April 2010

Librarian / Archivist

Eleanor Brown, Rare & Manuscript Collections

Eleanor Brown has distinguished herself as Assistant Director for Programs and Services, Curator of Digital and Media Collections in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC).  Eli has served in RMC since 2002, and during that time, she has proved to be among the most versatile of librarians and archivists.  Throughout, her initiative, her organizational skills, and her energy have been truly impressive.

Eli came to Cornell in 2002 from the National Archives of Canada, with outstanding recommendations for her project management skills and her particular expertise with visual collections.  Initially serving as RMC’s Technical Services Coordinator, she was promoted to the newly created position of Head of Program and Project Management in 2003, assuming much more diversified and complex responsibilities.  In 2006, she was named Assistant Director for Programs and Services, Curator of Digital and Media Collections, in recognition of her talents and accomplishments.  In addition to a continuing role supervising processing and finding aid creation, she now has general responsibilities for RMC’s public services operations (including reference and reproduction services) as well as for digital projects and audio-visual collections.  I’ve greatly appreciated her enthusiasm, energy, and flexibility in these roles, and I think that she has been remarkably successful in achieving RMC and CUL goals.

Eli’s excellent supervisory skills also have allowed her to make good use of the time and talents of support staff and of student assistants involved in manuscript processing and finding aid production.  Under her supervision, Encoded Archival Description (EAD) guide production increased and became more efficient, and included cooperation with the Kheel Center.  She has also focused attention on the extensive audiovisual collections held by RMC, conducting surveys of our photographic negatives and audiotapes, instructing staff and patrons in the handling of these valuable and often fragile media, and developing and monitoring policies and procedures for their preservation and use.  She has worked closely with Professor Timothy Murray in developing cataloging and access methods for the digital files in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art.

Thanks to Eli’s project management skills, we successfully completed a number of major grant-funded projects including the IMLS-funded Political Americana project, a complex project that involved cooperation between Preservation, DLIT, and RMC.  She has also worked on the GLOPAD project to develop metadata for the Global Performing Arts Consortium, and the NEH/SAT-funded Native American Collection project.  In 2004, she coordinated the Library’s publication of Bend in the Road, a collection of poetry written by Eamon J. McEneaney, a Cornell alumnus who died on September 11. 

Special Collections librarians and archivists have to be multi-faceted, and Eli is an exemplary case.  Along with her other responsibilities, she not only provides expert reference services, but she has also been involved in successful exhibitions and presentations.  She curated Pastimes and Paradigms, which continues to be one of our most viewed Web sites.  She also contributed to the Willard Fiske, Get Out the Vote, Liberty Hyde Bailey, and Not By Bread Alone exhibitions.

Eli has also been generous in her assistance to other CUL libraries.  She has worked with Kheel Center staff on the EAD project; helped the Law Library with an exhibition and brochure based on the William Rogers collection and the Rwanda Tribunal; worked with a student assistant organizing the records of the Cornell Center for Materials Research; advised Music Library staff on archival processing; assisted the Africana Center with their photographic collections, and helped the Hotel Library with their menu collection.  Additionally, she has worked closely with Echols staff on joint projects to process complex collections. 

Eli has helped to enhance the profile of Special Collections within the Cornell Library by her participation in many CUL groups and committees.  As a member of the Public Services Executive Committee, in particular, she provides a different perspective to the group and brings library public services issues to the Special Collections community. 

She is professionally active, participating in the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and has been invited to participate in many RLG committees.  She has presented papers at SAA, at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC), and at RBMS, and has published a number of articles in Canadian archival journals.  In her spare time, she raises and shows flat-coated retrievers and builds miniature houses.

Eli’s lively interest, integrity, intellectual curiosity, flexibility, and sense of humor (combined with her great Scottish-Canadian accent) make her an outstanding archivist, valued colleague, and good friend.  We congratulate her on her richly deserved promotion to Librarian/Archivist and look forward to her continuing growth and professional success. (Elaine Engst)

Angela Horne, Management Library

Angela Horne began her library career in 1996 at the Nova Scotia Department of Labour in Halifax as their Electronic Initiatives and Departmental Webmaster. Two years later, she arrived at Cornell working as a part-time reference specialist at the Physical Sciences Library. By June 1999, Angela had accepted the position of Public Services Librarian at the Johnson Graduate School of Management Library working with Don Schnedeker and Lynn Brown. Angela quickly moved up in the ranks becoming Associate Director in 2005 and then later Director in 2007. That same year, she completed her MBA in the Cornell/Queen’s University joint program as a complement to her Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University (1996). (See the December 2005 issue of Kaleidoscope for Angela's account of her experience in the program, along with Nate Rupp, and Scott Wicks.)

Meeting Angela for the first time, you get the impression of a warm, friendly professional with a ready smile and great sense of humor. Spend more time with her and you come to appreciate her as very perceptive, aware of the environment, careful, thoughtful, and having lots of energy. In addition to the quantitative skills you would expect from someone with an MBA, and all the advantages that brings to solving problems and making decisions, you realize how good she is with people. Building a library team capable of supporting a top flight management school comes naturally to Angela. As proof of this, Cornell’s Management Library has just won, under Angela’s leadership, the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Business & Finance Division’s Centers of Excellence Award for Service for 2010 (see People News below). These awards are modeled by SLA around the Baldrige National Quality Awards to showcase excellence in the provision of library and information services. And this recognition came within a relatively short time of Angela’s appointment as director at the Management Library.

Angela assumed responsibility for several key assignments within CUL relating to the library system’s future direction. Beginning in Fall 2006, Sarah Thomas selected her to lead the Planning to Plan effort which later evolved into the Strategic Alignment Group (SAG). Angela also became the first chair of the Manager’s Council, an advisory forum designed to promote the free flow of information and ideas from staff to the Library Executive Group and the University Librarian. Among other achievements, Angela has also had a central role in keeping the Business Interest Group (BIG) on track to improve system-wide the quality of information services for students in this subject area.

Leadership at the professional association level is also an important aspect of Angela’s commitment. She has held several leadership positions in the Upstate New York Chapter of Special Libraries Association including that of president. Angela is also active at the national level of SLA and most recently served as chair of the Student and Academic Relations Committee.

The rank of Librarian is reserved for a few select professionals who set the standard and make a substantial difference. Angela’s career at Cornell fits that description and promotion to the rank of Librarian is well deserved. (Gordon Law)

Associate Librarian

Medha Devare, Mann Library

After earning a BA in biology from Colby College, Medha came to Cornell where she earned an MS in environmental toxicology and a PhD in crop and soil sciences.  Prior to coming to Mann she was a post doctoral research associate in crop and soil sciences where she researched the effects of transgenic crops and insecticides on soil microbial populations.  Medha was hired as our first ever Bioinformatics and Life Sciences Librarian in 2004.  Medha provides reference and other library services, has taught bioinformatics open workshops including BIOG 6000 (Bioinformatics tools for genomics), and sponsored a National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) workshop at Cornell.  She chaired the CUL Life Sciences Working Group for several years and was co-chair of the Professional Development Committee in 2005-6.

Medha arrived just as we were developing VIVO for the life sciences community and quickly became our VIVO evangelist.  She developed the resources section of the site while she met with department chairs, faculty stakeholders, and senior administrators in CALS and CHE.  Provost David Harris recognized the value of VIVO and subsequently supported VIVO’s expansion to serve the University’s need for a researcher discovery system.  As a result the library has received significant funding from the Provost’s office for the continued development and expansion of VIVO.  Now Medha coordinates the work of the CUL VIVO curators. 

Last year Cornell partnered with the University of Florida and several other institutions to apply for an NIH stimulus grant: “A Semantic Approach to Enabling National Networking of Scientists”.  The Florida/Cornell proposal was one of only two grants awarded.  Naturally Medha is the National Outreach Coordinator for the project. Medha has made presentations on VIVO at various conferences including SLA, ARL, Frontiers in Information Provision for the Bio and Environmental Sciences (FIBS), USAIN, and the Digital Library Federation.

Medha has maintained an involvement in international agriculture.  She was the coordinating lead author for a chapter in a United Nations EnvironmentProgramme (UNEP) sponsored publication:  International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development.

VIVO has succeeded because of the technical innovations of Jon Corson-Rikert, the developers in ITS, and Medha’s enthusiastic outreach efforts and her advocacy for the user’s needs.  Medha came to us as a scientist by training with an interest in knowledge transfer.  She is high energy, hard working, and enthusiastic. That combination of interests and skills has contributed to the success of our services to the life sciences community and Cornell.  (Kathy Chiang)

Laurent Ferri, Rare and Manuscript Collections

Laurent Ferri joined the staff of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) in 2007 as curator of French Collections. His first assignment was to create an exhibition, accompanying publication, and events celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Lafayette with materials drawn from the Library’s extensive Lafayette Collection, the largest of its kind outside of France. On a short timeline, Laurent exceeded everyone’s expectations in completing this complex and challenging task, writing an exhibition and printed catalog that were widely praised, developing compelling associated programming, and delivering a paper based on his research in the French Senate in Paris, December 2007.

Since that first success, Laurent has contributed to an expanding number of assignments and activities in RMC. He serves on RMC’s busy reference desk, and he has created enhanced cataloging and EAD guides for several significant manuscript collections, including the Library’s internationally renowned French Revolution and Witchcraft Collections, originally assembled by Andrew Dickson White. Laurent also contributes to RMC’s popular teaching programs, preparing rare book and manuscript presentations for classes in Medieval and European studies, Comparative Literature, and Romance Studies. His classroom presentations routinely receive grateful letters full of glowing reviews from faculty, students, donors, and alumni.

Laurent is a member of the Library’s Humanities Team, currently serves on PSEC’s Instruction Committee, and contributed last year to an ad hoc group charged to revise the Library’s “A-Z guide” online.

Laurent also serves as adjunct faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences, and is currently the acting chair of the French Studies program. He taught a class last fall, FR2240 “The French Experience,” and he is scheduled to teach another course in fall 2010 for the French Studies Program, this time on Versailles.

In recognition of his abilities, expanding job assignments, and willingness to tackle almost any task, Laurent was promoted to the position of Assistant Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts in September of 2009. In that role, he continues to excel. Laurent can also play the piano, sing songs, tell jokes in several languages, and make waffles—making him a treasured asset to any work environment. (Katherine Reagan)

Keith Jenkins, Mann Library

Keith has a BS in mathematics from Cornell and an MLS from Simmons.  He started his career at CUL in Olin/Uris, first in circulation, then as a weekend supervisor, and later as a reference assistant.  During library school he worked in the Massachusetts Historical Society and actually touched Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book and John Adams’ Diary.  (Note:  the MHS policy is not to wear protective gloves.)

In 2004 Keith started as the Metadata librarian in Mann.  It was an ideal position for someone with Keith’s problem solving instincts.  During that time he developed several services that are still being used.  JAbbr (the journal abbreviation look-up system) is a result of his working the reference desk and seeing the problems patrons have deciphering journal abbreviations.  The CUL New Books tool is another example of his work while a metadata librarian. 

In October 2007 he became our GIS/Geospatial Applications Librarian.  He manages the CUGIR site and provides extensive consulting support for GIS questions from patrons across the campus.  In January he added ITS liaison responsibilities to his job.  Keith reviews librarians’ ideas for IT projects and works with Mann ITS to assess their feasibility.  He participates in ITS project review meetings and reports back to us on the progress of our projects.

There has been an explosive growth in location-tagged information triggered by the widespread implementation of Global Positioning Systems (gps) receivers and ‘floating car data’ (cell phone triangulations) in hand held devices.  Many disciplines in agriculture and the applied social sciences use location information.  The CALS Associate Deans identified our geospatial program as a priority library service and in a recent Mann Library Faculty Committee meeting it was cited as an example of the library providing a valuable central college service.  We are grateful to have someone of Keith’s caliber supporting our geospatial program to bring us such recognition.  (Kathy Chiang)

Sarah Keen, Rare & Manuscript Collections

Sarah Keen joined the staff of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) in 2004.  She was hired as the Project Archivist for the records of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences (AAFCS), a position funded by that organization and with assistance from major donors. The Association is a national organization and the acquisition of their records was a significant addition to the collections in RMC.  Historically, Cornell has provided leadership in this discipline since the founding of the Department of Home Economics in 1901.  Sarah’s responsibilities included the development of a processing plan for the records to impose an intellectual and physical order, the creation of a Web-published finding aid which would provide an online resource for access to the collection and general outreach.  She also had to develop a business relationship with the corporate organization and create a records management program for them.  This involved visits to the headquarters to create records plans that would suit their needs and also facilitate future records transfers.

During the project, Sarah also organized two very successful events for the AAFCS.  The first was an exhibit she curated with a presentation to executive and general members of the Association expressing CUL’s appreciation for the donation and funding.  The second event was the official opening of the collection, a major event which included opening remarks from Anne Kenney and Alan Mathios, the Dean of the College of Human Ecology.  Sarah demonstrated excellent public relation skills as CUL’s representative with the AAFCS and this has been transformed into a strong business relationship. These factors have contributed significantly to the national profile of Cornell as a leader in this discipline.

When the AAFCS project was completed Sarah began working on a variety of archival processing projects with curators in RMC, faculty, and supervised teams of students and interns.  Some of these include the William B. Provine Collection of Evolutionary Biology Reprints, a collection of over 800 cubic feet; various Human Sexuality collections; the K.C. Parsons Papers; Cornell Theater Program Records; the Alexander Drummond Papers; the Department of Anthropology Records relating to the Vicos Peru project; and the Ithaca Rotary Club.  

Sarah is immensely proud of her profession as an archivist and she keeps current with new developments and technologies in the science.  Her technical skills were invaluable in the investigation of new archival management systems, especially the Archivists’ Toolkit; Encoded Archival Description (EAD), including co-managing the upgrade to EAD 2002; and general standards and mapping in XML document creation, both investigating and training in XML editing tools for staff and students.

Sarah serves on the Circulation Desk in RMC which is the most crucial of the security points in RMC, overseeing the use and handling of rare materials in the Reading Room and monitoring the items which are circulating at that service desk.  She has also assisted with instruction programs, tours, and other outreach in RMC and CUL programs.

Sarah has contributed to the work of several CUL committees, including as member and Chair of the Committee on the Economic Status of Librarians and collating the annual committee report.  She has also served as member and currently is Chair of the Metadata Working Group.  Her national professional activities include serving as the newsletter editor for the Description Section of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and she is a member of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference.  Sarah also coordinated a workshop on Encoded Archival Description and style sheets held under the auspices of the SAA which took place at Cornell.

Just today, Sarah received a personal letter from the President of the Ithaca Rotary Club commending her work and that of her assistant archivist on processing their corporate records.  Well done, Sarah.  (Eli Brown)

Gail Steinhart, Mann Library

Photograph by Gwen Glazer

Gail has a BS in geology and geophysics/zoology from Wisconsin, an MS in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell, and an MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse.  After earning her Cornell Master’s she worked on various environmental programs, most notably as the Research Coordinator for the Lake Ontario Biocomplexity Project.  She started at Mann in 2004 with reference and instruction responsibilities and worked on a special project for the JRS Biodiversity Foundation.  Gail became our Environmental Sciences and GIS Librarian in June 2004, and in fall 2006 our first Research Data and Environmental Sciences Librarian.

Gail and John Saylor co-chaired the Data Discussion group charged with gathering information about CUL and the wider world of data curation activities and making recommendations for further data curation activities at CUL.  The group met from late 2006 into 2008.  Their white paper can be found here. 

Gail is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the NSF Grant, “Promoting the Curation of Research Data through Library-Laboratory Collaboration,” a.k.a. the DataStaR project.  The purpose of DataStaR is to support collaboration and data sharing among researchers during the research process, and to promote publishing or archiving data and high-quality metadata to discipline-specific data centers, and/or to Cornell's own digital repository.  Gail leads the project team and has presented on the project at several conferences over the last few years, including IASSIST, the Digital Curation Conferences, and various library conferences.

Gail is co-PI on an IMLS funded grant with Jian Qin from the Syracuse School of Information Studies, “Building an eScience Librarianship Curriculum for an eResearch Future.”  The goal of the grant is “to educate a new generation of science librarians by developing a digital curation curriculum that will emphasize the management and preservation of science-related information”  (http://www.imls.gov/news/2009/061709b_list.shtm#NY).

In addition to her data related responsibilities, Gail keeps current on developments across a wide breadth of information management topics.  She teaches the ‘keeping current’ workshop in our open series.  This year she led the Virtual Libraries Discussion group.  The initial group comprised librarians affected or possibly affected by library downsizing.  The membership evolved into a group of CUL librarians with an interest in discussing how libraries could represent themselves online.

The National Science Foundation, the National Academies of Science, and the Association for Research Libraries are just a few of the groups that are calling for better research data management.  It is a continually changing, fast moving field, with many participants.  We are fortunate to have someone as talented and intellectually capable as Gail involved in the CUL response to that challenge.  (Kathy Chiang)

Senior Assistant Librarian

Kaila Bussert, Research and Learning Services

Kaila arrived at Cornell with four years’ experience as a public services librarian at the American University in Cairo and with the Information Commons of the University of Arizona.  Although leaving the sunny, dry climates she knew and loved was a difficult prospect, she took a deep breath and began life in Ithaca’s gorge-ousness in September 2007.  Ever since, Research and Learning Services has benefitted in many ways, but especially from Kaila’s experience with electronic resources (including Flickr), general library instruction, and information literacy, and from her subject expertise (she holds an MA) in Near Eastern Studies.

In the past two and a half years, Kaila has established herself at Cornell as a versatile, active, and universally-respected member of the Cornell University Library team.  She has demonstrated on numerous occasions her thoughtful (and effective!) approach to instruction, and has generously shared her creative ideas about using Web 2.0 technologies.  Notably, Kaila is the genius behind “Research Minutes,” which has received national recognition and untold thousands of hits on YouTube.  She brings her special mix of technical expertise, imagination, artistic sensibilities, and information literacy awareness to that project, as she does to many others, and works with colleagues to re-mix tried and true tutorials for a new generation of learners.

Beginning last semester, Kaila has also provided digital visual resource assistance for faculty and students in the College of Arts and Sciences.  And as a co-chair of the Visual Resources Working Group, she has been actively setting the course for image resource support in what is a fast-changing, but also fast-growing area of research in the humanities.  She has shared her expertise in this area not only within Cornell, but through participation in ACRL and ARLIS.

As active and productive as Kaila has been since she arrived here, her work life has expanded in the past year to include many more responsibilities and projects:  collection development responsibilities for general social sciences, chairing the citation management committee, membership in the reference and outreach committee, and participation in the Cornell Undergraduate Information Competency Initiative.  Finally, she returns to her internationalist roots as the Fulbright Program’s library liaison, guiding students in using library resources to research and develop their Fulbright proposals.

As Special Projects Librarian, Kaila has accomplished an astonishing amount in a short amount of time, and has made herself an indispensable and highly valued member of the CUL team.  Please join her colleagues in Research and Learning Services in congratulating Kaila on her well-deserved promotion.  (Susette Newberry)

Ana Guimaraes, Rare and Manuscript Collections

Ana was hired as Head of Reference Services in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) in 2007 after graduating from the MLIS program at Syracuse.  Since that time she has provided leadership for public services in the Division and has represented this RMC function within the CUL system.

Ana is very conscientious and leads by example which quickly earned her respect from staff in RMC.  She serves on the Circulation Desk overseeing the use of rare materials in the Reading Room and general security of circulation items, and at the Security Desk in the Reference Room, providing oversight for the materials in the exhibition gallery and acting as back up security for the circulation desk.  Ana is very conscious of the security of RMC collections and the proper handling of rare items by patrons.  She has no qualms about intervening with a patron should there be a problem, and always acts in a calm and professional manner.

She chairs the Public Services meetings in the Division and is a member of the RMC Operations Team which is comprised of the heads of the various functional areas in the department.  She is a fair and responsive supervisor, and has proven herself to be resourceful in motivating staff and student workers and building morale.  She has also trained staff, interns, and students on policies and procedures.

Her interactions with colleagues in other CUL units, including the Digital Management Group and the Kheel Center, have been successful.  These relationships will prove to be very useful in the future development of joint policies by the Cornell Council on Special Collections.  By further streamlining the Rareref and Rarerepro listserves and managing them in a very efficient system, Ana has enabled RMC staff to work in a more structured environment improving turnaround times.  She also has oversight for the public services schedule which she reviews on a weekly basis to ensure that security points and paging shifts are properly staffed.  Her attention to detail and procedural matters are a great asset when managing services in an efficient manner and this is one of Ana’s many strengths.

Ana has done an excellent job encouraging staff to be more involved in decision making and as a supervisor she is rigorous yet humane.  She is not afraid of change, and has helped me to institute new public service policies and procedures, conveying decisions made to staff in a positive and patient manner.

Her CUL committee work includes serving as member and co-chair of the Committee on Professional Development (now the Committee on Career Development).  In this role she coordinated and participated in many functions including Professional Development Week, workshops, and meetings.  She is currently a member of a new committee created to review the CUL homepage and will be contributing to various other initiatives.  For example, she will represent RMC in the latest project to create an improved CUL online interface for alumni and in other projects as required.

Ana is a member of the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of ACRL.  She has also co-presented a paper at the Library Management Institute (LMI) in 2009.  Her future plans include membership on an RBMS committee and other professional involvement at the national level.

I enjoy working with Ana as part of the team in RMC.  She has become an important part of the Division and I look forward to meeting new challenges with her support.  Although her experience in the library profession has been relatively short, she has really impressed me with her intuitive style of managing people and her prescient contributions at the workshops that we have attended together.  She is a very talented “lady.”  (Eli Brown) 

Baseem Krkoska, Mann Library

Before coming to Ithaca, Baseema earned a Bachelor of Commerce and an MS in Business Administration from Osmania University in Hyderabad.  At Cornell she earned an MS in Communication.  Baseema began working in Mann’s ILS in 2003 and was the ILS supervisor from mid 2005 to when she was hired as our Management and Public Policy Librarian in 2007.  Later that same year she also took on coordination responsibilities for our reference services.

The Applied Economics and Management undergraduate business major at Cornell is one of the most highly ranked programs in the country and has about 700 students.  The AEM program received accreditation about the time Baseema became its librarian.  Baseema has left her mark on it.  She created a program that systematically targeted the large courses.  She worked with faculty to create exercises and assignments, and an online support infrastructure that is integrated into the students’ program.

Baseema also researched reference services in academic libraries and reviewed our reference statistics before designing our new staffing model.  The combination of front desk staff and on-call librarians working the desk or coming out as needed has been very successful.

Baseema is the chair of the Database Review Committee.  Her strong organizational and management skills are also being put to good use through her memberships in the Reference and Outreach and Library Outside the Library groups. 

As of July 1 Baseema will become our International Projects Librarian.  She will be responsible for directing the daily operations of TEEAL and our international reference programs.  We look forward to her contributions to our international programs.  (Kathy Chiang)

Randall Miles, Catherwood Library

Randall Miles brought a 21st century vision of the Technical Processes Archivist position to the Kheel Center when he arrived from an eight year stint at Binghamton University Libraries in 2007.  His skills, collegiality, and eagerness to explore new ways to do things have made him an integral part of the Center’s day-to-day work and long-term planning.

While Randall’s hands-on work with collections is excellent, his most important contribution has been in the development of tools to increase the entire department’s productivity and efficiency.  He has proven skillful in developing an understanding of the needs of researchers and staff through observation and conversation, thoroughly investigating the advantages and limitations of current systems, and then applying his technical knowledge to implement changes and solutions.  In this manner, he has revamped the way we process collections, create EAD guides, document reference activity, give access to collections, create monthly and annual reports, and physically track and inventory collections.  These systems have directly led to better service to researchers and will result in a more efficient use of money and space over time.

Randall has embraced his role as leader of the Center’s technical services.  He is responsible for the supervision of a number of staff and students working on a variety of tasks and can be counted on to accurately prioritize projects and bring them to completion.  He also has established a system for surveying older collections that informs our short and long-term technical services planning.

Randall understands the importance of building off the work of others in the field and adding his own contributions back to the whole through publications such as Code4Lib.  He is a strong colleague and collaborator and it has been a pleasure to supervise him as he successfully pursued the rank of Senior Assistant Archivist. (Curtis Lyons)

Jaron Porciello, Mann Library

Jaron joined the Library in 2007 as the VIVO project aide, arriving with a BA in English and an MLS from Indiana University.  She worked first with Medha Devare and Jon Corson-Rikert during the early years of the VIVO project as they met with various Cornell faculty and senior management to promote the project and the service.  She also worked on the World Ag Info Project “re-thinking systems of training, access to information, and knowledge sharing to facilitate improved decision-making among small-scale farmers in South East Asia and Africa.”  The Project sponsored two international conferences, the first in Ithaca, the second in Livingstone, Zambia.  Jaron then transitioned to working on other international programs in Mann, including the Center for Transnational Learning, a project seeking to increase food security, especially in Africa.

In March of 2009 Jaron became the TEEAL Project Director.  TEEAL, The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library, now holds 149 agricultural research titles.  It goes to 234 institutions in developing countries.  For a map of the TEEAL coverage see here.  Jaron was responsible for all of the aspects of the TEEAL product, from publisher negotiations through to overseeing mailing the disks or LAN hard drives to the subscribers.

As of July 1 Jaron will be our AEM/Business Program coordinator and also coordinate our instruction program, while still keeping some of her international agricultural information responsibilities.  She is chair of the Training team of the Research4Life program.  Research4Life is the umbrella name for the Health Access to Research Initiative (HINARI); Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA); and Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE).  

Jaron has superb organizational skills and quickly learns new arenas.  She has made significant contributions to the Library through her participation in the VIVO project and our international programs, as well as her work for CUL, such as with the Instruction Committee.  We look forward to her future contributions.  (Kathy Chiang)

Wendy Wilcox, Research and Learning Services

Wendy Wilcox joined Research and Learning Services in January 2007.  She is currently a Special Projects Librarian in the Olin/Uris Department of Research and Learning Services with responsibility for Public Services coordination for Kroch Asia.  

Since her arrival in RLS, Wendy has cultivated valuable talents in the delivery of academic reference services, the development and teaching of course- and subject-related instruction, Web design and usability, project management, and public services coordination.  She has also honed her skills in digital technologies, including chat reference and podcasting.

Wendy has been involved in an impressive array of committees and special project teams.  Since arriving at CUL, she has been a member of the Interface Design Committee and the Usability Committee (both part of the Web Vision Team), the RefBlog Group (a sub-group of the PSEC Reference and Outreach Committee), Public Services/Public Computing Advisory Committee, the Professional Development Committee, the Macs-on-the-Arts-Quad Investigative Team, and the Podcast Team (during which time she assisted in the development, recording, and producing of a number of library podcasts).

In 2007 and 2008, Wendy was a member of the New Student Reading Project Committee.  In partnership with Lance Heidig, Wendy worked with the Website team to develop the Web presence for the project and with co-authoring a daily blog on the Reading Project book and other relevant topics. 

One of Wendy’s most significant accomplishments is her ongoing work related to the eXtensible Catalog Project in collaboration with the University of Rochester.  The project examined the research and work patterns of “high-use” student and faculty researchers at Cornell, during which time the team conducted interviews with users and assisted in interpreting the data.  Wendy subsequently took part in a group presentation on this project for Academic Assembly and recently submitted a co-authored book chapter detailing user research roadblocks and workarounds that were discovered in the course of data-gathering for this project.

Wendy also participated in an ethnographic research study of user behavior in Uris carried out in collaboration with Kornelia Tancheva, Director of Olin and Uris Libraries, and Gaby Castor Gessner, Reference Specialist in RLS. 

In her work as Public Services Coordinator for Kroch Asia, Wendy displays a great deal of initiative, independence, and creativity.  In addition to managing budgets for the Asia Reading Room and the Asian Grant accounts, providing course instruction and reference services, and overseeing the staffing of the Reference desk, Wendy developed a wiki for information sharing across the Asia Collections; migrated the reference statistics reporting from paper-based to the online recording system; integrated IM technology into the Asia Collections reference service; and coordinated a Reading Room rearrangement with Library Facilities.

Wendy is open, friendly, and very collegial.  She possesses a seemingly endless amount of energy and approaches her work with a great deal of enthusiasm. Whether working at the reference desk or leading instruction sessions, her pleasant and approachable demeanor is a real asset.

These characteristics, along with her flexibility and willingness to take on new responsibilities and adapt to the changing nature of the service function at CUL, make Wendy a valuable member of the Research and Learning Services team and the larger community at CUL. Please join me in congratulating Wendy on a well-deserved promotion!  (Deb Schmidle)

Glen Wiley, Metadata & Batch Processing Services, Central Library Operations

After serving stints at the North Carolina State University Libraries as a Serials and Electronic Resources Cataloging Librarian and at the Rensselaer Research Libraries as a Digital Resources and Metadata Librarian, Glen Wiley joined the CUL staff in June 2007 as a Metadata Librarian in what was then LTS’s Department of Metadata Services.  He was initially responsible for metadata consulting and design, and Glen soon immersed himself in a variety of outreach and metadata support activities involving a number of clients, including Project Euclid, DCAPS, the Fine Arts Library, the Vet Library, and the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.  If you’ve been involved with CUL digital library projects, chances are you met Glen early in his Cornell tenure.

With the departure of Elaine Westbrooks in July 2008, Glen assumed a greater leadership role on the LTS Metadata Services team and a year later became CLO’s Chief Metadata Specialist and Head of Delivery and Metadata Management Services (DMMS) Metadata and Batch Processing Services.  The responsibilities of his current position include management and oversight of CLO’s involvement in non-MARC metadata projects, data-driven science, batch processing, and visual resources cataloging.  Glen has had a hand in over forty CUL projects since his arrival at Cornell.  These projects have ranged from the scanning of, and creation of metadata for, the Music Department’s event programs and audio files housed in the Music Library and RMC, to the review and editing of OAI-harvestable metadata for the non-textual, multilingual compound resources in the Müller-Kluge collection.

In addition to his operational and managerial contributions to CUL, Glen has also chaired a committee for the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) and is currently chairing the SCRLC’s Education and Training Committee.  He has taught several 2-hour online courses for the Southeastern Library Network (SOLINET) on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records model (FRBR) and “Emerging Directions and Revisions: AACR2, RDA, and FRBR.”  He has presented on multiple occasions both locally and nationally – most notably at the 2008 NASIG Conference where he spoke on both OpenURL metadata and on institutional repositories.  A published version of the latter presentation, co-authored with Jean-Gabriel Banker and Connie Foster, appears under the title, “Institutional Repositories – Strategies for the Present and Future,” in The Serials Librarian 56: 1-4 (2009), pp. 109-115.

Although he didn’t win, Glen was nominated for the 2009 Esther J. Piercy Award – evidence that he is making his mark locally, regionally, and nationally and is showing “outstanding promise for continuing contribution and leadership” in the library world. (Jim LeBlanc)

Photographs provided except where otherwise noted.

Preserving the Legacy of the ICTR

Claire Germain

Three of us from Cornell University Library found ourselves in Arusha, Tanzania for a week in June 2009 as United Nations consultants at the invitation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).  Together with my colleagues Thomas Mills, research attorney and head of collections at Law, and Stuart Basefsky, information specialist at Catherwood and director of the IWS Bureau of the Institute for Workplace Studies, I had been invited to provide advice and assistance in helping to preserve the heritage of the Tribunal which was scheduled to close in 2010.  We had also been asked to find ways to help raise the profile of the Tribunal in order to sustain its legacy and to explore areas of mutual interest.

Our visit to Tanzania reverberated at the highest level at Cornell, as President  Skorton is co-chair, with Professor Silas Lwakabamba from the National University of Rwanda, of a new advisory board for the Africa-U.S. Higher Education Initiative.  Sir Dennis Byron, the President of the ICTR, extended an invitation to President Skorton to visit the tribunal while we were there.  Although his schedule would not permit it, President Skorton expressed appreciation and interest in our work, noting the importance of our work with the ICTR and asking to be kept informed of our progress.  Our visit was also undertaken with the assistance of Professor Muna Ndula, Professor of Law and Director of the Cornell Institute for African Development, who had met some of the key players. 

From left: Chief of Information and Evidence Ayodeji Fadugba, Thomas Mills, Stuart Basefsky, ICTR President Sir Dennis Bryon, Claire Germain

While consulting for the ICTR in Tanzania we were able to make short trips to other important organizations including the East African Court of Justice, the African Foundation for International Law, and the East Africa Law Society.  They were very interested in hearing about our work for the ICTR and we were equally interested in the work they were engaged in.

At the Tribunal we learned about the different facets of their work and explained what kinds of things were being done at Cornell.  We talked about our experience with the Nuremberg trial transcripts and other materials.  It was on the basis of that very experience with the Donovan archive of Nuremberg materials that we had been invited to the ICTR.  That and our Liberia collection were of particular importance and relevance to the task at hand.

The Donovan Nuremberg Collection

Our acquisition of the Donovan Nuremberg Collection came about by a most fortuitous but entirely serendipitous circumstance.  General Donovan was the Assistant to the Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Jackson.  After the trials were completed, General Donovan took the papers and had them bound into approximately 150 volumes.  They sat on the shelves in his law office at Donovan & Leisure for many years and were still there long after his death in 1959.  A young lawyer discovered them when the law firm dissolved in the 1990s and gave them to Henry Korn, a Cornell graduate who together with his wife offered them to the Law Library.

The Donovan Nuremberg Collection of trial transcripts and other materials which were declassified in the 1990s had not been seen for over 50 years.  We were delighted to accept the collection and began by creating a detailed index to the materials.  We digitized part of the collection and posted it and the index on the Internet.  Nearly overnight we were receiving requests from scholars all over the world for more information about the collection and appointments to visit.  The Rwanda Tribunal saw our Nuremberg collection online and picked up the phone to call me.  Several months later we found ourselves in Tanzania advising on the preservation of the papers from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. (Above, Mount Meru, the tenth highest mountain in Africa)

From left: Thomas Mills, Chief of Evidence Ayodeji Fadugba, Senior Legal Officer Roland Adjovi, Judge Bossa, Claire Germain

Liberian Law Collection

From the mid 1950s to 1979 the Liberian Codification Project was led by Cornell professor Milton Konvitz, Professor at Law and ILR.  For over two decades Professor Konvitz collected documents in Liberia and brought them back to Cornell.  Later Law Librarian Jane Hammond visited Liberia in the 1980s to assist with the organization of their National Law Library.  Among the documents in the Konvitz archive at Cornell are early constitutions, a complete history of Liberia’s statutory law, and both working papers and final drafts of the codification project. 

After the destruction of virtually all legal materials during the Liberian civil war, the Konvitz archive assumed even greater importance as the unique repository of the statutory history of Liberia.  In recent years the Law Library has been working on the important and urgent goal to re-establish the rule of law in Liberia with various groups including the United Nations Mission in Liberia, the office of the U.S. State Department in Monrovia, and the Carter Center at Emory University.  See the February 2007 issue of Kaleidoscope for more about our Liberian Law Collection.

The ICTR in Tanzania

Our five days at the ICTR were long and filled with meetings, presentations, and excursions to neighboring groups and offices.  We were able to provide specific information on the following topics:

Our Donovan Nuremberg Collection and the Liberia/Konvitz Collection, what we have in these archives and how they are organized, what’s online;

Foundations and organizations with a reputation for funding preservation initiatives and especially for funding projects in Africa;

Internet resources for legal research;

How to organize online resources, how we organize our Web site at Cornell Law Library;

The variety of legal research training that can be offered to ICTR staff and their affiliates;

How to organize an archive; comparison of materials from the Office of the Prosecutor with our Liberia/Konvitz archive;

How to analyze data on Web site usage using methods employed at Cornell Law Library to analyze our homepage usage;

Free online legal resources in general and Web portals;

Large-scale digitization at Cornell, what has been done and what we have learned.

Throughout our visit we were struck by the urgency of the transition prompted by the closing of the Tribunal and the great need to keep genocide information centers available not only in Rwanda but throughout Africa.  Archives and the personal papers of judges were of paramount importance. 

The ICTR building above; and standing in front of the ICTR building, from left: Stuart Basefsky, Law School intern Chloe Wiatrowski, Claire Germain, Chief Librarian Angeline Djampou, Chief of Evidence Ayodeji Fadugba, Thomas Mills

We met with the President of the ICTR, Sir Dennis Byron; Prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow; staff of the Office of the Prosecutor; Head of the Judicial and Legal Services Division Pascal Besnier; staff of the Defence Counsel and Detention Management Section; members of the Witnesses and Victims Support Section; Chief Librarian Angeline Djampou; Chief of Information and Evidence Ayodeji Fadugba; Senior Legal Officer Roland Adjovi; and still others.  We visited the Detention Center.

When we met with President Byron he asked us both to help identify the judges’ needs and to assist in conceptualizing the usefulness of an archive of their papers.  Stuart explained how the library where the archive is located is responsible for its long term care but stressed to them that the control of the archives rests with the giver.  Based on his experience at ILR he was able to advise on how to organize their papers and to provide model forms and contracts. 

Outcomes and Future Steps

The profile of the Tribunal has already been raised since that trip to Tanzania last June.  President Byron was invited to speak at the Cornell Club in NYC in October 2009 by the Law School and ILR, coordinated and organized by Professor Samuel Bacharach, and he was invited by the Avon Global Center for Women and Justice to speak at their spring symposium in Washington, D.C. last month (March 2010).  Chief of the ICTR Information and Evidence Section Ayodeji Fadugba will speak at the upcoming American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) annual meeting in Denver, Colorado in July 2010 and at the upcoming International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) annual meeting in Goteborg, Sweden in August of this year.  These meetings alone have extended the audience of the work of the Tribunal to scholars and stakeholders worldwide. 

Stuart Basefsky arranged for the communications division of the ICTR to provide him with press releases for dissemination through his electronic news service, IWS Documented News and through two others services:  ResourceShelf.com and DocuTicker.com.  We also discussed the possibility of archiving the ICTR Web site if permission were granted.

Sixty-five years after the end of World War II there has been a resurgence of interest in Holocaust studies.  Going online with our Donovan Nuremberg Collection has taken us in directions we could not have foreseen when we first received the archive.  It led to our collaboration with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and it has recently been used by a Rochester lawyer in preparing a case from Guantanamo Bay.  Our Donovan collection will be the subject of an upcoming Cybertower video that will be available by Reunion time in June.  Who knows where the legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda will reside 50 years from now.

Masai mother and child

Claire Germain is Edward Cornell Law Librarian and Director of the Law Library, Professor of Law, and Director of the Dual Degree Programs Paris & Berlin.

Photographs provided by Claire Germain

Measuring the Quality of OpenURLs: An Interview with Adam Chandler

Jim LeBlanc

Adam Chandler is E-Resources & Database Management Research Librarian in Central Library Operations.  He has recently been appointed chair of the OpenURL Quality Initiative Working Group for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).  Jim LeBlanc is Director of CLO Delivery & Metadata Management Services.

JL: Let’s start with something simple, Adam.  What are OpenURLs?

AC: Back in the 1990s, the only way to link from an article citation to a full-text document was through something called bilateral linking.  Each vendor needed to pre-compute and maintain all the links between their site’s content and every other vendor site they linked out to.  Then Herbert Van de Sompel and his colleagues at Ghent University came along and figured out a way to pass metadata to software that knows something about a library’s collection, a method to exchange information to help a patron answer the question: does the library have access to this resource, print or electronic, and if so where is it?  They essentially moved the job of maintaining the links to a brand new node in the supply chain, one optimized for the task: the “link resolver.”  Then they proposed a standard for the syntax of this “OpenURL” that would allow for predictable transfer of the resource’s metadata.

The development of OpenURLs was hugely successful because it addressed what was known as the “appropriate copy problem,” a term that refers to the inadequacy of standard URLs to lead a user from the citation of an article to an appropriate full-text copy of that article.  Commercial link resolver software was developed in the early 2000’s to take an incoming OpenURL and: (1) determine if the library has a subscription to the journal in question, and (2) if so, present a new URL to the library patron that will connect him or her to full text – or to the library catalog or an interlibrary loan request form, if full text is not available.

JL: What’s your specific interest in OpenURLs?  Tell us about quality metrics.

AC: Many vendors offer OpenURL links on their sites, but after the links go out to library link resolvers, the vendors have no idea what happens.  They get no systematic feedback and don’t know if library patrons are able to successfully access resources from their links.  The aim of my project is to devise a method to provide feedback to vendors regarding the quality of the metadata content they’re sending out, because the reality is OpenURLs don’t work 100% of the time.  Some OpenURL providers are better at supplying complete and accurate data than others.  Nobody knows how often patrons are successful when they click on an OpenURL.  The access these links provide can be very satisfying for library patrons – OpenURL was a genuine breakthrough and innovation for libraries – but bad links can be extraordinarily frustrating.  In 2009, Cornell patrons alone clicked on about half a million OpenURL citation links.  The OpenURL standard has been around for ten years now, but our new NISO initiative is the first attempt to create a feedback loop to help improve the quality of the data passed along in OpenURLs.  A related issue is how to improve the proprietary and nonstandard inbound linking from the link resolver to the full-text content provider sites.

JL: Where are you now in your research?

AC: I’ve been gathering up usage log files from different link resolvers for three different institutions and three vendors.  I have complete data for 2009 from Cornell, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Kansas State University, plus sample data from EBSCO, Serials Solutions, and Thomson Reuters – a total of over 4,475,000 OpenURLs.  I’ve written a program that parses each OpenURL, counts the elements that are most likely to be needed for successful linkage (title, ISSN, author, date, and so forth), and indicates whether these elements are present or absent in the OpenURLs.  Within each field of the OpenURL, I look for other things, such as whether dates have been entered in the correct form.  The results are loaded into a database from which anyone can request reports [see http://openurlquality.niso.org/)].

JL: Can content providers request reports on the quality of their own OpenURL data?

Adam Chandler; photograph by Joan Brink

AC: The Web reporting system is currently organized by the institution or vendor who supplied the link resolver log file and date, but it is possible to generate an offline report for a vendor.  For example, a year and a half ago Eric Rebillard, Professor of Classics and History at Cornell and editor of the bibliographic database, L’Année philologique, was getting a number of complaints about failed OpenURL links.  David Ruddy, DLIT’s Director of Electronic Publishing, and I worked with Eric to obtain a planning grant from Mellon to improve links from L’Année.  The primary focus of the grant was experimental work on something called canonical citation linking (see http://cwkb.org).  A secondary focus of the proposal was to develop an automated method for evaluating OpenURL quality.  Eric is currently working with his programmers to fix the problems we identified when we ran the 900,000-plus OpenURLs through the parser.  I recently ran a sample of OpenURLs for another vendor, the American Institute of Physics.  I look forward to working with more vendors, as more of them find out about the NISO initiative.

JL: So it’s necessary to keep the vendor-supplied data separate from other data in the database?

AC: I believe it is.  The data from the 900,000 citations in L’Année, for example, would distort the results from other queries on the database.  The point of the current system is to be able to pull data from library link resolvers for a specified time period (quarterly, for example), because we want to monitor changes in quality over time.  As vendors are sensitized to the issues and can see how their own OpenURLs compare in quality to those of their peers, they will, I hope, allocate resources to fix the problems that are uncovered.  We will write a report on the efficacy of this model after two years and make a recommendation on its continuation.  If vendors fix problems we’ll consider the work a success.  If they ignore it, well, I would conclude that there is an inherent flaw in the OpenURL linking model that probably won’t be fixed.

JL: What’s next?

AC: I’ve been working on this problem for a while, thanks to our collaboration with Professor Rebillard, but the NISO initiative is helping me bring in other collaborators and solicit more interest in the issue.  We now have the NISO working group – whose members include Susan Marcin from Columbia University, Oliver Pesch from EBSCO, Ellen Rotenberg from Thomson Reuters, and Elizabeth Winter from Georgia Tech – and I’ll be speaking about OpenURL quality metrics at the NISO Forum on Discovery to Delivery in Atlanta on March 23rd.  NISO provides some clout.  The existing OpenURL standard was developed under the aegis of NISO, which is a member of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), so it makes sense to develop the quality standard within the structure of NISO.  The project needs to be vetted and recognized as credentialed work.

JL: When you’re not solving problems with Web citation linking, what do you like to do?

AC: Some readers may remember my wife, Sarah, from when she worked at the ILR Library.  We have a child, Rose, who just turned six, and another child, Hugh, who just turned three.  When I’m home and awake, that’s what I’m doing.

Editor's Note: A revised version of this article will be appearing in Vol.22, #2, Spring 2010, of NISO’s Information Standards Quarterly.

Better and Faster Metadata for Cornell's Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dianne Dietrich

The Graduate School has offered students the option to submit their theses and dissertations electronically since 2004.  These documents are deposited in eCommons, Cornell’s institutional repository.  There are a number of benefits to electronic theses and dissertations, including faster processing for students and enhanced discoverability and availability of the documents, as many students opt to make their papers openly available.  Recently, Central Library Operations has developed a way to use these electronic documents to help streamline the cataloging process for both the electronic and print versions of these papers.

In the past, it typically took a full calendar year after a student graduated until her dissertation appeared in our library catalog.  Acquisitions staff or catalogers would create the MARC record from scratch and there would be no way to connect the record describing the paper version to the electronic version.  Metadata and Batch Processing Services investigated the old thesis and dissertation workflow in light of the recent switch to electronic submissions.  We thought:  wouldn’t it be great if the library could reuse the eCommons metadata to automatically create MARC catalog records, find a way to connect the paper and electronic versions, and speed up the entire cataloging process?

From left: Pedro Arroyo, Peter Martinez, Dianne Dietrich, George Kozak, Lois Purcell, Gary Branch; photograph by Joan Brink

Metadata and Batch Processing Services worked with CLO Cataloging and DLIT’s George Kozak to develop and refine an automated process that included harvesting thesis and dissertation metadata from eCommons and extracting text from the digital documents to generate a complete MARC record.  Dianne Dietrich and Peter Martinez developed scripts to harvest and transform eCommons metadata to MARC and clean up the text from the documents, Pedro Arroyo and Lois Purcell worked to ensure that the resulting MARC records were complete, and Gary Branch and George Kozak made sure that the infrastructure was in place for all of this to work smoothly.  This new process offered substantial benefits to increase discoverability of these items – the new records included the abstract of the document and any keywords the student assigned to it.  The records also connected the electronic version in eCommons with the paper version in the stacks.  Most importantly, we are now able to create these records using only minimal manual effort and have them ready much earlier than before – often just a few months after a student has officially graduated from Cornell.

Elizabeth (Tobi) Hines is a new program aide at Mann Library. She is part-time VIVO Project Coordinator. She also works part-time as a program assistant in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Cornell. Before working at Cornell, Tobi worked as a freelance editor for Paramount Market Publishing, Inc. in Ithaca and as a historical editor, transcriber, and researcher on the Gouverneur Morris Papers: Diaries Project for the New York Historical Society. She has a BA in cultural anthropology from Boston University.

Melissa Wallace is a new consultant/advisor at Mann Library working as the Web Interface Design and Development Specialist. She comes from her job at Virginia Commonwealth University where she was a Web developer, and previously worked in DLIT where she designed and developed Web interfaces. She has a BA in art history from the University at Albany, SUNY, and an MS in Information and Library Science from Pratt Institute.

Transfers/Promotions

Dianne Dietrich has been hired as the new Physics and Astronomy Librarian for the Physical Sciences Library. Currently she is the Metadata Librarian in Database Management & Metadata Services. See below for more information.

Sasha Skenderija, the Research Technology Coordinator at the Law Library, has been promoted to programmer/analyst III.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Paul Albert, MLS, Digital Services Librarian, who was quoted in The New York Times. Paul was interviewed by Claire Cain Miller of The New York Times for her March 24, 2010 article, "Social Networks a Lifeline for the Chronically Ill." Research has also shown that emotions can be contagious, said Paul Albert, digital services librarian at Weill Cornell Medical Library in New York who has researched how social networks meet the needs of patients with chronic diseases. “If you hang out on a message board where people are very negative, you can easily adopt a negative attitude about your disease,” he said. “On the other hand, if people are hopeful, you might be better off.” For the full article please see here. Paul was discovered by Ms. Miller as a result of the presentation he delivered on October 7th at the tri-chapter meeting of the Medical Library Association. The topic was why some patients with chronic disease are disaffected and how online social networks have met some of their needs. That presentation can be found here. (Diane Delgado)

Adam Chandler, CLO’s E-Resources & Database Management Research Librarian, gave a presentation entitled “Transparent and Scalable OpenURL Quality Metrics” at this year’s Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference, held in February in Austin, Texas.  Adam was also an invited speaker on “Inherent Dependencies in the OpenURL Linking Model,” at the NISO forum, Discovery to Delivery: Creating a First-Class User Experience, in Atlanta in March.  For more on Adam’s work on OpenURL quality metrics, see the interview above, Measuring the Quality of OpenURLS. (Jim LeBlanc)

Contratulations to Mark E. Funk, Academy of Health Information Professionals (AHIP), who was named Fellow of the Medical Library Association (FMLA). Each year, the Medical Library Association (MLA) gives a variety of awards, grants, and scholarships to individuals to recognize and support the valuable contributions they have made to the health sciences librarianship profession. From research and instruction to outstanding service and leadership, MLA's professional recognition program supports and encourages the best and brightest in the field. This year he was also selected to be in the 2010 edition of Who's Who in America. Congratulations to Mark E. Funk, AHIP, FMLA being named MLA Fellow. (Diane Delgado)

Bill Kara, Head of CLO’s E-Resources & Serials Management Department, and Jesse Koennecke, ERSM’s Electronic Resources Librarian, gave a presentation entitled “Comparison Complexities: The Challenges of Automating Cost-per-Use Data Management” at this year’s Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference in Austin.  (Jim LeBlanc)

Jim LeBlanc, CLO’s Director of Delivery & Metadata Management Services, gave a talk on “Agoraphobia in James Joyce’s ‘Eveline’” at this year’s Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900 held in February.  In addition, Jim’s essay, “Magical Mystery Tours, and Other Trips: Yellow Submarines, Newspaper Taxis, and the Beatles’ Psychedelic Years,” co-authored with Professor Russell Reising at the University of Toledo, was recently published in The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles, edited by Kenneth Womack (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 90-111.

Susette Newberry, Assistant Director of the Department of Research and Learning Services in Olin and Uris Libraries, and Dianne Dietrich, Research Data and Metadata Librarian in Central Library Operations, recently developed a CyberTower webcast on the availability of A. D. White’s architectural photographs in Flikr. (Kornelia Tancheva)

Wendy Wilcox and Kaila Bussert, librarians in the Department of Research and Learning Services in Olin and Uris Libraries, developed a Reader Advisory Libguide, which has been featured in Springshare Library’s Best of Libguides site. The Best of Libguides site features “the best and the coolest LibGuides” and seeks to be a source of both inspiration and excellent examples that others can reuse when creating their own content. (Kornelia Tancheva)

Announcements

From: Janet A. McCue
To: Cornell University Library
Sent: Thu 4/15/2010
Subject: Management Library Wins Excellence Award for Service!

Dear Colleagues,

On a warm spring day, it’s a pleasure to share good news. The Management Library, under Angela Horne’s leadership, is the recipient of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Business & Finance Division’s Centers of Excellence Award for Service for 2010. These highly competitive awards were established in 2001“…to recognize quality and excellence in libraries and information centers within the Business & Finance Division of SLA. Modeled after the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards, the Center of Excellence Awards strive to recognize the very best in library and information practices. The goal of the Centers of Excellence Awards is not only to recognize this excellence but also to bring it out into the public eye so that others may learn from it and benchmark themselves against these truly outstanding organizations.”

From left: Elena MacGurn, Neely Tang, Melissa Jackson, Susan Kendrick, Angela Horne, Barbara Bartholomew, Lee Ringland, Terri Whitaker; photograph by Kyi Gyaw, student employee

The Management Library impressed the judges with its ability to adapt to changing user needs and with its focus on the customer. This commitment is captured in the Management Library’s branding statement: “Proud to be your research partner.” The judges also liked the Library’s use of Key Performance Indicators to measure the success of services and the iterative planning process that the Management Library uses to adjust these services.

The award will be presented at the annual meeting on June 14th and to my knowledge, this is a first for this SLA award within CUL. Please join me in congratulating Angela and the staff of the Management Library (Barbara Bartholomew, Angela Horne, Melissa Jackson, Susan Kendrick, Elena MacGurn, Lee Ringland, Neely Tang, and Terri Whitaker) on this prestigious award which is richly deserved!

***

From: Tiffany L. Howe for Leah Solla
To: cu-lib@cornell.edu
Sent: Fri 4/16/2010
Subject: Dianne Dietrich

It is my pleasure to announce that Dianne Dietrich has accepted the position of Physics & Astronomy Librarian, to commence on July 1, 2010.

Dianne received her Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan and her Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from Wesleyan University. She joined the Cornell University Library in 2008 as a Research Data & Metadata Librarian in the Department of Metadata Services. Since then she has been a very active participant in the growing data community within the library, including work with the Data Executive Group and the Data Discussion Group. She has also made significant contributions on the Library Outside the Library Committee and the Electronic Thesis effort.

Dianne will be continuing many of these excellent efforts in the scope of her new responsibilities. She has already been collaborating within the physical sciences departments and building up services in these areas. I am very excited for Dianne to join me at the newly emerging Clark Physical Sciences Library. Welcome, Dianne! (Leah Solla, Chemistry Librarian)

***

From: Anthony J. Cosgrave
To: cu-lib@cornell.edu
Sent: Mon 3/15/2010
Subject: Official Launch of CULite: Library's Mobile Interface

Dear Colleagues,

The Library Outside the Library Committee is excited to announce the official launch of CULite: Library’s mobile interface. LOL has worked with a wide group of people to make this possible https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/CULLABS/Mobile+Team+Credits.

Interested users can choose from a device independent mobile site or an iPhone/iPod touch app available from the Apple iPhone App Store (search for Cornell University Library). Both of these options allow users to search the Classic Catalog, check Library hours, contact the Library, use our Ask a Librarian services and more.

Soon libraries will receive posters and other promotional material they can display for the benefit of their patrons and there is a promotional video on YouTube.

LOL members: Matt Connolly, Tony Cosgrave, Baseema Banoo Krkoska, Chair;Rick Silterra, Jeremy Cusker, Dianne Dietrich, Eli Brown, Laura Larrimore

***

From: Virginia A. Cole
To: CU-LIB@cornell.edu
Sent: Tues 4/6/2010
Subject: Cornell's Chat Reference Service Is 10 Years Old!

Hi all,

This year marks the 10th anniversary of our chat reference service!

We’re celebrating this achievement with birthday parties on Thursday April 8. The reference desks at Mann and Olin will be decorated with balloons, and, at 3pm, there will be birthday cake in the Olin Libe Café and the Mann Lobby, and a raffle for students to win a gift certificate from the Campus Store. Please stop by!

In early 2000, when the service first went live, we were pioneering, one of only a handful of universities offering a new way for patrons to ask questions. It’s been a journey, one that isn’t over yet. Over the years, we’ve migrated through three different types of software, and just recently, in a spate of new technical developments, our OCLC QuestionPoint chat widget was embedded in Worldcat local, a mobile version became available, and text and chat are beginning to be integrated. In the early days, we were open just four hours on weekdays, 1-5 pm. Over the years we grew the service extending hours by adding campus partners at Mann, Engineering, ILR, and Hotel, and even for a time at the University of Washington. Ten years later we’re online 24/7 with the help of the QuestionPoint 24/7 academic cooperative.

More details can be found on a special birthday webpage with birthday mascots created by Carla DeMello, a map by Boris Michev showing the location of our hundreds of cooperative partners, and a timeline designed by Laura Larrimore.

Birthday events were organized by the Digital Reference Services Committee and Library Communications, and funded by Reference & Outreach and Janet McCue, Associate University Librarian for Teaching, Research, Outreach, and Learning Services!

Chat on!

Virginia, on behalf of the Digital Reference Services Committee (Jeremy Cusker, Jim DelRosso, Baseema Krkoska, Susan Lacette, Nancy Skipper)

Cat in the Chat and Lincoln at Chattysburg by Carla DeMello

***

From: Anne R. Kenney
To: cu-lib@cornell.edu
Sent: Mon 4/12/2010
Subject: Take One: April 12, 2010 (On the Fine Arts Library)

It is widely recognized that the single most important element of collections preservation is proper environmental conditions. The Fine Arts Library remains the only library on campus without air conditioning and good environmental controls. In fall 2007 the then Dean of Architecture, Art & Planning and I commissioned a consultant’s report on FAL that was written by two very prestigious consultants: Katharine Martinez, Herman & Joan Suit Librarian of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University and Irena Murray, Sir Banister Fletcher Director, British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects. Their report concluded: “There is a critical need to relocate the Library out of its current damaging environment as soon as possible. The University has an obligation to preserve its collections and make them accessible to users. The FAL’s current location is endangering the collections. If the College cannot guarantee that it will [provide a suitable environment] the University Library should take immediate steps to relocate the Fine Arts Library to another facility on campus that has environmental controls .”

As you know, the Library’s strategic report to the Provost last fall recommended possible unit library consolidations as part of budget cutting and resource reallocation. Noting that the Fine Arts Library was in serious need of renovation, with collections, staff and users all at risk, our report concluded that unless the College of Art, Architecture and Planning were committed to major upgrades to the facility, FAL should be merged into one of the other libraries on the arts quad. The new dean of AAP, Kent Kleinman, and I have talked about the collections’ importance and he agrees that something needs to be done soon. There are real possibilities offered by the work underway for constructing Millstein that would entail relocating FAL in Rand Hall where the load bearing floors can support denser collections housing and proper environmental controls can be assured. Kent has pledged his support to raising the funds necessary for retrofitting the space (with work to begin this summer in asbestos abatement and other fundamental work). Given his commitment to address these very real issues, the faculty’s support for the library’s relocation into Rand, and in recognition of the importance of proximity to physical collections for teaching, research, and lab and studio work in AAP, I’m comfortable with deferring for another three years the possibility of relocating FAL outside of the college. I will work closely with Kent, the faculty, Janet, Martha, and Bonna in assessing facility needs and opportunities presented for creating a Design Library that fully supports the new vision for AAP. Work will begin very soon, including moving upwards to half of the FAL collections temporarily to the Annex so that space can be made available for functions displaced in Rand during the asbestos and remediation work to be done this summer. As more details become available, we will be sharing them with you.

Have a healthy and productive week.

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From: Schnedeker, Donald
To: cu-lib@cornell.edu
Sent: Fri 3/5/2010
Subject: Alumni Access to Library Resources Is Here!

As many of you know, I have been working the past few months to set up alumni access to a small group of databases. I am happy to announce that this work has now been done thanks to staff in LTS and DLIT. The databases listed below are being supported by funding from the Johnson and Hotel Schools.

Alumni access is ready for a launch. The Resolver links included below. Alumni will need netids to access these resources. I have included information for alumni who need to get their netid. The university is now requiring that alumni get netids in order to vote for alumni trustees. Library Alumni Affairs and Communications will be working on the promotion.

I have attached my draft announcement with the database links created by DLIT.

Please let me know if you would like more details or background on this program.

Library Resources for Alumni

The Cornell Library, in collaboration with the School of Hotel Administration and the Johnson Graduate School of Management are offering alumni access to electronic databases that feature the latest news and research on a variety of business topics.

Academic Search™ Alumni Edition is designed for the continuing education needs of the post-college professional. The database provides full text for more than 3,350 journals as well as indexing and abstracting for more than 8,200 journals. The database offers information in nearly every area of academic study.
Business Source® Alumni Edition includes full-text sources ranging from general periodicals to trade publications. Additional full-text sources include country economic reports, industry reports, market research reports, company profiles, and more. This database includes publications in nearly every area of business including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance, econometrics, economics, and more.
Hospitality & Tourism Index™ (HTI) is a bibliographic database covering scholarly research and industry news relating to all areas of hospitality and tourism. Publications include Hotel & Motel Management, Journal of Leisure Research, and Nation's Restaurant News. Subject areas covered include the culinary arts, demographics and statistics, development and investment, food and beverage management, hospitality law, hotel management and administrative practices, leisure and business travel, market trends, technology, and more.

Cornell Alumni can access these resources from the links above with your Cornell NetID. We have recently simplified the process for alumni to get a NetID and activation code. All you need to do is call 607.254.2288, Monday to Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. EST. A staff member will ask you a few questions to confirm your identity, and then issue you an activation code over the phone.

Once you have that activation code, you'll go online and set your own secure password. To do that, visit netid.cornell.edu and follow the instructions.

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Library Welcomes Back Cornell Men’s Basketball Team

CUL employees joined hundreds of other Cornell employees, the Cornell pep band, cheerleaders, and students in front of Day Hall on a bright but chilly March 26, 2010 at noon to welcome the Cornell Men’s Basketball team back from Syracuse.  The team had lost a hard-fought game against the University of Kentucky in the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA basketball tournament, but were triumphant in spirit because of their performance.  Among those attending were Michelle Nair from Access Services in Olin; Kim Woodin and Doris Hendrickson who work in Lib Café, pictured here with Jeff Foote, the team’s local boy and 7 foot center; and Janet Gillespie and Elizabeth Teskey from Law.  Go Big Red! Go CUL! Go Lib Café!  (Ed Weissman)