Last Friday, I was very pleased to participate as part of this panel discussion being held by Lyrasis at the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Harrisburg Pa. The ambitious hour-long agenda covered many aspects of working with e-books in libraries, featuring just five minutes from eight different speakers and several excellent questions from participants.

The outline of the speakers and topics ran more or less as follows:

• Timothy Cherubini (Lyrasis): Introductory remarks “E-books are back!”
• Nancy Adams (H’bg Univ of Sci & Tech): Process of beginning to explore e-books; features and functionality
• Tim Siftar (Drexel Univ): Collaborating with faculty to promote e-book use, e-books as textbooks
• Becky Albitz (Penn State Univ): E-book adoption challenges
• Mary Sue (OCLC): How do users find e-books?  MARC, persistent URLs, OPAC, federated search, google
• Cynthia Cleto (Springer): E-book business models (subscription, perpetual, pay as you go), DRM
• Jackie LaPlaca (IGI-Global): DRM, licensing (including SERU), library/publisher communication
• Lou Mutty (Books 24×7): Marketing your e-books (early adoption, help pages, etc.)
• John McLaughlin (Cengage): Beyond the PDF (new technology, functionality & social media)

Here’s the link to the archived webcast. Please note that the archive is viewable on the Eluminate platform and requires an updated version of Java to run, ie – you will be prompted to run the plugin when clicking this link.

I would enjoy hearing any comments you have.

Best,

Tim Siftar

Professional associations are good investments. Whether you are networking for a job, keeping skills up to date or just seeking the company of colleagues, your reward from participating will exceed your investment many times over. A recent inquiry about local Philadelphia area associations that focus on IS/IT related topics provided the basis for this post.

While I don’t mean to slight national associations, I have only included groups that I know to have an active chapter in the Philadelphia area, just as a way to illustrate the F2F aspect of association activity. Many of these have an affiliation with a national organization, while others are strictly local. Techies outside Philly can use this list to get ideas about groups that might exist in your area. Even if you do not live in an urban area, you I encourage you to explore ways to network with other IS/IT professionals who meet face to face even if you have to take the first step.

Just choose the place to meet, and a discussion topic for the first meeting and then post an announcement to Meetup or Craigslist.  Just DO it! I promise you will be rewarded many times over! As always, I welcome your comments or any additional suggestions for this growing list of Philly area associations.

Regards,
Tim Siftar

This is a perennial project for the INFO 520 class. And I always wonder how far to go in responding to the questions I get about it. Aren’t all these librarians-in-training just overflowing with ambition and creative ideas for research projects like this? Well… I guess for those full of verve, they don’t need my help and this posting won’t hurt them. And for the ones that can use the encouragement, at least they’ll have to wade through my sermonizing to get to the useful advice, and hopefully be better for it.

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The Drexel student chapter of SLA aka “DUSLA” really made a mark at the last SLA Philly Board meeting! The Board convened to a full agenda May 9th, at the bucolic Radnor Township “Willows” historic mansion, just prior to the Spring Banquet.

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I’d like to let you know about the AIDS Library 20th Anniversary on Thursday June 28th. Very timely as June happens to be AIDS Education Month. Way back when in graduate school, I was classmates with Jenny Pierce, who is a Librarian at the AIDS Library. I volunteered at the AIDS Library for a time as well.

I probably don’t need to tell you about all of the important work that this group of people have accomplished in the past 20 years (www.aidslibrary.org).

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Six participants in this year’s Emerging Leaders program have been charged with creating or finding options for “rebranding the library profession in the digital world.” The Project KK group has crafted a survey intended to go out to as broad a spectrum of library professionals as possible to analyze current perceptions and future trends in librarianship. Find a couple minutes to take the survey….

(thanks to the American Libraries e-newsletter, May 2, 2007!)

Not since the height of the dot.com boom have I participated in a conference where the sense of change underway made it seem like the very ground beneath my feet was shifting. Let me back up a minute to describe what NFAIS is – the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services. Celebrating its fiftieth year of existence NFAIS is the professional association for top executives of library database vendors. Usually when I attend a conference it’s a bunch of librarians or teachers talking about how fast the web and users are changing and how we’ve got to run to keep in place. This one really brought home to me how the vendors are in the same boat – something I’ve known intellectually but hadn’t appreciated on an emotional level until I felt some of these speakers take the audience on what amounted to a roller coaster thrill ride of both the exciting and dire possibilities brought about by the advent of Web 2.0.

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As an afterthought it seems to make sense to cross-post my entry on the DU SLA Student Chapter blog over to this one – just to keep everything in one place. I will preface my remarks by saying that while I’ve attended several SLA conferences as a day-tripper, this was the first time I stayed for the duration. The glamor of three days marching around the Baltimore Convention Center with so many other librarians, all wearing sensible shoes! ; ) Seriously – I enjoyed myself like a kid in a candy shop. And as always when coming back from a conference – it will be a challenge to apply what I picked up in a meaningful way. But as a first step, sharing it with others is always good.

So here’s the link to my comments written shortly after returning from Baltimore. Enjoy! – Tim