IRIS Photos

Shorts

Libe Café will close on Saturdays during the summer, beginning June 18, and will reopen after the beginning of the fall semester. The café is also closed on Sundays. Experience has shown that use of the café is slight and does not cover the cost of staffing on summer weekends.

Lynn Brown has announced her plans to retire from her position in the Management and Hotel libraries. After eighteen years in the Cornell Library, mainly in the Management Library, Lynn is looking forward to new challenges and responsibilities. Following a stint as an information assistant back in the late seventies and early eighties, Lynn found her calling and earned her M.L.S. degree from Syracuse University. She began her position in the Management Library in December 1986. At that time we were introducing computers to both the staff and the public in the library, and Lynn spotted an opportunity to create the instruction program in the Management Library. She also saw another opportunity and became a champion for the staff training program that began in the late eighties. In addition to her initiative, Lynn added a dynamic component to these projects, a willingness to change and adapt as the environment changed. Both of these efforts are still flourishing today. Lynn has developed an extensive network of colleagues around campus and in the profession. She has served as a mentor for many Cornell librarians, and there are several faculty members who equate the Management Library with Lynn. We plan to celebrate Lynn’s tenure in the library later in June. We will miss the daily friendship and support that Lynn provides to her colleagues.

As part of our transition plan, Angela Horne will assume many of Lynn’s responsibilities in the Management Library and I will assume her responsibilities in the Hotel Library. We have also just posted a position for an entry-level public services librarian in the Management Library.

–Don Schnedeker

Librarian turned sleuth, Phil Davis (Collection Development, Mann Library) investigated the unethical publishing practices of Emerald Publishing Ltd. (formerly known as MCB University Press), by which hundreds of articles were systematically republished—without attribution—in at least seventy-three journals from 1975 through 2003. The study resulted in wide media attention (Library Journal, Cornell Chronicle, and the Chronicle of Higher Education), presentations at national conferences in Charleston and at ALA), three publications (Library Resources & Technical Services and Portal), and a faculty lecture and student workshop at the School of Information Studies at the University of Syracuse.

As one of the principle authors of the CUL Open Access report and addendum, Phil was responsible for doing the economic analysis by comparing a producer-pays model to the traditional subscription model. This work has led to two presentations, one at ALA Midwinter in January and the other at the NYSHEI annual conference in Saratoga Springs in May.

Medha Devare (bioinformatics and life sciences librarian, Mann Library) was invited to teach a bioinformatics workshop at Weill Medical College on April 20. While in New York City, she also demonstrated VIVO to the WMC library staff and presented a short talk on VIVO at a joint faculty symposium to explore ways to increase collaborative efforts among faculty at Cornell’s Ithaca and New York City campuses. Medha also organized a free campuswide bioinformatics workshop held here in Ithaca on April 27-28 for faculty, students, and staff. One hundred eighty people attended a lecture and participated in a series of hands-on sessions by bioinformaticians from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Thad Dickinson (head of Instructional Services at the Nestle Library) co-presented a poster at the twelfth National Conference of the Association of College & Research Libraries in Minneapolis on April 8. The poster, titled “Changing Roles and Redefining Goals: The Five Year Itch,” summarized results of a nationwide survey exploring why many librarians change jobs or roles in their first five years as professionals. Initial results indicate that the lack of opportunity within an organization ranks higher than low salaries as a cause of dissatisfaction, and that nearly half of the almost 500 respondents have left, or are considering leaving, the profession. The poster was well received, and the authors have been asked to publish their findings.

In early April, Barbara Eden represented CUL lobbying in Congress for Humanities Advocacy Day. She lobbied with Linda Grace-Kobas and Jacquie Powers, also from Cornell. Efforts were focused on increasing the proposed funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities. They made visits to eight congressional offices representing New York and were very effective in getting our message across.

Peter Hirtle (IRIS) has been invited to be part of a special NISO working group investigating the impact of digital rights management systems, specifically rights expression languages, on libraries and archives. The working group will work to identify requirements of libraries for rights expression for digital materials; to focus on interoperability between systems for the exchange of rights expression; and to propose specific areas where NISO can facilitate standards and best practices for rights expressions. Peter has also been asked by the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress to join a small study group to review Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (the section that deals with copying by libraries and archives).

Angela Horne, Management Library, spoke at the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce “networking at noon” event at the Carriage House Café on March 24. About twenty-five people attended the event.

On April 15, Angela Horne and Lynn Brown participated in a regional entrepreneurship “Pre-Seed Workshop.” Pre-seed programs are designed to support regional entrepreneurs in high-tech fields of study as they begin to assess the feasibility and marketability of their technologies prior to seeking venture capital funding. In short, the workshops are designed to teach entrepreneurs how to do a first-stage competitive analysis. Invitations to the Pre-Seed Workshop are extended to high-tech faculty from the region’s academic institutions. Attendance at this particular program included three teams from Cornell and one from Binghamton University.

Mihoko Hosoi, the head of Reference and Research Services at the Nestle Library, presented a paper titled “Motivating Employees in Academic Libraries in Tough Times” at the ACRL annual conference in Minneapolis on April 8. More than 200 people attended her session, and her picture and the description of her presentation were published in ACRL Footnotes (Sat., Apr. 9). Her paper, published in the conference proceedings, and the presentation CD are available via ACRL.

On March 23-26 Linda Stewart (Collection Development, Mann Library) attended the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association in San Diego. As part of a panel, Libraries, Archives, and Popular Culture Research, she presented the paper “Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA): Online Texts from America’s Rural Past.” Her presentation described the materials included in CHLA and their use as shown by transaction logs. This was Linda’s second year to attend PCA/ACA: last year she presented a paper entitled “Home Economics Archive: Research, History, Tradition (HEARTH).” Both presentations were part of an effort to promote Cornell’s historical digitization projects to groups of scholars who might use them.

Kornelia Tancheva (instruction coordinator, Mann Library, and team leader for the Information Fluency Strategic Priority Team) was recently invited to present at the workshop Building Bridges Between Libraries and Faculty: Information Literacy in the Curriculum, organized by SCRLC, in Binghamton. Her presentation, “Information Literacy and the CU Library System,” highlighted both the varied instruction efforts of the library—ranging from credit courses through course-integrated sessions to open workshops—and the current work of the Information Fluency team. In March Kornelia also presented a paper on librarians’ visual self-representation online at the Popular Culture of America Annual Conference in San Diego. The paper, which is part of a larger ongoing project, argues that while the popular-culture representation of librarians tends to “normalize” the image of the librarian along several different lines of cultural stereotyping—i.e., cultural acceptance—visual self-representation online attempts to question and deconstruct cultural norms and thus emerges as a possible grassroots agent of semiotic change. For good examples of this alternative library culture, check out Library Underground.

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