UNYSLA recently announced this year’s Chapter Member Merit Award and Student Merit Award recipients at the annual Fall Meeting in Fayetteville, NY.

Linda Galloway received the Chapter Merit Award for her record of distinguished service and outstanding achievement to the Upstate New York SLA Chapter as well as the national SLA organization. Linda joined SLA and UNYSLA in 2003 and has held several UNYSLA board positions including Secretary, President-Elect, President, Past-President, and Vendor Relations Chair. During her time as President-Elect in 2008, Linda planned the spring and fall annual meetings on digital rights management and interactive technologies, respectively, and has since continued to be a valuable resource for event planning. Her time as president saw the creation of new policies and the revision of UNYSLA’s best practices governing document. At the national level, Linda has presented at several SLA Annual Conferences. Linda is currently the biology, chemistry and forensic sciences librarian at Syracuse University Library and is active in the Pi Lambda Sigma Chapter of Beta Phi Mu.

Esther Marie Jackson received the Student Merit Award for increasing SLA student involvement, expanding professional development opportunities, and expanding the profile of the SLA Student Group at the University at Buffalo (UB). As President of the UB SLA Student Group, Esther has shown leadership through outreach and programming, including re-designing the group’s website to create a more professional image, podcasting group meetings to be more accessible to distance members, and planning local library tours and a public speaking workshop. Esther has also increased collaboration with other student groups on campus to create a more cohesive social media presence and activities calendar. Through these efforts, membership and interest in the SLA Student Group at UB has grown tremendously in the last year. Esther also attended the Spring 2012 UNYSLA meeting as a student shadow and plans on receiving her LIS degree in December 2012. In addition to her SLA activities, she currently serves on UB’s LIS Advisory Board and works for UB’s ILL Lending Department and Preservation Department.

Congratulations to both members for their outstanding achievements and contributions.

When did you first volunteer to help out?
Late last summer, 2011, I knew I would be expected to become more active in professional groups when I became full time faculty in October. Professional organization activity is one of the tenure requirements.

Why did you get involved with UNYSLA?
I was encouraged by the President to become involved because the organization was unique.

Was there anything that surprised you about your experience?
No – the group is welcoming and there isn’t pressure to do more than is comfortable.

What would you say to people who are not sure if they should get involved?
I think if someone has made the decision to join SLA, they would really enjoy the personal connections of the local group. To make those connections, volunteering is a great opportunity to learn what goes on at the local level and to slowly get to know the members.

Both chapter and division program planners will benefit from these tips for

• discovering good content,
• not “going it alone,”
• sharing the wealth after the event, and
• creating valuable sessions.

Register now for “Partnering for Program Content” on Thursday, October 18, 2012, from 2 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Eastern time.

(https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/992935041)

This is a free program for leadership development, open to all SLA members.  Presented by: Carolyn Sosnowski, SLA’s Director of Education and Information Services, with the assistance of Linda Broussard, SLA CFO.

Brought to you by your Cabinet leadership team.

The UNYSLA Student Merit Award provides a $100 each year to an LIS student who is active in SLA or their student group. Nominations for the award will be accepted until October 5th.  The criteria are as follows:

Purpose of the Award: The UNYSLA Student Merit Award seeks to recognize and reward the active participation of student SLA members through their involvement in their Student Group activities.

Eligibility for Nominations: Any chapter member may nominate a student for the Merit Award.

Eligibility to receive the award: Any SLA member who is also enrolled in a masters or PhD level library or information studies program.

Award criteria: Award criteria may include one or more of the following:

• increased SLA student memberships
• expanded professional development opportunities both formal and informal;
• raised the profile of the SLA Student Group in their own school; on their own campus; or in the professional community;
• brought educators and practicing special librarians together;
• increased or enhanced the profile of special librarianship and/or the SLA within their academic or broader community.

Nominations will be ranked based upon clearly stated and documented quantitative and qualitative evidence. Be sure to clearly state the category of nomination and address the award criteria listed above.

Read the full story

Biographies of all of the candidates can be found at http://www.sla.org/content/SLA/governance/12election/13candidates.cfm

The election runs Sept. 5 – 26.  Votes are cast online, unless a paper ballot has been requested.

Read the full story

Join Sean Campbell, Co-Owner of Cascade Insights, guest speaker for our next CI Division’s webinar, on Tuesday, June 5th at 1 pm EST. This session is FREE to all SLA members.
Sponsored by: Aurora WDC and Cascade Insights.

Topic: Going Beyond Google: Gathering Internet Intelligence

Knowing a competitor’s strategies, in advance, can be the difference between success and failure, and yet members of business leadership teams, marketers, and sales teams are stretched too thin just “doing their job” to spend much time really analyzing the competition. During this session we’ll show you how can make the most of open source intelligence (OSINT) assets.

Take Aways:

• 20+ free Web tools for Competitive Intelligence
• Best practices for searching the deep web
• Multiple examples of how these tools have been used in competitive intelligence projects
• Guidance as to how you should rank and prioritize open source intelligence sources

To register: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/485841318

What a great Spring Conference last week in Ithaca, NY. More than 20 librarians from across the state attended The Library is a Growing Organism:  Innovative Methods, Classic Missions. With Jim DelRosso (president-elect) planning the program, we had speakers from various academic libraries presenting on citation habits, bibliometrics, and creating an innovative culture within your library. The speakers were engaging as attendees asked many questions and shared their experiences with each other. The conference also had two student shadows, Sara Brown and Esther Jackson, both from University at Buffalo, that introduced the speakers. Stay tuned as they write up their experiences and share them with the chapter on our website.

(From left) Jim, Sara, Esther, and Allison preparing for the spring meeting.

From national SLA headquarters we had our own member, Jill Hurst-Wahl, share with us how the Loyalty Project got started and how it has taken shape over the last year and a half.  Jill has written about the project on her blog. As the project wraps up this year, we shall be hearing from the participating chapters how it has changed the way they communicate with their members. I am looking forward to sharing these ideas with you.

We also held a raffle to support the Little Free Library project that Jill brought to fruition in Syracuse. The gift basket included a backpack, thumb drive, notepad and other items donated by Syracuse’s iSchool. Bond, Schoeneck, and King donated a Barnes and Noble gift card.  And I threw in well known munchies that are made in the Syracuse area. A total of 8 books were donated and $51 was raised to support the project.

Sharon and Charles showing off some of the donated books to the Little Free Library project.

The Spring Conference was a huge success. So, thank you to our speakers, Jeremy, Elaine, Chris, and Jill. Thank you to Jim for planning the day and providing beautiful weather for us in Ithaca.  Thank you to the student shadows, Sara and Esther, for introducing everyone. We have already begun to plan our fall meeting. Once we have a date we will be sure to send out a “save the date” message.

Continuing on with the communication theme, I know I have been very quiet so far this year. That does not mean I’ve been idle. I have been working with the board to find ways that we can reach out to you, our members, so that we continue to meet your association needs. If you have ideas on how we can improve the value of your UNYSLA membership I would love to hear from you.

Allison Perry
President
UNYSLA

Join the Rio Grande Chapter at 12:00 Noon, Mountain time (2:00pm EST), for our March 28th Virtual Lunch webinar:

Visualization for Data Analysis: A New Way to Look at Content
with presenter, Marjorie M.K. Hlava.

As librarians we normally look at data in lists, citations, and other text based presentations. Increasingly however this data can be analyzed, manipulated and presented as visual displays. Maps of science, places and spaces, increased amounts storage and computing power have made working with digital assets possible. Presenting the data in new and visual ways allow us to see trends, changes in research directions, coverage, demographic trends, data overlap and the white spaces where data does not exist on a topic – knowledge gaps are exposed. This talk will cover how the data is prepared and options for visual display content to leverage your understanding of your own and other data quickly and visually.

What: Visualization for Data Analysis: A New Way to Look at Content (webinar)
Date: Wednesday, 28 March
Time: 2:00pm EST (12:00 Mountain time)
Where: Your computer!

This program is FREE to all SLA members, but registration is required.

Non-members are welcome to attend for a $10 registration fee. For more details please see the Rio Grande Chapter website.

The program starts promptly at 2:00. We recommend logging into the webinar at least 5 to 10 minutes earlier than the start time so as not to miss the beginning.