The annual ILLiad International conference is taking place March 25 & 26, 2010 in Virginia Beach.  A number of pre-conference programs are available on March 24.  These include Nylink’s own Jon Penn, presenting with Collette Mak of the University of Notre Dame and Stephanie Spires of Atlas Systems.  This workshop will include both a morning and afternoon session (hands on lab in the afternoon!) on March 24.  If you are going down to the conference make plans to participate in this workshop.

ILLiad and OCLC Data Reporting Made Simple

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 9:00 am – 12:00 noon

Collette Mak, University of Notre Dame; Jon Penn, Nylink; Stephanie Spires, Atlas Systems

Join instructors Collette Mak of the University of Notre Dame, Jon Penn of Nylink, and Stephanie Spires of Atlas Systems to learn about the ILLiad database, OCLC Usage Stats, and how to create custom reports. We will explore:

• Basic ILLiad database tables and relationships
• ILLiad web reports vs OCLC stats
• Exporting data from OCLC Usage Stats for Use in Microsoft Excel
• Exporting data from the ILLiad client and web reports for use in Microsoft Excel
• How to access the ILLData database using Microsoft Excel
• Extracting data for annual report topics
• Using mapping software to display data for visual impact

This session is BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop).

ILLiad and OCLC Data Reporting Made Simple – Hands-on Lab

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm.

NOTE: ILLiad and OCLC Data Reporting Made Simple class is a prerequisite in order to attend this class

Collette Mak, University of Notre Dame; Jon Penn, Nylink; Stephanie Spires, Atlas Systems

This session requires the use of a personal laptop with Microsoft Office programs. Lab exercises will include extracting sample ILLiad and OCLC Usage Stats data to create:

• Spreadsheets
• Pivot tables and charts

This session is BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop).

There is more information about this workshop on the 2010 International ILLiad Conference web site:

https://www.atlas-sys.com/conference/login.aspx

Join Lauren Pinsley for a demo of True Serials, and see how it can help you to facilitate accurate inward & outward facing serials holdings through a robust hosted management environment that provides easy access to license and subscription/renewal terms, and streamlined local holdings record updating by batch to WorldCat.

With True Serials, you will be able to:

• Help your patrons find and use your e-journals and databases.
• Keep track of licenses, renewals, and other administrative data.
• Create accurate local holdings for your e-journals in WorldCat.

Dates

• METRO: 01/25 (1:00 PM-3:00 PM)
• Nassau Library System: 01/26 (1:00 PM-3:00 PM)
• Capital District Library Council: 02/08 (2:00 PM-4:00 PM)
• Rochester Regional Library Council: 02/22 (2:00 PM-4:00 PM)
• Western New York Library Resources Council: 02/23 (10:00 AM-12:00 PM)
• Central Library Resource Council: 02/23 (2:00 PM-4:00 PM)
• Southeastern New York Library Resources Council: 02/01 (1:00 PM-3:00 PM)

Attendance is free, but we do appreciate your advance registration; sign up now!

On Tuesday 12/8, representatives from the New York State Library, including State Librarian Bernard Margolis, the New York 3Rs Councils, and Nylink met to discuss digitization efforts in New York, including opportunities for statewide collaboration. The meeting closed with agreement that a smaller subset of the group would meet again for planning purposes.

Nylink staff members Mary Edgerton, Deidre Dowling, Meredith Case and Lauren Pinsley are looking forward to attending the New York Library Association’s annual conference, and exhibiting at the trade show, next week.

Nylink will be at booth 139, and our staff will also be involved with two presentations:

Living History through Social Networking
Track history, as it happens, through the web. This session will begin with a brief overview on information hunting and engaging users with social media. Then we’ll dive in and see how a teacher from a project-based high school implements Twitter and other social media into her classroom.
Friday, October 16, 9:45-11
Conference Center, C-Tubman
Sponsors: NYLINK, SLMS
Speakers: Stacia Snow, Tech Valley High School; Meredith Case, Nylink

Managing Serials-the New York Landscape
Join a discussion on current strategies for managing serials and local holdings in NY.
Thursday, October 15, 10:45-12 Noon
Conference Center, C-Tubman
Sponsors: NYLINK, SMART
Speakers: Lauren Pinsley, Nylink; and Mary Edgerton, Nylink

The American Association for State and Local History announced the winners of its Leadership in History Awards Program for 2008.  These awards recognize the best of the best in state and local history.  New York state winners are the Coalition of Niagara County Historical Societies for the public program, World War II Axis Prisoners of War at Fort Niagara 1944-45 and the New York State Archives for the website, Throughout the Ages

Joyce Rambo, Nylink Reference & Digital Preservation Resources Librarian
One of the first things I realized when I was embarking on my month-long, one-day-a week externship at the Albany County Hall of Records this past April is that an old town like Albany sure has a lot of great old stuff. Little did I know as I walked into the Albany County Hall of Records, located in a former warehouse in downtown Albany’s Nipperville, that I would soon be treated to a reading room hung with 19th-century maps
of the City of Albany (”so that’s where the Erie Canal used to be”) or valuable histories about Albany’s many historic homes, parks and buildings, or a hand-drawn, 23-foot- long map from the 1800’s of the Albany Post Road that marks taverns, inns, meeting houses and homesteads from Albany to New York City.
I immediately recalled one of the basic tenets of my archives class in library school: many of the documents we generate today will be tomorrow’s precious clues to how we live today.
Read more about Joyce’s externship in the Spring 2009 issue of Nylink Connection.

“Could you please send me a picture of Secretariat?” was the most common request fans had for Mrs. Penny Chenery (then Tweedy) the owner of Secretariat who won the Triple Crown in 1973. 

For 5 days I sifted through and scanned fan mail sent to Mrs. Chenery about her super horse Secretariat and some including his stable mate Riva Ridge.  The National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs was loaned an old box of fan letters dated from the fall of 1973 through spring 1974 with the intent that they could scan them and then have full rights to those images.  While the letters themselves won’t be a part of the museum’s archives the digital images will be.

I was able to participate in the practical aspects of a scanning project including organizing the letters, scanning, and metadata creation.  It was a great opportunity to refresh my digitization skills and to be reminded just how long it takes to go through the process.  (Partly because I couldn’t resist reading many of the letters!)

Last Tuesday, August 14^th, I attended the 3rd Library Camp unconfererence: librarycampnyc, this one was held at Baruch College in NYC. This was my first experience with the unconference “camp” experience – a format that effectively blurs the boundaries between presenters and attendees. Some trademarks:

• The agenda is decided the meeting day.
  • It was impressive to see more than 120 people agree on an agenda in about an hour last Tuesday. This also allows for discussion of bleeding-edge topics or recent developments.
• There are no pre-determined presenters.
  • Anyone could suggest a topic and offer to moderate it – therefore each meeting was more of a discussion between all attendees.

There is a link to several unconference resources on the librarycampnyc wiki – http://librarycampnyc.wikispaces.com/Unconferences. You can see how unconferences are particularly popular in technology circles.

Check out the final agenda of last week’s Library Camp – There is a lot of content on each breakout session’s web page – and more continues to be added.

The highlights for me:

• Getting a chance to really talk with other librarians and information folk about concerns and interests they have. Even before the official conference started I was chatting with people about the trials and tribulations of making your web site xhtml and CSS compliant.

  The talks I attended ranged from using Open Source in a desktop environment – a group that had both practitioners and those interested but uncertain of why they might want to, or how they should, explore open source – to talking about green librarianship – sharing tips and interests in making workplaces greener, but also getting info out to patrons.

  I plan to keep an eye on the librarycampnyc web site/wiki.

• The experience of the unconference. While it was a very democratic process, unless Baruch College had generously shared their space and if at least three individuals (Stephen Francoeur, Rachel Watstein and Steven Kaye) hadn’t been on top of the baseline logistics, this event wouldn’t have gone nearly as well as it did. It really worked – it was an intellectually stimulating environment and people were excited to experience it – but you really couldn’t show up with pre-conceptions, being really willing to roll with the topics and contribute made the time invaluable.

This past week (June 13-15th) Member Services Librarian Ann Gunning, OCLC Services Librarian Jen Hawkes, and Cooperative Services Librarian T Sahm exhibited and attended SUNYLA at SUNY Maritime.

In “Collaborative Digitization in College Archives and Special Collections: The North Country Digital History Pilot Project,” Plattsburgh Librarian Debra Kimok discussed their libraries contribution to the North Country digitization project (http://history.nnyln.org/g/). The North Country 3R’s council had purchased a licence for CONTENTdm (http://www.nylink.org/digitize/contentdm.cfm) and member libraries can contribute content. There was a lively discussion that followed about CONTENTdm and what is can do for your library and to assist in collaborative projects. Jean Currie from the South Central Regional Library Council is eager to start their CONTENTdm project.

Beyond attending the various sessions, Nylink was able to exhibit at the vendor area and enjoy spending time with our members on the Sunset Cruise Thursday night. For anyone who was at the conference last week, yes- Ann, T, and myself still have our sailor hats, and yes we did wear them at work on Monday.

For more photos check out our flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/groups/nylink/