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Kudos

Kristine Alpi, the associate library director at Weill Cornell Medical Library, and Medha Devare, the bioinformatics and life sciences librarian at Mann Library, contributed to the article “Vignettes: Diverse Library Staff Offering Diverse Bioinformatics Services,” published in the July 2006 online content of the Journal of the Medical Library Association.

Stuart Basefsky, the senior reference librarian at Catherwood Library, lecturer, and director of the news bureau of the Institute for Workplace Studies in the New York City office of the ILR School, authored the lead article (“Mis-Information at the Heart of the University: Why Administrators Should Take Libraries More Seriously”) in Information Outlook, the official publication of the Special Libraries Association (SLA), 10 (August 2006), 15-19. Stuart argues that major university research library systems are complex organizations made up of at least three types of library entities—the central library, the department/school library, and the professional school library. Are these libraries cost centers or value centers? The voices of all three types of libraries should be heard for their perspectives when determining the future of the university library system with respect to this basic question. Otherwise, the competitive future of the university and its key programs may be put at risk. Knowing the core businesses of the university and how the library can best serve its fundamental purpose is essential. SLA members may read the article online.

Terry Ehling, the director of the Center for Innovative Publishing, served as co-chair for the 2006 Society for Scholarly Publishing's Top Management Roundtable, held September 6-8 in Philadelphia.  She brought in keynote speakers Kevin Guthrie, the president of Ithaka, and Paul Duguid, University of California at Berkeley, and panelists Brent Shaw, coordinator of the Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics; Bob Stein, the director of the Institute for the Future of the Book; and Bill Strong, an intellectual property attorney and the author of The Copyright Book 5/e.

In July, Lance Heidig, a reference and instruction librarian in Olin who was working on this year’s New Student Reading Project, wrote a brief e-mail report to Michele Moody-Adams, the vice-provost for undergraduate education:

I told you about these Fitzgerald/Cornell connections in our conversation a month or so ago, but I wanted to provide you with my text about them. The three documents attached to this message are the labels for the exhibit I am co-curating in the Division of Rare and Manuscripts in Kroch Library, which we will be installing next week. We will also use this text in our Cornell Connections section of the Reading Project web site. It’s been fun learning more about Fitzgerald and Gatsby, especially to find out that a Cornellian launched Fitzgerald’s literary career and that a Cornell professor helped to revive Fitzgerald’s reputation.

Lance received the following reply:

Dear Lance:

I am immensely grateful to you for all the work you have done to enrich the Reading Project, and to enhance our appreciation of the links between Fitzgerald’s literary career and Cornell. We will try to find a way to integrate the results of all your hard work into introductory remarks at the Barton Hall panel, and remarks about the book in every other appropriate venue.

Your efforts (like those of everyone involved with the website, and associated efforts) are a wonderful reminder that reading a good book really can reinforce the best values that unite us as Cornellians.

Sincerely

MM-A

Peter Hirtle’s article “Research, Libraries, and Fair Use: The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1935” has been published in the Journal of the Copyright Society, 53:3-4 (Spring-Summer 2006). Peter would be happy to provide anyone who is interested with an offprint, and there is a preprint version available on the Web. Peter also attended at the American Association of Law Libraries meeting in St. Louis, where he gave a session called Copyright Implications of Digital Libraries.

In July Pat Viele attended the summer meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers at Syracuse University, which attracted 1,100 attendees from around the world.

The Committee on Graduate Education in Physics sponsored the panel discussion Information Literacy and the Physics Curriculum that Pat arranged. Thirty physics faculty, representing both high school and higher education, attended. The speakers represented three different ways to introduce information literacy into the physics curriculum. In addition to the panel discussion, Pat attended a cracker-barrel session about the professional concerns of high school faculty and conducted a similar session for four-year college and university faculty. And, yes, she was wearing her “Ask Your Librarian!” T-shirt. Pat has also just published an article, “Physics 213: An Example of Faculty/Librarian Collaboration,” in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship on her work with the summer 2005 Physics 213 class, Thermodynamics, Electricity and Magnetism.

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