We’re especially pleased to highlight two very special achievements by CUL TS staff in this issue. First, we pay tribute to Elaine Westbrooks (Mann), metadata librarian, author, editor, and hole-in-one golfer. Elaine was awarded the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Librarianship earlier this year. Candidates for this award are evaluated on "their skill in librarianship, their service to the college and to the profession and their scholarship and continuing professional growth." In all these areas, Elaine has certainly excelled. She has firmly established herself as a leader in metadata applications and the development of digital collections and services. Within CUL, she has been a leader of the Metadata Working Group; within the profession, she is a recognized expert in the field of geospatial metadata. In 2004/2005, Elaine published not one, but two, books: Metadata in Practice: Building the Diverse Digital Library, (ALA Editions, co-edited by Elaine and Diane Hillmann) and Black Studies and Culture on the WWW: A Guide to the Very Best Websites (forthcoming from Scholarly Resources, Inc.). In addition, Elaine and her Mann colleague Keith Jenkins are now editing a Festschrift honoring Tom Turner. As if all of that weren’t enough, she continues to play a major role in several important initiatives, from geospatial repositories to grant sponsored work on language acquisition research data. The Cornell community and the library profession have clearly benefited from her knowledge, energy and dedication. Please join us in congratulating Elaine for this justly deserved recognition of her contributions and accomplishments. Secondly, we note with pride and joy that Scott Wicks (CTS) was awarded the ALCTS Leadership In Library Acquisitions Award for 2005. The award is given for significant contributions by an outstanding leader in the field of library acquisitions. Nominees must have demonstrated achievement in the field of acquisitions as evidenced by contributions to professional associations; contributions to the literature, including research; contributions to the education of acquisitions professionals; and contributions to the advancement of the profession. Typically, first-time nominees do not win this prestigious recognition, but Scott’s peers broke with tradition in selecting him for the award. Crucial to this recognition was Scott’s groundbreaking recent work on ITSO CUL, the automated ordering and selection software featured in our very first issue (http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/backstory/v1n1/itsofeature.htm). A $1500 dollar prize and a citation presented by Otto Harrassowitz, the award’s sponsor, will be presented to Scott at the ALA Annual Meeting in Chicago on June 26th. In earning this recognition, Scott joins such distinguished technical services professionals as Carol Pitts Diedrichs, Rosann Bazirjian, and former head of CTS Christian Boissonnas. Please join all of us in congratulating Scott on this well-deserved award.

ERM, wrestled

In March, CUL brought up the III Electronic Resource Management System, featured in our Fall 2004 issue. The production system has enabled simpler and much faster retrieval of electronic journal titles licensed or otherwise made available by the Library. In combination with our new single-record approach to e-journal cataloging, the ERM has greatly improved our e-journal access from the Find E-Journals service. We will be looking to move the Find Databases interface to the ERM later in 2005.

A screenshot from the new ERMS-based Find E-Journals service

Farewell to Iris Wolley

The ides of April brought not only the usual rush to complete tax returns this year. The date also marked the end of Iris Wolley’s tenure at CUL. Iris has left Cornell to take a new position at Columbia University Libraries (the other CUL), where she’ll be doing serials and electronic resource cataloging. For 14 years, Iris served as a member of the academic catalogers’ team, specializing in Fine Arts materials. Iris has been very active in training, both nationally and within Cornell, and has enjoyed a national reputation as a trainer and author/editor of training materials. We wish Iris all the best in her new position at Columbia. A few photos from her farewell party appear below.

 

Here's a sample of what CUL technical services staff have been writing, presenting, or doing in the broader world over the past few months:

Several LTS staff have contributed to a forthcoming Festschrift in honor of Tom Turner, former metadata librarian at Mann Library. The book, Metadata and Digital Collections: A Festschrift in Honor of Thomas P. Turner, was edited by Elaine Westbrooks and Keith Jenkins of Mann Library and features additional contributions by Karen Calhoun, Marty Kurth, and Nathan Rupp. The book will be published by Scarecrow Press later this year.

Jim Alberts (Music) has drafted a white paper for the Machine Readable Bibliographic Information (MARBI) Committee on behalf of the Music Library Association’s (MLA) MARC Formats Subcommittee. The proposal seeks a revision of MARC21 to include additional codes for musical genre and medium of performance (the 047 and 048 fields, respectively, in MARC21), drawn from code lists maintained and updated by the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (IAML). Incorporating these codes would allow for greater international information sharing, and also allow MARC21 catalogers to use a much more broad and non-Eurocentric code set than is currently available.

David Banush (CTS), Marty Kurth (CTS), and Jean Pajerek (Law) have an article forthcoming the in July issue of Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS), entitled “Rehabilitating Killer Serials: An Automated Approach to E-Journal Metadata Management.” The article should appear in volume 49, number 3 (July 2005).

Karen Calhoun (Associate University Librarian for Technical Services) traveled to Waterville, Maine to consult with library staff at Colby, Bates and Bowdoin Colleges on libraries and librarians responding to change, with a focus on technical services. The day-long session featured three presentations available at http://www.library.cornell.edu/tsweb/aboutus/tsPresentations.htm.

On June 27, Karen will speak at the ALCTS President's Program "Librarians, Learning, and Creativity: a Boundary-Breaking Perspective." Her presentation will offer a number of observations about the changing context for being a librarian in the interconnected world of the Web. She will suggest how collections and technical services librarians might respond creatively and effectively to the challenge of introducing a new generation of collections, discovery systems, tools and techniques to not only connect information seekers to what they need, where they need it, but also to continue empowering them to transform mere information into knowledge, insight, and action.

Adam Chandler (CTS), along with Scott Wicks (CTS), will be giving presentations at “Electronic Resources Management Systems: Opening a Can of ERMS,” an ALCTS pre-ALA conference workshop in Chicago on June 24th. More on the workshop can be found online at: http://www.ala.org/ala/alcts/alctspubs/alctsnewsletter/vol16no2/annualconference05/eventschedules/05eventsched.htm#erms

Adam is also serving as a facilitator and organizer for a second ALA pre-conference workshop, "Reading and Mapping License Language for Electronic Resource Management: A Pilot ARL/DLF Workshop,” sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries. More on that event here: http://www.arl.org/stats/work/mapping.html

Last January, Adam teamed with Jim LeBlanc (CTS ) at the ALA Midwinter meeting in Boston for a presentation. Their talk, entitled "Creating a Virtual Undergraduate Library Collection with the Hierarchical Interface to LC Classification (HILCC)," focused on their HILCC research project.

Jim traveled to Grantville, Pennsylvania in late March to participate in the Keystone Library Network's annual meeting as part of his authority control consulting assignment on behalf of CUL. He is also chairing the host committee for the 2005 North American James Joyce Conference, which will be held at Cornell June 14-18. As part of the conference's academic program, Jim will be chairing a panel on Joyce's Dubliners and presenting a paper entitled "Revenant Being in 'The Dead.'"

Nathan Rupp (Mann Library Technical Services) gave a talk in May at the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) meeting called “Metadata Management Design.” For 2005/06, he will continue as co-chair of NASIGs Continuing Education Committee. Nate will also participate in the ALCTS Cataloging for the 21st Century Training Program and attend a train the trainer session on cataloging Internet resources at ALA in June.

Zoe Stewart-Marshall (CTS) served as a panelist at the annual Endeavor Users’ Group Meeting, EndUser, in Chicago, April 29th. The session, entitled “The Future of the Integrated Library System: A Panel Discussion”, also featured John Miller (University of Kansas), John McGinty (Loyola Notre Dame Library), and Roland Dietz (CEO, Endeavor). In May, Zoe gave a talk at the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) meeting called "Challenges of Off-Site Library Storage Facilities: Cataloging, access and management of off-site serials." Sarah Corvene (Harvard) and Susan Currie (SUNY Binghamton, late of CUL) were co-presenters. If that’s not enough, Zoe is also chair of the LITA Web Policy Task Force as well as a member of the LITA 2005 National Forum Planning Committee.

Scott Wicks (CTS) spoke at the ALCTS Automated Acquisitions/In Process Discussion Group at the ALA Midwinter meeting in Boston last January. Scott talked about Cornell's development of ITSO CUL as an example of how libraries are extending the acquisitions module of the integrated library system.