visits, sharing of experiences from national SLA meetings, etc.  Anyone with an interest in the small library environment is welcome to attend.
 
Call Eric at (408) 522-6697 or email him at [email protected].
 
Eric Kristofferson
Patricia Parsons

Track Your Volunteer Efforts!

Are you keeping your professional volunteer resume current? Hadn’t thought about it?

SLA tracks your commitments if you have an Executive Board position in a chapter or division, or at the association level, but not committee positions. In the chapter some of the committee work can be tracked on an as-need basis through our bulletin issues, especially if you chaired a committee, but not always if you were a member of the committee, and identifying committee members over time gets increasingly harder.

Book Review: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More – by Chris Anderson

By Karen Takle Quinn, Ph.D.

Chris Anderson shows in The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (NY: Hyperion Press, 2006. ISBN 1-4013-0237-8) how the Internet is changing the way everyone does business. He suggests that the future of commerce and culture isn’t in high volume hits but in what used to be regarded as misses—the endless long tail of that same curve. Many years of research have gone into this book. It is partly an economics research project. Economics seeks to find neat, easily understood frameworks that describe real world phenomena. Anderson, as editor-in-chief of Wired, first published his “tail” ideas in an article in the October 2004 issue. This article became the most citied article Wired had ever run. In statistics, curves like those described are called “long-tail distributions.” Anderson coined the term “The Long Tail” to help to explain how our culture and economy is shifting focus away from the head, “mainstream products and markets,” toward the tail, the “ever-expanding universe of niche products and businesses.” Many suggest that The Long Tail is the most important business book since The Tipping Point. It was selected by Business Week as one of the best 2006 business books. It reveals that companies are seeing demands in categories that had previously been dismissed, and it reports that everything a company puts out finds a demand of some sort. The economics of ”online” keeps going while the traditional retailer is influenced and limited by shelf space and the cost of maintaining inventories. The infrequent sellers have value in the online market even though they are only selling in small numbers because their aggregates add up to big business. Anderson suggests that letting people choose for themselves will create new opportunities for consumers and businesses.

Image from jacket cover of The Long Tail.

Help with San Andreas Chapter archival files

Hello, fellow Chapter members. I could use your help!

As Chapter Archivist, I have identified some “holes” in our archived files. I have already back-filled what I could with my own older issues of the Faultline bulletin and Chapter membership directories, but we still need three Faultline issues:

Faultline: Vol. 22.
No. 3 (Jan/Feb 2002)
No. 4 (Mar/Apr 2002)
No. 5 (May/June 2002)

and six San Andreas Chapter Membership Directories for the years:
1982/1983
1984/1985
1985/1986
1998/1999
2001/2002
2002/2003

If you are willing to part with your personal copies, please contact me ([email protected]).

Thank you,

Lee Pharis

Former San Andreas Chapter Member, Linda Post

Linda Post died March 28, 2007, surrounded by her family, after a long and courageous battle with cancer.

Linda had managed the GTE Lenkurt Library in San Carlos from the mid-1970s until 1978, when she went to work at Intel in Santa Clara. She also worked for a time at the HP Library in Roseville, and she retired from there in 1995. During this time, she had been an officer and active member of the San Andreas Chapter.

Linda earned a BS from Penn State and an MLS from Drexel University.

She had lived the last 20 years in Grass Valley and was active with the League of Women Voters and worked as a docent at the Bridgeport South Yuba River State Park.

There will be a memorial gathering for Linda at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 7, at the Bridgeport South Yuba River State Park.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to Hospice of the Foothills (530-272-5739), www.hofo.org or to Save-the-Redwoods League (888-836-0005), www.savetheredwoods.org. Linda's daughter Kathryn will be planting a memorial garden for Linda at her home on Whidbey Island. If you would like to choose and purchase a flowering tree, shrub, or perennial for the garden, please call Bayview Yard & Garden at (360)321-6789.