Silicon Valley Chapter | SLA

Chapter Member Deb Hunt Honored for 23 Things Program

SLA Contact:

Cara Schatz

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SLA Board Member Deb Hunt Honored for Innovative “23 Things” Program  
 

Alexandria, Virginia, December 16, 2009- Deb Hunt, Principal at Information Edge in San Leandro, Calif. and a member of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Board of Directors, was honored by Information World Review (IWR) magazine for her work on behalf of SLA to spearhead and implement the innovative “23 Things” program.  

23 Things is a free, members-only, self-directed training program to help SLA members develop confidence and skills using a wide range of Web 2.0 tools.  Hunt was granted a first-time special commendation mention by IWR at its “Information Professional of the Year” ceremony in London on December 1.  “It was a highly competitive field but Deb and the 23 Things project really stood out,” said IWR Editor Peter Williams.  

“When I began my term as a member of the SLA Board of Directors, I was asked by 2008 SLA President Stephen Abram to choose a project to lead and I immediately suggested getting SLA members up to speed on Web 2.0 skills,” said Hunt.  

Hunt recruited a small team of eager SLA members to assist in the effort, and SLA’s 23 Things was created. Working closely with her team, Hunt anticipated the need for a registration and survey process as well as a formal recognition for any member who completed the 23 Things.  One of the more effective aspects of the program was the manner in which participants were asked to immediately apply their learning by creating a blog to record the knowledge they were gaining. 

23 Things went live in June of 2008 and it proved to be an instant success. Hunt continues to monitor 23 Things, a thriving program that now has 1,943 participants and is growing.  

The 23 Things program is credited with attracting many new SLA members, and participants coming from all over the world, including the U.S., Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia, and several countries in Asia and Africa. Hunt also received a 2008 SLA Presidential Citation from Stephen Abram for her work on this innovative program for SLA. 

The nominations were judged by a panel of previous recipients of this award.  The Information Professional of the Year award is annually organized by IWR magazine along with Incisive Media, the organizers of the Online Information conference, and was sponsored by the American Psychological Association.

About SLA 
The Special Libraries Association (SLA) is a nonprofit global organization for innovative information professionals and their strategic partners. SLA serves about 11,000 members in 75 countries in the information profession, including corporate, academic, and government information specialists. SLA promotes and strengthens its members through learning, advocacy, and networking initiatives. For more information, visit us on the Web at www.sla.org.

End of Year Holiday Meeting

The end of year business meeting/holiday party at MacArthur Park Restaurant on December 8th had a sizeable turnout, with what your editor estimates as forty to fifty attendees. Absolutely Adina (Adina Magill) displayed jewelry during the networking portion of the evening, the incoming board members were announced and Leslie Fisher announced a number of awards. The new board members will be listed in a separate post.

Libby Trudell received the Mark H. Baer Award and Sonia Dorfman received the Lucy Steelman Award. Other award recipients included Pam Gore (President's Award), Jean Bedord (Published Member Award), George Plosker on behalf of IEEE (Vendor Partner Award) and Gloria Elia (a new category, Outstanding Service Award). Gloria was awarded memberships to both the national association and to the San Andreas Chapter on behalf of her tireless work managing registration and payment for the Chapter's programs throughout the year.

Roy Tennant gave a brief presentation "Three Things You Must Know About What Libraries Are Doing" which discussed changes in the profession and how librarians need to react to them by making as much information available to users as possible, pushing support out to their users, pulling data from external sources (and mashing it up) to enrich services. There was a brief Q&A period with questions about open source versus proprietary information sources and how to allow access to a wider audience while still maintaining some restrictions over the visibility of private holdings.

Thanks to everyone who organized the event, to board members past and present and to the Chapter members for making our last meeting of 2009 a success!

Review of San Andreas Chapter 2009 Events

Greetings All - A part of each SLA unit President's duties is to submit a year-end report to SLA headquarters on the state of the chapter over the past year.  It's not only useful to the Association; it gives the President a chance for a final review of "their" year.  One element that is reported is the events held.  When I took a look at this impressive array of activities I felt considerable pride that San Andreas Chapter leadership produced such inspiring programs.  For those of you who attended one or two events and may not realize how rich our activities were this year, I am memorializing for the chapter this remarkable year by sharing with you all what I sent to HQ.

 

Here's to a hearty round of thanks and applause to the Program Directors, Patricia Parsons and Jean Bedord. Likewise thanks are due to Sonia Dorfman, our Solo Librarian group leader, and to Lee Pharis for Professional Development. And of course Hospitality, covered by Helen Josephine and Gloria Elia, is the "behind the scenes" force that is so vital to the event process. 2009 was a truly impressive event year for our chapter.  "Go team!"

 

Leslie R. Fisher

2009 President, San Andreas Chapter SLA

 

 

Our Solo Librarian group met actively throughout 2009.  In January, Jean Bedord addressed the group on the topic of her book, "eBooks Hit Critical Mass: Where Do Libraries Fit with Oprah?”.  At the February Solos meeting, Leslie Berlin, the Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives, was the guest speaker discussing and sharing her experiences of the archives. Cindy Hill spoke to the group in April on the topic of “influencing up” and communicating with key stakeholders. In July the group met with Carol Chatfield at The Career Development Center, at Stanford University. In September Craig Cruz, Jr. joined the group to discuss the history and current focus of BayNet (Bay Area Library and Information Network). In November the group met again to de-brief on and share experiences of the Internet Librarian conference.

 

The 2009 Program Directors rolled out an innovative series of career-focused programs styled as the Career Agility Series. This featured as breakfast meetings.  These events proved quite popular. The first was held in April and featured Cindy Hill and Christian Gray talking about branding oneself for the marketplace.  The second Career Agility event was held in June and featured Linda McKell and Sarah Vogel discussing alternate employment options for the information professional. The third of the series was held in July and featured Amelia Kassel speaking about the independent information professional. 

 

The first standard program of the year was held in January and featured the Chapter President de-briefing on the Leadership Summit. It was a casual dinner meeting with pizza and salad held in a conference room at a public library. 

In March we had a formal dinner meeting at a sit-down restaurant. The speaker was author Sarah Milstein addressing the topic she has written about, The Business Case for Twitter. It was a very popular event.

The joint chapters meeting with San Francisco Chapter was held in May in meeting space at SFO. This was also a celebration of the Association’s centennial and we had a panel of chapter luminaries discussing future directions of the profession. The panel included Bill Fisher, Cindy Hill, Richard Geiger, Libby Trudell and Deb Hunt offering up thoughts and inspiration.

Also in May the chapter held a special team building event. Several members travelled to a local winery for a tasting and wine blending party.  We enjoyed the wines of Tenuta Vineyard and then were coached on blending. Three teams developed their blends and all had a final round of tasting to vote on a winner. Lots of good food was consumed and a good time was had by all.

In June-July the chapter held a series of informal Neighborhood Dinner meetings, each one coordinated by a chapter volunteer. The Neighborhood Dinners are a long-standing tradition in San Andreas Chapter and are usually spread out over a week or more and are situated in various locations throughout the chapter boundaries. In recent years these have been calendared to share experiences from the annual conference.

 

In August we had a reception at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, with some members touring areas of the museum in advance of the reception. The reception was followed by a panel discussion on the realm of e-books. Panel members were all players in this industry, including representatives from Morgan and Claypool, Knovel and CRC Press. The discussion began with chapter member Helen Josephine, Head Librarian at the Engineering Library of the Terman Engineering Center at Stanford University, talking about implementation of a "bookless" engineering library.

 

In September we held our annual Professional Development workshop. The topic was copyright and featured Dru Zuretti, Copyright Education Manager at Copyright Clearance Center in an interactive discussion with members. Questions from potential attendees were compiled and sent to the speaker in advance of the meeting. Zuretti covered compiled questions and there was time for additional questions from the audience, as well. This was a half-day event.

 

Our October program meeting was held at Intel and featured Melissa Cefkin and Alexandra Zafiroglu discussing the corporate trends in hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. Cefkin is a business and design anthropologist in the Service Practices group at IBM's Almaden Research Center. Zafiroglu is a senior researcher with Domestic Designs and Technologies Research at Intel Corporation.

 

Scheduled to take advantage of the high rate of chapter members attending the Internet Librarian conference, a tour of the Dudley Knox Library at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey was arranged for Sunday October 25. Organized by a chapter member, this tour was hosted by Greta Marlatt, Manager of Outreach and Collection Development at Dudley Knox.

We had a dinner program at SJSU in November with the speaker discussing "Evolution of Controlled Vocabularies." The speaker, Christine Connors, has extensive experience in taxonomy, ontology and metadata design and development. Prior to forming TriviumRLG, an information management consulting firm, Ms. Connors was the global director, semantic technology solutions for Dow Jones. This presentation was videotaped at the request (and expense) of SLIS. A tour of King Library was organized to precede this dinner program. The November dinner program was the first time out for this chapter to use SurveyMonkey as a program registration tool. 

Our final event for 2009 was the chapter’s annual business meeting and Holiday party. Though this is typically a celebratory event, at which special awards and leadership acknowledgements are given, we also had Roy Tennant as our guest speaker at this event. He shared his perspectives on the three things libraries of the future must have/do in order to succeed. It was a very interesting presentation enjoyed by members and guests alike.

Our Program Directors also organized two “for fun” screenings of The Hollywood Librarian, one in July and one in November.

Dudley Knox Library -- Academic and Serving a Very Special Clientele

The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey was the venue for the San Andreas Chapter tour on October 25. The tour of the Dudley Knox Library was hosted by Greta Marlatt. Event organizer Lee Pharis provided coffee and refreshments, which we enjoyed while we waited for all our number to arrive.

The campus houses about 1400 students at any one time, but the Dudley Knox Library serves many more who are stationed elsewhere or involved in a distance learning program. Students come from all over the world, and can be from almost any branch of government service. 

The current building, the first permanent home for the Library, was constructed in 1974. An extension was added in 1994, and last year the library underwent a partial refresh under the watchful eye of University Librarian Eleanor Uhlinger.

After a presentation about the School and the Library, Marlatt conducted the tour, with about 18 of us in tow. We are grateful to her for generously spending over two hours with us and answering all our questions.

The tour included a look at the large map collection, quiet study areas, computers for conducting research, and workstations dedicated to accessing the online catalog. Along with a reasonable number of  microform readers and printers (older technology), the DKL offers several group study spaces with state-of-the-art technology called "collaboratories." The newly remodeled reference area features a counter and desks that adjust for librarian preferences and customer needs. This is within sight of the circulation desk where staff welcome students and visitors to this hard-working library.

The Library offers a full menu of resources -- book collection, paper journals and access to many commercial databases. The Dudley Knox Library is a federal depository library for government publications. As such, the Library is open to the public, subject to the School's access policies including a 48 hour embargo and the requisite identification documents.

The thesis collection dates from the 1940s forward, and is a jewel of this library. Most but not all theses are available for public release (i.e. not classified). Slowly the collection is being digitized, and of course all theses are cataloged and findable via the online catalog, which can be accessed at DKL's website.

The Dudley Knox Library is constantly developing and testing new services and new versions of traditional academic library services. "Ask a Librarian" is an extension of the reference and readers advisory service, and utilizes chat technology. If you're a fan of social media, you might want to follow the DKL on Twitter; look for KnoxSquawkBox. Video technology is catching on as a tool for training their customers and each other.

The Library's staff of about 30 support the graduate programs that cover business, most engineering disciplines, and national security affairs. The staff are all civilians, and most permanent staff have security clearances. Knowledge of military uniforms and rank is valuable for the staff; if they don't have it when they arrive, they develop the knowledge quite quickly!

SLA is not the only organization celebrating 100 years in 2009. Established in 1909, the school became the Postgraduate Department of the Naval Academy in 1912, and moved to Monterey in 1951. The school occupies the site of the historic Hotel Del Monte, which was built in 1880 by railroad pioneer Charles Crocker. The main Hotel building still stands; it's called Hermann Hall and it houses the administrative offices of the School.

The Dudley Knox Library was named Federal Library of the Year in 2004.

For more information about the library, visit the website. Information about history, collections and services abound, including instructional videos and a link to the online catalog, called BOSUN. 

-- Patricia Parsons