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Kudos

Congratulations to David Banush, Marty Kurth, and Jean Pajerek, who have just published “Rehabilitating Killer Serials: An Automated Strategy for Maintaining E-Journal Metadata” in the most recent issue of Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS). The article explains in a lucid way how Cornell has developed a largely automated method for providing title-level catalog access to electronic journals made available through aggregator packages.

In June Tony Cosgrave attended the 6th annual LabMan conference, sponsored by CIT’s Public Computing Department and designed for people associated with the maintenace of computing labs in colleges, universities, K-12 school districts, or libraries. Attendees met colleagues from other institutions who, like them, face various challenges in putting together academic computing labs for the wide variety of needs each institution faces.

Mann Library recently received the following thank-you letter from Catherine Arnott Smith, an assistant professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University: “I’m writing to express my thanks for the participation of your Life Sciences Bibliographer, Phil Davis, as a guest lecturer in my class ‘Library Systems and Processes’ at the School of Information Studies this April. Phil made a special guest appearance during one week of the distance section of this course, which meant that he was doing outreach to an interesting group of students, most of them full-time employees in libraries and other information places all over North America. Phil was a particularly good lecturer because he was so willing to engage with the students. This is a group that asks challenging questions, and Phil was definitely up to the challenge, posting eloquent questions and effective responses. I’ve heard from several students that this was one of the best ‘cameo’ appearances they’ve had yet in an online course. I am always happy to find practitioners who can talk to my students, so Phil did me a considerable favor, and if I can help you all out in any way, please don’t hesitate to ask me to return the favor.”

Tom Hickerson, Associate University Librarian, made a presentation at the ALA Meeting in Chicago titled, “Sustainability: Transformative Models for Digital Services.”

A review essay that Peter Hirtle wrote on three recent titles on copyright has appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of American Archivist: “Carrie Russell, Complete Copyright: An Everyday Guide for Librarians; James S. Heller, The Librarian’s Copyright Companion; Tim Padfield, Copyright for Archivists and Users of Archives.”

Peter Hirtle was quoted in, and photographed in the Kheel Center stacks for, a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Whose Work Is It, Anyway?” The article discusses the difficulties of trying to locate copyright owners.

Recently, as the writers for the Great Lakes Radio Consortium were developing a show on vegetable gardening, they discovered Mann’s “Kitchen Gardens” exhibit, which was curated by Ashley Miller. They soon called Ashley to interview her for the broadcast Obsessing over Vegetable Gardens. Connect to the GLRC Web site and search under “gardens,” or look in the GLRC archives under “week of July 4” to find the audio stream of this program. If you listen closely to this four-minute piece, you’ll hear Ashley waxing eloquent about the pleasures of vegetable gardens. As you taste the first tomatoes of the season or mix up a batch of pungent pesto from your garden, remember that Ashley said: “Growing vegetables is as close as we can get to a seasonal ritual. There is something primal about putting a seed into the soil, and tending it, and harvesting it..., and then eating it.”

Marcy Rosenkrantz, the director of Library Systems, made a presentation titled, “Policies and Practices of Institutional Repositories” at the ALA Meeting in Chicago.

This summer Pat Viele has been collaborating with a physics faculty member to find ways to introduce information literacy into the physics curriculum. The class consists almost entirely of Cornell engineering students at the sophomore or junior level. The professor and Pat met several times to discuss what they hoped to accomplish and to design assignments. They decided on three primary goals:

  • students will learn about the history of certain concepts relevant to the course
  • students will learn how to evaluate information found on Web sites
  • students will learn how to search the Internet effectively

The assignments will be 5% of the grade. The assignment will be given to the students on Monday, and a half-hour block of time will be set aside on Thursday for discussion.

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