SLA June 15-18, 2008
Seattle, Washington

As usual, my activities were mainly with the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics (PAM) division of SLA. I gave a brief report about the meeting “Graduate Education in Physics: Which Way Forward” at which I gave a poster presentation on information fluency at the PAM-wide roundtable discussion. I gave a two hour poster presentation on comPADRE with Dr. Bruce Mason, Principle Investigator for the comPADRE project. comPADRE is the physics and astronomy portion of NSDL. Bruce and I also presented together at the Physics Round Table discussion. We are proposing that science librarians can help spread the word about comPADRE (and all of NSDL) by attending regional meetings of groups such as the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, etc. I also attended the Astronomy Round Table discussion. There was a discussion about the usefulness of and demand for paper pre-prints now that articles are on-line. Two groups of faculty still want the paper: older faculty who have always done it that way and the newer faculty who want copies to send to family and friends. The Institute of Physics announced a change in the pricing structure for the astronomy journals that they took on in 2008 (formerly published by the U. of Chicago Press).

I attended a session “The Science of Coffee”, which was quite interesting. The speaker was Dr. Joe Vinson of the University of Scranton. His presentation will be on the SLA web site soon. His article “Take Two Cups of Coffee and Call Me Tomorrow” is on his web page: http://academic.scranton.edu/department/chemistry/

I also attended the session “Alternative Fuels: Technologies for a Healthy Planet”. Dr. Richard Nelson , Kansas State University and Alvetta Pindell, from the Information and Research Services Branch of the National Agricultural Library spoke. Their presentations will soon be on the SLA web site. An interesting web site that was mentioned is:
http://www.biodiesel.org/

Quite a bit of my time was spent with vendors. Thomson Reuters has a new “vertical search” engine that was demonstrated. It is in beta test currently. The person who demonstrated the systems said: “Using context shrinks the haystack and makes the needle bigger.” He contends that the new search engine will eliminate spam and move the most relevant sites to the top of the list.

AIP is pleased to announce that Physics Today no longer has a one year embargo and is available back to issue one. The one year embargo applied to institutional subscriptions. Faculty got very frustrated by that.

Sara Tompson, at the University of Southern California attends physics colloquia and prepares bibliographies related to the topic. The physics faculty and grad student look forward to the service. http://isd.usc.edu/~sarat/PhysColloqBibliogs.html

The winner of the International Scholarship this year is Mandy Taha, Senior Research Services Librarian, Biblioteca Alexandrina. She spoke at the PAM wide round table. The facility is quite spectacular.
http://www.bibalex.org/english/aboutus/building/facts.htm

Scitopia celebrated a one year anniversary. They have added more publishers to the systems this year. (scitopia.org)

As always, I enjoyed meeting with my colleagues and sharing ideas.

Pat Viele