On Tuesday morning, after an icy drive from Albany, the Nylink crew arrived at CLRC for a meeting of the Local Holdings Summit Planning Committee. This summit is taking place on June 17, in Saratoga Springs and the planning team including: Nancy Howe, Marie Noonan, Lauren Pinsley, Mary Edgerton and Deidre Dowling spent a good part of the day mapping out the event. We are using a wiki to plan various aspects of the day and it worked out great. I highly recommend this approach for group projects, especially when team members are in different locations. The team came up with a title: Zen and the Art of Local Holdings Maintenance: A Summit and we have started to design the program. In general the day will include speakers throughout the morning and then an opportunity for participants to get together to discuss a variety of issues surrounding Local Holdings Maintenance. Stayed tuned for more info!

Nylink’s very first Community Brown Bag Lunch, the theme of which was Share Your Library’s New Year’s Resolutions, was a big hit Friday 1/25/08. Held at the Hudson Valley Community College’s Marvin Library (note to Capital Region library organizations: the space was great, the director, Brenda Hazard, was a terrific host, and parking on a Friday afternoon, when there are no classes, was a breeze), the lunch was attended by librarians from HVCC, the Albany Institute of History and Art, Schenectady County Historical Society, Albany Medical College, and Oneonta State, and of course Nylink staff.
The discussion was lively. Here are some of the resolutions and topics that were discussed:

• Setting up an oral history project: how to get started, who to get help from, and how to get people in your community to participate
• Weeding big monograph collections: why keeping obsolete materials on the shelves to maintain high numbers doesn’t work, and how to convince others at your library to weed wisely and well
• Collecting popular culture: obtaining CDs and other materials from local bands, and collecting zines and art publications. It’s hard to convince bands to donate a copy of their latest opus for posterity, and getting funds to buy local materials may be challenging.
• Virtual reference: the allure of the collective, and the hesitation libraries have about outsourcing reference to librarians who don’t know their local collection strengths
• Managing across generations: how to mentor fresh young staff and help experienced librarians keep an open mind

Thanks to those who came and shared their knowledge, experience and concerns! Speaking for myself, I really enjoyed the hour and a half, and left with lots of new ideas.

“Great Discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.”
-Alexander Graham Bell

Thursday I attended a webinar presented by the Association of Rural and Small Libraries and Webjunction on collaborations. Partnering and collaborating are vital activities for all libraries and museums whether they are large or small. The presenter Bonnie McKewon had several great ideas for rural libraries that are applicable for all institutions. Some ideas such as sharing in the development and prepping of programs are relatively easy ways for libraries and museums to engage one another, along with other groups in a community. Bonnie also suggested sharing expertise and contacts, sharing promotion through cross promotion or joint marketing campaigns, and even financially sharing a position such as a YA librarian. Key elements for the success of any collaboration are communication and trust.
One great idea shared by a student was to take 15 minutes a day to ‘discover something cool’ and share it with colleagues. Some cool things that have been discovered this way are: www.rememberthemilk.com a site for your ever evolving to do list and www.mailchimp.com for online newsletters and email marketing.

ALA Midwinter Meeting, January 11-16, 2008

Join Atlas Systems (http://www.atlas-sys.com/) and Nylink staff at the Atlas booth, no. 2033, to catch up on what’s new with ILLiad, and learn about two new products from Atlas: Ares Reserves Management and Aeon Special Collections Management. You can also register for a special Nylink-only drawing for an iPod Shuffle courtesy of Atlas. In addition, Jon Penn, Nylink’s Resource Sharing Librarian, will be on hand in the Atlas booth, 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, January 12. So stop by and chat with Jon and the folks from Atlas in Philly!

Other Nylink partners at the ALA Midwinter Meeting:

v Staff from the H.W. Wilson company will once again host their always enjoyable What’s New breakfast on Saturday, January 12^th, 7:00 a.m.-8:00 a.m., at the Marriott Liberty Ballroom. The update will immediately be followed by a WilsonWeb User Group meeting. To register for the What’s New breakfast and the User Group meeting, visit http://www.hwwilson.com/conferences/ALA/ala.htm.

v From OCLC, two perennially popular events are the Friday afternoon OCLC Symposium (“New Leadership for New Challenges” ) and the Sunday morning Update Breakfast, both being held at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown. Details and registration at https://www3.oclc.org/app/ala_registration/.

OCLC has recently provided new information regarding the “LHOP” (Local Holdings Offline Product) project.

LHOP replaces the “SULOP” product used previously by OCLC members who contributed local holdings records to the Union listing system and wished to retrieve an offline file of those records. Although OCLC has not yet announced a firm date when the Local Holdings Offline Product (LHOP) will be made available, they have supplied an update on the progress of the project. The actual format of the file has been completed and OCLC is working on the ordering and production processes.

Individual libraries will be able to order a tab delimited file of all of the local holdings they currently have in WorldCat. The tab delimited file will be picked up from the OCLC Product Services Web and can be imported into a spreadsheet package. The data elements that will be included in the file are:

From the bibliographic record: OCLC Number, Title of Item from the bibliographic record (245 $a), ISBN/ISSN, Place of Publication (260 $a & $b), and Fixed field codes BLvL, Form, and SrTp

From the Local Holdings Record: LHR Summary, Leader, 007, 008, 852 (Location), and Holdings Data (fields 853-878).

Information about the order process and the introduction date will be provided as soon as they are available.

Searching Reminder: Right now it is possible to use the “My Local Holdings” index label (L4:) to retrieve bibliographic records that have your local holdings records attached. The L4: index requires you to add your OCLC symbol as the search text. For example, To search for all records that have TQW’s (Nylink’s training symbol) LHRs attached, enter the following search:
L4: TQW
(You can enter this search in the Connexion Browser or Client interfaces, and also the WorldCat database in FirstSearch.)

NetLibrary is please to announce a new edition to our selection of 2008 eBook Subject Sets…

The 2008 Tax Resource Set – Priced at only $500

Featuring 18 titles of the finest tax preparation guides, financial self-help resources and more to help users prepare for tax day – April 15th! Includes new release and front list titles from leading publishers including John Wiley & Sons, Nolo and McGraw-Hill. Comes complete with:

• Access through June 2009
• Promotional icon for the library’s tax resource web page
• OCLC MARC records
• Available to all library types in the U.S. and ideal for Public and Community College Libraries
• Special Offer! Orders placed by January 31, 2008 will receive 10% off the purchase price.
• When ordering on TitleSelect, type “bill to Nylink” in the special instructions box and receive an additional 5% off!

Nylink Local Holdings Maintenance Summit
June 17, 2008
Holiday Inn, Saratoga Springs, NY

Mark your calendars for the Nylink Local Holdings Summit, Tuesday, June 17, 2008 in Saratoga Springs, NY.

The goal of this one day summit is to enhance New York State’s leadership role in contributing high quality local holdings to WorldCat. The summit will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas regarding issues related to contributing and maintaining Local Holdings. A potential outcome from the summit could be publishing guidelines and recommendations for Local Holdings Maintenance and use of the MARC holdings format.

Summit participants will have the opportunity to participate in discussions with their peers, learn about issues and trends in Local Holdings Maintenance and contribute to guidelines or recommendations concerning Local Holdings Maintenance and the use of MARC holdings format.

In the coming months summit details will be available on the Nylink website at http://nylink.org/ .

The summit planning committee includes:

Mary Edgerton, Chair, Nylink
Deidre Dowling, Nylink
Sara Greenleaf, Hobart and William Smith College
Nancy Howe, CLRC
Marie Noonan, CDLC
Lauren Pinsley, Nylink