Please join us for our next Spark! Presentation featuring John Cannan and his Constitution Project.

Tuesday, April 5 : Hagerty L33 : 10 am

John is a Legal Reference Librarian at the Legal Research Center, and has been working on a Drupal-based web site to organize the Constitutional Convention’s debates in a topical form.  The project is funded by the American Association of Law Libraries.

You can preview some of his work on the Preamble, here.

Please bring a morning beverage – snacks will be provided.

Join us for our next Spark! event on Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at Hagerty Library, room L33.

Because staff suggested that a longer time slot with fewer presenters could be beneficial for the audience, the 5×5 event has been renamed Short Talks and will feature 3-5 speakers leaving 20 minutes at the end of the session for discussion.

This month’s event features the following speakers:

• Emily Missner: Clinical Faculty Workshop Series
• Diane Kinney: Tips for Getting Organized using Microsoft Outlook
• Rob Sieckiewicz: Online Internships
• Jenny James: Preparing the Annual Report

The event will be webcast and archived.  Please see your meeting invitation for the webcast information.   We’ll provide some morning snacks, so bring a drink, and enjoy!

New date & time for this session!!

November Presentation : November 4, 2010 : 11 am : L33 Hagerty Library

Please join us as iSchool faculty member Christopher Yang presents his grant project on creating unified subject categories across institutional repositories  He would especially like to get feedback on this idea from librarians and practitioners. The project abstract is below.

The November session will be videoconferenced using Adobe Connect and the URL will be distributed with the meeting invitation.  Finally, please welcome Rebecca Goldman as co-organizer of future Spark! sessions. Please feel free to send ideas for future Spark! meetings to either Rebecca or Rebekah.

Project Abstract:

Owing to the information explosion, today’s libraries face the necessity of building unified collections derived from different repository sources and integrating resource types from different institutional repositories. In this situation, it is imperative to integrate the distinct subject directories such as classification and taxonomy into a unified subject directory. This will facilitate federated searching of information resources and will in turn enhance the user experience of seamless information access. Furthermore, the importance of information and resource sharing through collaboration across libraries, museums and other institutions have been increasingly recognized; accordingly, there is a critical need for integrating subject categories and taxonomy derived from different repositories. However, there are enormous challenges for information professionals in undertaking such an integration task. The core of the challenges stems from the fact that each of these subject directories evinces a complex semantic and syntactic structure that is embedded in local collections; moreover, there is no existing tool to support the integration task. In order to overcome such obstacles, it is necessary to devise a semi-automatic tool to support information professionals in apprehending relationships from the subject categories of different repositories and in recommending plausible changes and fine-tuning of the integration process.

To address these critical issues and challenges, in this two-year research project the research team at the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University seeks to develop techniques for facilitating an effective integration task and developing open source tools which enable information professionals to successfully integrate and expand taxonomy and subject categories derived from different repositories. Toward this end, we shall test our techniques using the Internet Public Library 2 (IPL2: http://research.cis.drexel.edu/index.html) IPL and Librarian’s Internet Index (LII)–and develop a new platform to share the open source. The platform will also be used to obtain feedback from information professionals to enhance our tools and will serve as an online community forum (i.e., a social networking site) through which information professionals express and exchange experiences in using the developed techniques and open source tools for the integration tasks.

The goals of the project are listed as follows:
Goal 1: To determine relationships between subject categories from different repositories (e.g. IPL and LII) through several text classification models.
Goal 2: To develop integration operations and process based on the identified subject category relationships of IPL and LII.

October 5×5 : October 5, 2010 : 10 am : L33 Hagerty Library

This month we welcome the following speakers to talk about projects going on in various departments in the Libraries.  Read more about the 5×5 format, or see info on past presentations.

Kenneth Fisher
Cross-training with Access Services

John Wiggins
The cross-training initiative between Tech Services and Access Services

Meredith McCusker
CHOP and Children’s Seashore House records collection project

Rob Sieckiewicz, Rebecca Goldman, Jay Bhatt
Faculty research on future uses for iDEA at Drexel

Meg Finney & Nancy Spedding
Preparing for Windows 7, and what you need to know

Spark Plus! Conference session 6 : Sept. 23, 2010 : 10 am : L33

Presenters : Conference attended

Rebekah Kilzer : Reference Renaissance in August 2010

Jay Bhatt : American Society for Engineering Education in June 2010

Rob Sieckiewicz & Rebecca Goldman : Society of American Archivists in August 2010

Also look for an announcement for the start of the regular Spark! Season, beginning with a 5×5 session October 5th!

Spark Plus! Conference session 5 : July 23, 2010 : 10 am : L33

Please join us for our next conference presentation on Friday, July 23rd at 10 am in L33 at Hagerty.

Presenters : Conference attended

Peggy Dominy : Special Libraries Association (SLA) and IATUL in June 2010

Rebekah Kilzer : Off-Campus Library Services in April 2010 and BbWorld in July 2010

Jay Bhatt : SLA and ETTLIS in June 2010

Spark Plus! Conference session 4 : July 7, 2010 : 11 am : L33

Presenters : Conference attended

Gabriel Farrel : Code4Lib in February 2010

Noelle Egan : NASIG in June 2010 [pdf of slides on L drive: Teams/Spark presentations/201007]

Nikki Karam : NASIG in June 2010 [pdf of slides on L drive: Teams/Spark presentations/201007]

Spark Plus! Conference session 3 : June 22, 2010 : 2 pm : Stern Conference Room

Please join us to learn about the activities at the ILLiad conference, held in March of this year.  Several people attended, so there will be a variety of topics to discuss!

Attendees:

Sunita Balija

Dee Childs

Stephanie Davis

Tom Pugh

Lynda Sadusky

Steven Thorpe

Spark Plus! Conference session 2 : June 3, 2010 : 11 am : L33

Please join us for our second in the series of conference presentations on Thursday, June 3rd at 11 am in L33 at Hagerty.

Presenters : Conference attended

Larry Milliken : Computers in Libraries, April 2010

John Wiggins : Innovative Users Group, April 2010

Shin Amano : Innovative Users Group, April 2010

Spark Plus! Conference session 1 : May 18, 2010 : 10 am : L33

For this conference season, we’ll be scheduling a series of “Spark Plus!” sessions to cover reports covering conferences we’ve attended for the Libraries.  The first of these will be Tuesday, May 18th at 10 am in L33 at Hagerty.

Presenters : Conference attended

Ann Keith Kennedy : Art Libraries Society of North America in April 2010

Rebekah Kilzer : Off-Campus Library Services in April 2010

Daisy Larios : California Academic & Research Libraries Association in April 2010