Slany Chapternews Newsletter Spring 2002

ChapterNews Volume 74, #3 Spring 2002

President’s Report

IN THIS ISSUE President’s Report

Much Ado

Much Ado ..................................1

Marty Cullen, President

Polls Open in May–

ince our last ChapterNews there has been a bevy of activity in SLA Land. Roberta Schaefer, our Executive Director, has resigned after five months into her tenure. The SLA Winter Meeting could have been called Wrestlemania or Bylaws...Smylaws. The Association is most definitely at a crossroads.

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Don’t Forget...............................6 Knowledge Services-KD/KS ..........7 Message of Appreciation...............9

First of all, Roberta’s departure was a shock and a surprise and she will be missed dearly. However, we will go on. SLA is not the only Library Association looking for a Director. Both the American Libraries Association and the American Association of Law Libraries have searches for Directors.

Members in the News....................9 Web Resources – Venture Capital & Private Equity Info ....10

Secondly, new bylaws recommendations came out in January while many of us were on our way to Chicago for the Winter meeting. The Bylaws Task Force, formed by the Board of Directors of SLA, has recommended that major revisions be made to the Association’s bylaws.

Growing an ejournal Collection at the Bronx Zoo Library .........11 Web Information ..........................14

The Board met on March 22 to further review and revise the proposed bylaw changes. The Board is also proposing Guidelines that would implement the changes, and in some cases, replace the bylaws altogether. The changes will make the bylaws compliant with New York law (SLA is incorporated in the state of New York). Review the current bylaws and proposed changes at www.sla.org/content/SLA/Structure/recbylaws/httpwww6596.cfm.

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT Career Day 2002..........................15 The Interviewing Process.............16

As you read a summary of the bylaws below, remember one thing. These were only recommendations and all this must come to a vote. They are not set in stone and the Board realized this as they went into their meeting on March 22. Below, Lee Weinberger, Insurance and Employee Benefits Division Chair-Elect, has provided a great summary of the most discussed bylaws.

Resume Template .......................17 Student Guide 2002-2003 ...........18 Chapter Officers ..........................19

1. Board of Directors

ADVERTISERSR

The new bylaws would reduce the size of the Board from 14 members to a minimum of 6; from this group the board would elect officers—a president, vice president, secretary and treasurer. The president would then appoint liaisons to the Chapter and Division Cabinets. The bylaws would give the Board the authority to determine the composition, election term and qualifications of the board members and set the frequency of board meetings. The last (January 2002) draft of the Guidelines calls for Directors’ terms to be three years, and the Board to meet a minimum of two times per year. Currently, the Board meets four times a year. Stated plans are for 12 Directors, but this is not spelled out in the Guidelines.

Dialog.............................................5 EBSCO...........................................6 Heller and Associates ....................4 InfoCurrent.....................................9 James Lafferty Associates...........14 Library Co-Op ................................3

These changes remove direct election of officers from the membership, and replace Chapter and Division cabinet chairs and chair-elects with liaisons. There seems to be a strong sentiment in SLA for direct election of the officers by the membership. Chapter and Division leaders also voiced a belief that the Chair

NKR Associates .............................7 Pro Libra ........................................8 Wontawk........................................6 ChapterNews

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and Chair-elect positions give the Chapters and Divisions a stronger voice at the board level. Arguments in favor of the change say that it allows the Board to best use the skills and talents of the board members and allows for greater flexibility. Chapter and Division cabinets would also elect their own chairs.

ChapterNews New York Chapter Special Libraries Association Spring Vol. 74, No. 3 PUBLICATION SCHEDULE

2. Membership

ChapterNews, the bulletin of the New York Chapter of the Special Libraries Association, is published four times a year.

The new bylaws remove the membership categories and place them in the Guidelines. The membership requirements and categories would be determined by the Board. The draft version of the Guidelines identifies the following categories: member, student member, sustaining member, honorary member and virtual member.

Deadlines for submitting materials:

Fall issue ....................August 15 Winter issue...............November 15

Virtual membership would be limited to people outside North America and would include electronic access to publications and the ‘members only’ area of the SLA website. Virtual members do not affiliate with Chapters or Divisions and cannot hold office.

Spring issue................February 15 Summer issue.............May 15

Submit all material to:

There are some concerns that this new membership category would discourage international members from being regular members of SLA. This would, in turn, dilute the diversity of SLA and the Divisions. Does Division membership add value for international members? If the virtual member category is a valued option, why is it not offered to North American members? The primary argument in favor of the virtual member option is that it creates a new membership category that would be more affordable to international members. The cost of virtual membership relative to dues paid by regular members is not spelled out in the draft Guidelines.

Thomas Pellizzi Interim ChapterNews Editor e-mail: [email protected]

Submissions: Articles on topics of general interest to information professionals and the New York Chapter are welcome. Authors can send submissions via e-mail as text file or MS Word for Windows attachments, or with article in the body of the e-mail. Please use single-line spacing, Courier font, with minimal use of boldface and italics. Include a byline with your full name and place of work.

Other membership changes include the extension of student membership to seven years, elimination of the associate member category, and the merger of the retired and 45-year member categories. The new bylaws also create a provision to suspend or terminate a member.

ADVERTISING inquiries should be addressed to:

Laura Kapnick, CBS NEWS 524 West 57th Street New York, NY 10019-2985 Telephone: (212) 975-2917 or E-mail: [email protected]

3. Dues

Under the new bylaws, the Board will have the authority to set membership dues. This is the current practice in most professional organizations. Currently, the SLA dues ($125/year) are at the low end compared to other information and business professional organizations. Dues in ARMA, AALL, MLA, ASTD and APS range from $135 to $168 annually. The draft Guidelines do not include any provisions for membership input into dues decisions, nor do they specify a dues structure for the various membership groups.

Special Libraries Association assumes no responsibility for the statements and opinions advanced by contributors to the Association’s publications. Editorial views do not necessarily represent the official position of Special Libraries Association. Acceptance of an advertisement does not imply endorsement of the product by Special Libraries Association.

CHAPTERNEWS STAFF Director of Publications Interim ChapterNews Editor Advertising Manager Webmaster

4. Quorums and Majorities

Thomas Pellizzi Thomas Pellizzi Laura Kapnick Konrad Will

Several provisions in the new bylaws make changes to what constitutes a quorum or a majority. The membership quorum would change from a minimum of 100 (Continues on page 4)

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voting members to 10% of the voting members. Voting members could be represented in person or by proxy.

6. Bylaw Guidelines

Some concerns have been raised about the proposed Guidelines document. The document seems to be more of a work in progress than a complete procedures manual. The bylaw revisions also remove nine Articles from the bylaws and place them in the Guidelines. These sections include: Nominations and Elections; Chapter Cabinet; Division Cabinet; Chapters; Divisions; Caucuses; Committees; Association Office; Association Affiliation and Representation. A tenth Article, Publications, is removed from the bylaws, but is not added to the Guidelines.

Action by ballot would be changed from the current standard of 2/3rds of the voting membership to a simple majority. Currently, New York law requires a mail ballot, but the new bylaws would allow for voting by any means that conform to the statute. This change may allow for electronic voting in the future. The bylaws could also be amended, altered or repealed by a majority of voting members.

The Guidelines leave many of the details up to the discretion of the Board and do not spell out any provisions for how issues such as dues or publications will be handled. A procedure to revise the Guidelines is also absent– after the Guidelines are initially adopted, any future changes will be decided by the Board.

5. Proxies

Members would be permitted to vote by proxy under the new bylaws. These proxies would be executed in writing or assigned to a duly authorized representative. The purpose of proxy voting is to give members who don’t attend annual conferences a voice in SLA governance. Proxy votes would count as part of a quorum and that may make the 10% quorum provision seem unreasonably small. Another concern is that proxy-voting procedures are not spelled out in bylaws or Guidelines.

The stated purpose of the new bylaws and Guidelines is to shift SLA from a constituency-based Board to a vision-based Board, and to make SLA more nimble and responsive to the needs of members. To accomplish these goals, the new bylaws hand over much of the decisionmaking authority to the Board. It is up to each member of SLA to decide if these changes will indeed accomplish the stated objectives.

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Polls Open in May... Don’t forget to Vote! Sandra Kitt, Richard S. Perkin Collection American Museum of Natural History istory has show recently that Presidential elections, indeed…MOST elections, can’t be discussed rationally in polite company. Efforts produce two reactions: rabid disgust, or catatonia. Oh...there is a third: complete denial that anyone discussing election outcomes actually voted for the winner. Controversy and acrimony aside, voting for officials to run our organizations, country, etc., remains an essential part of the American process, and effectively involves each of us in that process. This is important stuff! Well, now that the national elections are over, members of the New York Chapter of SLA can get geared up for our chapter elections.

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This year’s Nominating Chair, Sandra Kitt, and her committee, consisting of Donna Abbaticchio and Andrew Berner, have completed a slate for the May elections that should, hopefully, make voting easy for everyone. This year’s candidates are: President Director of Finance Professional Development Secretary

Leslie Slocum Lilleth Newby Steve Johnson Michele Moriya

Leslie Slocum, Director of the British Information

Services Library, is a long standing active member of the Chapter, who has served on the Executive Board of several past Presidents in a number of positions, including Publications Director. Lilleth Newby, Director of the HIV Resource Library for

the NY Department of Health, has also served on the Advisory Council and the Outreach Committee. Steve Johnson, Director of the Library for the Wildlife

Conservation Society, is currently on the Executive Board, and has held several positions on the Advisory Council, including two terms managing the Chapter’s Discussion List. Michelle Moriya, until the recent events of September

11th, was with Nomura Securities International. For two terms Michelle was the Downtown Luncheon Chair. All of the nominees, collectively, have served the New York Chapter for nearly fifteen years! This certainly speaks to their dedication to, and belief in, what the Chapter offers its members. Notices will go out in April announcing the date, time and place of the Annual Meeting and the Chapter elections. Mark your calendars, and make it your business to come out and support the candidates for the 2002-2003 year! ChapterNews

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Knowledge Services KD/KS = Collaboration + Learning (of course) + Teaching)

NKR Associates

Guy St. Clair

Consultants to libraries, offices, archives.

n any organization, the knowledge services focus builds on Knowledge Development/Knowledge Sharing (which I generally describe with the acronym, “KD/KS”). When information management, knowledge management, and strategic (performance-centered) learning are linked, you have a win-win situation, and it’s one I’m describing often these days. When I talk to people about information delivery, I strongly advocate the convergence of these three disciplines simply because, when they are converged, all information stakeholders benefit.

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Get to know Davida Scharf, Richard Steele, Nancy Nelson They’re hands-on information professionals helping clients in the NY area with projects, large and small. ■ ■ ■

Let me tell you what I mean. First of all, information management is a given. As I’m often saying, we’ve been successful—we librarians and the scientists who work on these things—in setting up information management platforms that (for the most part) work to our and our customers’ satisfaction. Oh, we’re tweaking here and there, and yes, the scientists will continually be improving on what we’ve got, but for the most part, we have a pretty good handle on how to manage the information itself.

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And we’re learning knowledge management by the bushel baskets full. If you don’t believe me, take a look at any of the conference invitations you’ve been deluged with over the past couple of months. Everywhere we turn, someone (including me, I’ll admit) is talking about the value of KM. Obviously (and I’m serious about this— this is not a joke), the successful mastery of KM as a management practice positions us specialist librarians for leadership roles in our organizations. For most of us, KM is here to stay and we welcome the more collaborative environment that provides the framework for successful KM. Such a combination is bound to result in better service delivery for our customers.

For most specialist librarians, what we want to achieve in our organizations is some level of service delivery in which our customers are more-or-less transformed through their interactions with us (if you’ll excuse the almost pompous phraseology). Of course we want them to get the information they’ve come to us for (that’s why we’re good at information management), and we want them to be able to use it to accomplish whatever they’ve set out to accomplish (and that’s where our knowledge management skills come into play). But we want them to go further with it. We want them to take the knowledge they develop from that information and, when appropriate, share it so that others will use it as well, so that the organization can benefit from its being used to accomplish its first use and, at the same time, use it to create new knowledge. And that’s where collaboration, learning, and teaching come in. They’re the tools that enable us to arrive at KD/KS.

But there’s more, isn’t there? Information management and knowledge management are important elements in the organizational information delivery scheme, but we’re missing something when we relegate them to stand-alone functions. They really go to work for us when we combine them with strategic learning. When that happens, the organization takes on a new spirit, a new way of doing things (and, not coincidentally, a new approach to accomplishing the organizational mission). Strategic, performance-centered learning—when linked with information management and knowledge management—provides service delivery that goes beyond anything any one of these functions can provide alone.

I like to think of KD/KS as a framework for professional learning, a framework that leads to excellence in knowledge services delivery and one that embodies the highest objectives of knowledge management, organizational learning, and organizational teaching. KD/KS builds on the assumption that all stakeholders in the information/ knowledge services delivery process accept their leadership responsibility to develop, to learn, and to share tacit, (Continues on page 8)

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explicit, and cultural knowledge within the enterprise. Of course KD/KS exists for the benefit of the organizational enterprise with which the stakeholders are affiliated, and which provides support for their knowledge development and knowledge sharing endeavors, and for their continued growth and development. But it also exists to bring a new, holistic focus to information and knowledge transfer. The new knowledge services profession is being built on KD/DS. We get to knowledge development and knowledge sharing through collaboration, learning and teaching. Collaboration as a management approach has not been particularly popular—at least until the last few years—probably because those in leadership positions found it difficult to give up their authority for more collaborative arrangements. Of course there have been plenty of attempts to move into a less “structured” management focus but by and large, moving to a collaborative management plan has not met with great success in many enterprises, particularly those in which specialist librarians are employed. That picture is changing now, thanks to the work of people like Edward Marshall, whose prediction of just seven years ago is meeting with noticeable success. In 1995, Marshall wrote, “Collaboration is the premier candidate to replace hierarchy as the organizing principle for leading and managing the 21st-century workplace.” I would contend that the growth of the collaborative workplace is a direct result of such influences as the learning organization and, little noticed, the teaching organization. The three of them, taken together, provide a useful way to approach knowledge development and knowledge sharing.

www.prolibra.com “Teaching organizations share with learning organizations the goal that everyone continually acquire new knowledge and skills.” To that Tichy and Cohen add the more critical goal that everyone pass their learning on to others. Well of course. We specialist librarians could have told them that. And now that our earlier attention to both learning and teaching, combined with our own natural willingness for collaboration, is being mainstreamed, it is only a matter of time (probably very little time) before the work we do as knowledge services professionals will play an even larger role in successful information and knowledge transfer in the organizations where we work. It is an ambition to be eagerly realized.

Obviously we don’t have to say much here about the learning organization. Peter Senge says it best, and certainly we specialist librarians have taken to his ideas with great enthusiasm. Senge’s “component technologies” (systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared visions, and team learning) resonate strongly among specialist librarians and, I dare say, will continue to do so long after we’ve lost all the other descriptors and are known simply as “knowledge services professionals.” These “dimensions” are too key, too critical to our concepts of service delivery, and if we are going to continue to be successful as information/knowledge practitioners, we’ll continue to use—and develop—Senge’s five disciplines. Our organizations can learn, and we with them.

References

Marshall, Edward M. Transforming the way we work: the power of the collaborative workplace. (New York: American Management Association, 1995) Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1990)

For successful specialist librarians, though, it doesn’t stop with learning. We’ve known this all along, but not too many years ago, Noel Tichy and Eli Cohen came forward with their concept of “the teaching organization,” arguing that while learning is a necessary competency, it’s not sufficient to assure success. And the establishment of teaching organizations is a natural next step since, as they put it, ChapterNews

Tichy, Noel M., and Eli Cohen. “The Teaching Organization.” Training and Development 52 (7), July 1998 Guy St. Clair is Consulting Specialist, Knowledge Management and Learning, SMR International, New York, NY. A past president of the Special Libraries Association and of the New York Chapter, St. Clair actively solicits readers’ responses to this column. He can be reached at [email protected]. 8

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Message of Appreciation

Carol Ginsburg, Managing Director and Global Head of

Business Information Services at Deutsche Bank AG, will receive the SLA President’s Award at the Annual Conference in June. As Chair of SLA’s Branding Task Force, Carol will receive this award along with the other Chairs of the Task Forces. This award recognizes each recipient’s commitment to the development to the Association as the premier organization for information professionals.

Carol Ginsburg and family deeply appreciate the kind-

ness and thoughtfulness of so many of you in the New York Chapter family, both librarians and vendors. Your warmth and caring meant a lot to us. Our loss will always be felt in our hearts, but your support helps mitigate some of the pain.

Suzan Lee, Senior Researcher, UBS Warburg LLC, has been chosen to receive the SLA Diversity Leadership Development Award, which recognizes individuals from multi-cultural backgrounds who display excellent leadership abilities in the profession, and who demonstrate the willingness to develop and strive for leadership opportunities within the Association. The co-recipient of this award is Jeffrey Mah, Chief Librarian, Bechtel Corporation, San Francisco. The recipients will each receive a $1,000 stipend for use in attending the Annual Conference.

Members in the News Marty Cullen, Vice President at Lehman Brothers

and Chapter President, appeared on the cover of the November 15th issue of Library Journal. Marty was interviewed by Susan DiMattia for the article entitled “Planning for Continuity–Emerging from September 11th”. Marty is a faculty member for the Practising Law Institute and is doing a program for them on Wednesday, April 10th. The program, on library management, is called “Performance, Pay and Advancement: How to Motivate Your Staff”.

If you would like to contribute an item to the Members in the News column, please send an email to: [email protected]

Special congratulations to the following award winners:

Your Source for Skilled Information Navigators

Nettie Seabury, Director of the Minority Business Infor-

mation Center at the National Minority Supplier Development Council in New York City, has been chosen to receive the SLA Rose L. Vormelker Award at the Annual SLA Conference in June. The co-recipient for this award is Billie Connor Dominguez, LA Public Library. This award is given in recognition of exceptional services to the profession of special librarianship in the area of mentoring students and/or practicing professionals in the field.

Helping you manage the flow of Information with temp, temp-to-hire, and direct hire placements. Whether you’re a skilled information management professional or a client seeking one, connect directly with our InfoCurrent professionals today.

Nettie was also this year’s recipient of the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies’ Partridge Award (i.e., the James Partridge Outstanding African American Information Professional Award). The award was given on February 26th. The Award committee cited her energy, innovation, leadership, effectiveness in furthering professional practices, and tireless role in mentoring and developing leadership skills in others.

Professional and clerical placements in Law, Business, Publishing, Pharmaceuticals, Vendors, the Arts & eCommerce. New York City Metro Area 1156 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10036 Phone: (212) 642-4321 [email protected]

Tom Fearon, Library Director at Lehman Brothers, has

Washington, DC Metro Area 815 Connecticut Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20006 Phone: (202) 775-1890 [email protected]

been chosen to receive the Factiva Leadership Award at the Annual SLA Conference in June. Tom will be recognized for his leadership, work ethic and dedication to advancing the information profession. This award is based on the acclaimed “Competencies for Special Librarians of the 21st Century” which can be seen on SLA’s website (www.sla.org).

www.infocurrent.com ChapterNews

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Web Resources

Trade Associations

■ National Venture Capital Association http://www.nvca.com/ ■ European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association http://www.evca.com/ ■ National Business Incubation Association http://www.nbia.org/ ■ Private Equity Network http://www.nvst.com/pnvhome.asp ■ The Angel Society http://www.angelsociety.com/

Venture Capital And Private Equity Information by Mindy Samitt This short guide to information sources on Venture Capital and Private Equity has been compiled by new chapter member, Mindy Samitt. Until recently, Mindy worked for GE Capital Equity in Stamford; previously she worked for PriceWaterhouseCoopers and, prior to that merger, Coopers & Lybrand LLP. Mindy may be contacted at [email protected]

Databases/Statistics

■ Venture Economics http://www.ventureeconomics.com/ ■ PricewaterhouseCoopers MoneyTree http://www.pwcmoneytree.com/ ■ VentureOne http://www.ventureone.com/ ■ Portfolio Management Data http://www.pmdzone.com/ ■ 3i Global Private Equity Report http://www.3ius.com/essentialreading/themarket/gpe2001/

Publications/Newsletters/Online News/Directories

■ Venturewire http://www.venturewire.com/ ■ Asset Alternatives http://www.assetnews.com/ ■ Private Equity Week http://www.privateequityweek.com/ ■ Venture Capital Journal http://www.venturecapitaljournal.net/ ■ Buyouts Newsletter http://www.buyoutsnewsletter.com/ ■ European Venture Capital Journal http://www.evcj.com/ ■ Private Equity Analyst http://www.assetnews.com/products/news/pea.htm ■ Latin American Private Equity Analyst http://www.assetnews.com/products/news/lapea.htm ■ The Corporate Venturing Report http://www.assetnews.com/products/news/cvr.htm ■ Venture Capital & Health Care http://www.assetnews.com/products/news/vchc.htm ■ VC Buzz http://www.vcbuzz.com/new/vc.cgi ■ Galante’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Directory http://www.assetnews.com/products/dir/galante.htm ■ Corporate Venturing Directory and Yearbook http://www.assetnews.com/products/dir/cv.htm ■ Venture Capital & Health Care Directory & Yearbook http://www.assetnews.com/products/dir/vchcdir.htm

ChapterNews

Rankings

■ Red Herring The Top 25 VC Firms, June 2001 ■ Forbes Money Magnets (ranking of venture capital firms), May 2000 Compensation Reviews

■ Venture Capital Journal Published in the November issues for 1999, 2000 & 2001 ■ The Industry Standard “No Pain for Bosses” (executives at venture-backed companies), March 5, 2001 ■ VentureOne Offers CompensationPro for privately held companies http://www.ventureone.com/ ■ PricewaterhouseCoopers Survey: Private Equity Begins to Mimic Corporate America’s Approach to Equity Compensation http://www.pwcglobal.com/extweb/ncpressrelease.nsf/ docid/6ABC13D8C236244585256AC500518E87 ■ 1999 Compensation Survey for Canadian VentureBacked Technology Companies http://www.pwcglobal.com/extweb/ncsurvres.nsf/ DocID/9CF36CD467ADE7DF85256918004C0AB7

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Growing an ejournal Collection at the Bronx Zoo Library

and urls for dissemination in individual e-mails, via the Bronx Zoo Library’s discussion list for WCS staff members, and by posting on the library’s then new intranet page. (See sidebar on ejournal databases.) At this time I also modified our online catalog’s standard serials holdings report, printed to disk and posted on our intranet, so that it would show all urls for all journals, in addition to volumes and years for each title, whether or not we had full access to the titles as ejournals.

by Steve Johnson n March 2002, the Bronx Zoo Library doubled the number of ejournals accessible via www.wcsonly.org, the staff only intranet of the Wildlife Conservation Society. The collection increased from 38 to 78 titles through a subscription access to the BioOne collection of forty journals in biology, natural history, and related fields. Two years ago the ejournal collection barely existed. This note describes how the Bronx Zoo Library got involved with ejournals and what we are doing to manage, publicize, and grow the collection.

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The launch of the ejournal collection came just as the zoo library acquired a page on our corporate intranet, wcsonly. The Bronx Zoo Library page initially offered links to the Ebsco Online ejournal portal, NISC’s Wildlife Worldwide database, and the Dialog@Carl collection of databases. These three collections formed the core of valuable, dynamic content which could not be found on the free side of the world wide web.

Planning for our ejournal collection began in calendar 1999 with the assistance of Ebsco, the Bronx Zoo’s long time journal vendor. Ebsco staff reviewed the zoo library’s print subscriptions and identified titles for which inexpensive or free ejournal versions were available through Ebsco Online, Ebsco’s ejournal portal. Ebsco staff also visited the zoo library to demonstrate how to access and manage the virtual collection. The Bronx Zoo Library ejournal collection began with a dozen titles in the spring of 2000, including key titles for our organization such as Conservation Biology and Zoo Biology.

The Bronx Zoo Library is a department of the Living Institutions division of the Wildlife Conservation Society, founded in 1895 as the New York Zoological Society. The library collections date to the early years of the Bronx Zoo. Librarians Steve Johnson and Dale Boles began work at the library in 1979 and 1999, respectively. Until 1999, the Bronx Zoo Library was a solo operation. The Library serves users at the Bronx Zoo, Central Park Wildlife Center, Prospect Park Zoo, Queens Zoo, New York Aquarium, Wildlife Survival Center at St. Catherine’s Island, Georgia, and the international program of the Wildlife Conservation Society. Library users from international programs work in numerous locations, including Bolivia, Burma, North Korea, Patagonia, Peru, and Thailand.

Of the titles in the Ebsco collection, half were hosted on the Ebsco Online website. Individual publishers hosted the others. Titles in each category required a mix of paper and click-through license agreements. Ebsco, and each of the publishers who hosted ejournals on their own websites, also required individual notification of the IP address range of the WCS intranet.

After we established the initial ejournal collection, growth came slowly from three sources. First, some individual publishers added online content to existing subscriptions with no price increase. Elsevier’s Web Edition is one example, represented in our collection by Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Second, in the course of reviewing publisher data for annual renewals, library staff identified candidates for the ejournal collection. Typically, among lower priced journals, adding an online version cost ten per cent in addition to the base price of the journal. Alternately, one could save ten per cent of that same price by dropping the print edition and subscribing to the ejournal version alone. Third, additional free titles came on the scene.

Library staff supplemented the Ebsco Online titles by identifying additional ejournals freely available on the internet. Some of these titles, such as International Zoo News and the Laboratory Primate Newsletter, were already in our print collection. Others, such as Contemporary Herpetology and Conservation Ecology, were entirely new, web only, peer reviewed publications. Most of these titles were identified in issue-by-issue scans of contents pages aimed at harvesting internet addresses (urls) of serials offering less than full text access (tables of contents, instructions to authors, etc.) For each of these titles, regardless of whether we accessed them via Ebsco or a publisher’s site, we added title specific urls to the 856$u fields of the records in our online catalog. This step enabled linking and launching to websites from the library’s online public access catalog. Storing the url information in a database eased the repeated updating and production of lists of ejournals

A journal aggregation, in the form of the BioOne collection, offered a means of quickly and substantially increasing the size of the ejournal collection at a low annual price. Although some of the titles were out of scope for our collection, BioOne included a dozen core print titles (Continues on page 12)

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from our collection, such as Auk, Journal of Mammalogy, and Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine. Others titles included journals, such as Ambio, which high prices had kept off our subscription list.

The third step was to add a specific ejournal page to the library’s intranet page, an alphabetical list combining titles accessible via Ebsco Online, BioOne, or the good will of individual publishers and societies. This page replaced the individual menu items for the Ebsco Online and BioOne collections. Such an integrated listing was feasible only because Ebsco Online and BioOne allow linking at the level of individual titles.

BioOne is a collaborative effort founded by the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, the University of Kansas, the Greater Western Library Alliance, and Allen Press, Inc. In the U.S., BioOne is marketed exclusively by Amigos, a regional affiliate of OCLC. OCLC is also a partner of the BioOne project.

In some cases, a single title would require more than one entry in the ejournal list. The first 631 issues of Mammalian Species are now available for free download from the American Society of Mammalogists. Subsequent issues are available from BioOne, as well as in print from the American Society of Mammalogists. In another instance, the journal Oryx changed publisher, meaning that current and back electronic issues are available from two different publishers. As it happens, Ebsco Online hosts each publisher’s content on the Ebsco Online site. Each publisher’s issues are listed at a separate url. In the case of the journal Evolution, online availability is changing from Ebsco Online to BioOne. Whether the existing content will remain on Ebsco is an open question.

When the Bronx Zoo Library subscribed to BioOne, my first step in providing access to the collection was to add a BioOne link to the intranet page, next to Ebsco Online. My second step was to add OCLC Collection Set records for BioOne titles to our local catalog, maintaining the central record of journal subscriptions, online and print. These records already included title specific urls in the 856 fields of Marc records. For an OCLC library, such as the Bronx Zoo Library, obtaining Collection Set records is as easy as filling out an online form at the OCLC website and downloading the records a few days later. It represents even less work than copy cataloging with OCLC’s CatExpress software.

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Ejournals and the short term future of paper collections Budget conscious executives may respond to an ejournal project by suggesting that there is no longer a need for paper collections or a library department. I’ve found it helpful to be prepared for such statements with concrete examples of how the paper collections continue to be used along with electronic collections.

Tracking ejournals “How to” sessions on maintaining and disseminating lists of ejournal titles and urls have been popular sessions at recent SLA conferences. Most speakers agree that library users want to see separate web page lists of ejournals and do not want to access ejournals by locating them in the online library catalog, even if the catalog is available via web browser.

For example, among our researchers, there is continuing demand for older literature not available in electronic format. This week’s requests included a book on sport hunting in Burma published in 1902, a Journal of Mammalogy article from 1959, and abstracts of dissertations by researchers in India, sponsored by our organization in the mid-nineteen seventies. These are queries which can be filled by interlibrary loan, our stacks, and our institutional archives, respectively.

In order to avoid manual preparation of static ejournal pages, many librarians maintain intranet linked databases of ejournal titles and urls, separate from the online catalog. The databases may be used to produce html pages dynamically, in response to user requests, or static html lists for posting on websites.

More generally, I find it useful to think and talk about information sources in terms of substitutability. In zoo biology, conservation biology, and veterinary medicine, it is not easy to substitute one source of information for another. College students may be able to satisfy course requirements by citing any three papers on the natural history of elephants. A conservation biologist will not accept a substitute for Mike Fay’s 1991 paper on forest elephant populations, unless it is another version of the same research by the same author. Even in the case of the same author, substitution is a stretch as researchers often ask to see the dissertations from which published research was drawn.

At the Bronx Zoo Library, I am avoiding the overhead and duplication of a separate ejournal database by using the online catalog to generate most of the code needed for static html pages. Inevitably, the easiest way to make last minute, minor changes to the ejournal list is to make parallel changes in the online catalog and the ejournal page. In the near future I hope to make a dynamic list of ejournals available at our website, using our online catalog as the database. ChapterNews

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Tracking these details requires periodic review of publishers’ sites and testing of the urls on a library’s ejournal page, followed by updating as needed. When working with a small collection, the information manager typically does not have the budget necessary to subscribe to a service for tracking ejournal addresses, such as the widely used Serials Solution.

Lessons learned In two years of working with ejournals, several practical lessons have emerged: 1. Subscriptions filtered by IP address are much easier to administer than username and password schemes. Username and password schemes have the sole virtue of permitting offsite access to content.

Managing urls was made easier because our online catalog can be configured to retrieve all serial records containing urls. ( The syntax statement is “url = http://*”.). To narrow the records retrieved to active full text ejournals, I added the keyword “ejournal” to the 500 field of Marc records for serial titles. I already identify active subscriptions by noting “active WCS subscription” in the 500 field of serial records.

2. At least once a year, the Information Technology department, or an IT department contractor, will change the IP address of your institution’s firewall without advance notification to the library. This change becomes obvious when internet resources are suddenly no longer accessible. Correcting this situation means obtaining the new IP address and communicating it to each vendor who provides access via IP address filtering. In our case, this means sending separate e-mail messages to Ebsco and a dozen other publishers. (Our BioOne subscription had not yet started.) Making these contacts if easier if one organizes contact information by publisher to more efficiently contact the publishers who supply more than one title. I found that at least one publisher was suspicious of IP change notices sent by more than one individual at a single institution. Apparently the publisher thought that separate messages sent by Dale Boles and me were evidence of hackers at work.

Once the new ejournal page was accessible, I began announcing it at every opportunity, from conversations with individual staff members to the weekly meeting of the Animal Management Committee. After a curator mentioned addition of new species of beetles to our invertebrates collection, I was quick to note the availability of the Coleopterists Bulletin in the BioOne collection. As a promotional tool, I found it useful to distribute business cards showing the urls of the Bronx Zoo Library’s intranet page together with telephone numbers and e-mail addresses for the library staff.

3. As a library makes licensed journals, and databases, available on one intranet, one will inevitably encounter requests for remote access and for more content. Library users who have research experience in a contemporary university or large corporation will expect levels of service and content common in these larger organizations. Although one can respond to these requests with declarations of intent to obtain a proxy server and remote authentication, I found it helpful to describe the organizational change necessary to implement this solution. In this case, remote access needs to become important to vice-presidents, not only to researchers and librarians. When individuals ask for particular ejournals or databases, I respond in terms of the dollars required to obtain that content. To minimize demand for remote access which I could not immediately satisfy, I limited announcements of the new ejournal page to people working inside our institutional firewall. This meant withholding the announcement from the library’s own discussion list, which reaches employees in a dozen or more states and countries worldwide. Instead, I used e-mail lists of employees at facilities within the firewall.

What comes next

After the rapid increase in the number of titles from the BioOne subscription, I see future growth of the ejournal collection coming from three sources. First is the title by title addition of journal titles requested by library users or identified by library staff as candidates for acquisitions. A second source would be the result of a concerted effort to identify a group of ten of more current subscription titles that would be converted from paper only or paper and ejournal to ejournal only format. Candidate titles would be those serials which offered a ten per cent or larger discount for paperless subscriptions. Converting ten average priced journals to ejournal only format would pay for an eleventh title at the same average price. A third source of titles would be another subject oriented aggregation of ejournals. One candidate is an electronic backfile, Jstor’s Ecology and Botany Collection. This retrospective collection, which includes no content more recent than dictated by a three to five year publishers’ embargo (“the moving wall”), includes numerous titles in our current print and ejournal collection. Examples include American Midland Naturalist, American Naturalist, Biotropica, Conservation Biology, Ecological Applications, Journal of Animal Ecology, Journal of Applied Ecology, Systematic Biology and its predecessor, Systematic Zoology. The depth of the backfile is

4. Any announcement including urls or usernames and passwords needs to be thoroughly tested and proofread prior to distribution via e-mail or printed handout. After corrections are made, another round of testing and proofreading is mandatory.

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substantial; American Midland Naturalist begins in 1909 and American Naturalist begins in 1867. If we acquired these titles in digital format, we could dispose of at least some of the less used titles and increase the amount of space in our movable shelving units. Regardless of what big step comes next, I plan to move ahead by integrating the ejournal collections in other Bronx Zoo Library services, multiplying their usefulness. For example, where feasible I am adding urls to the individual articles in the current awareness list of recent staff publications that I distribute via the library’s discussion list, WCS-L, and a page on the library web page. Readers inside the firewall will be able to access the full text of these articles. Readers outside the firewall will be able to access abstracts on BioOne and certain other titles. Vendors and organizations mentioned in this article BioOne

http://www.bioone.org marketed in the U.S. exclusively by Amigos Library Services http://www.amigos.org 1440 Midway Road Dallas, Tx 75244-3509 Ebsco Subscription Services

http://www.ebsco.com 17-19 Washington Street Tenafly, NJ 07670 201 569-2500 Jstor

http://www.jstor.org 120 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10011 212 229-3700 NYLINK

http://nylink.suny.edu State University Plaza Albany NY 12246 800 342-3353 Regional affiliate of OCLC and reseller of Serial Solutions ejournal tracking service, EZ-Proxy remote authentication product, etc.

The SLA New York Chapter maintains a web site with links to our calendar of upcoming events and full contact information for Chapter Executive Board members, committee officers, and group chairs. The New York Chapter URL is:

www.sla.org/chapter/cny/ Check it out — it’s a great way to keep up-todate with your Chapter!

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SLA Special Supplement: Career Day A Day to Explore Career Opportunities — Saturday April 6, 2002

CAREER DAY SUPPLEMENT

By Clifford Perry, Career Day Chair Warburg Pincus LLC he event you have been waiting for all year is just around the corner — Career Day 2002. We have been diligently preparing programs and exhibitors from the Tri-State area to assist you with your career choices. Whether you are new to the field or just thinking about changing jobs, this event has something to offer. We have gathered a diverse group of professionals who work in various industries to talk about A Day in the Life of An Information Professional. If you dread the interview process then do not miss the panel discussion “Getting the Job: The Secrets to a Successful Interview”.

T

In the exhibition hall we will have placement agencies ready to discuss your future and take your resume. If you are interested in exploring your professional development opportunities, speak to the areas library school representatives. Perhaps your specific questions were not addressed in the panel discussions. If so, come visit the Career Café. The Café offers you an opportunity to speak to professionals from many industries (Medical, Legal, Financial, Consulting, Non-profit etc.) on a oneto-one basis. Lighthouse International 111 East 59th Street between Lexington and Park Noon – 5PM

Refreshments will be served. To register, send an email with your name and address to [email protected] or call (212) 878-9314. Please bring a photo ID with you. All bags are subject to security check.

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SLA Special Supplement: Career Day The Interviewing Process

Additionally, it will leave you with more time to meet with the prospective employer. Applications will ask you for previous salaries, reason(s) you left the company, name and telephone of supervisor. Having a comprehensive cheat sheet with you will be priceless.

by Suzan Lee and Christine Mills Career Day is just around the corner — Saturday, April 6, 2002. In this special issue, we will highlight and outline one of the four seminars that will be presented to attendees at Career Day...the Interviewing Process.

Contact Lists – Recommendations

Applications will undoubtedly ask you for a list of references, usually a minimum of three. Please contact your references and let them know beforehand to expect a call. References caught off-guard may not be prepared to provide a prospective employer with the excellent recommendations that you have earned.

Co-Speakers are Suzan Lee of UBS Warburg and Christine Mills of Lehman Brothers. Everyone should have amongst his or her professional tools, a complete interviewing process kit. It is not available in stores. The kit is partially subjective and personal. Below, Christine and I will outline what a basic kit should contain. • Most recent resume • Most recent cover letter • Comprehensive contact list of your previous employers (5 to 10 years) • Contact List of your professional recommendations (3 minimum) • Corporate Attire • Corporate Casual Attire • Blank thank-you cards • Firm handshake • Eye Contact • Smile

Attire – Corporate versus Corporate Casual

Lehman Brothers has returned to corporate formal attire. It may not be long before other companies follow suit (pardon the pun). When in doubt, dress in formal corporate attire. If you are asked to return for a second interview, you may choose to dress down; but once again, when in doubt, choose the formal corporate attire. Thank You Cards

Thank you cards are ALWAYS handwritten. We highly recommend that you mail (first class mail) a thank you card within 48 hours of completing an interview. The card itself should be simple and plain. The content should highlight what you’ve found interesting about the open position or topics you’ve discussed, and/or the company. Intangibles

Most Recent Resume

A firm handshake, eye contact and a smile is a must in all basic interviewing process kits. Practice, if necessary. Sound silly? The person who landed the job sure doesn’t think so.

You should keep a paper copy plus an electronic copy of your resume. Not only is this convenient for updating, but it will keep your resumes consistent and accurate. See Resume Template.

Christine and I hope that you will be able to attend Career Day. During the Interviewing Process seminar, we will be handing out a very basic kit for you to take home and to build on.

Most Recent Cover Letter

The same applies for a cover letter. Why reinvent the wheel? It’s much easier to “tweak” a cover letter. We would suggest that you hold on to several different cover letters; whether your own or borrowed from a peer.

Suzan Lee Senior Researcher UBS Warburg LLC 299 Park Avenue New York, NY 10171 [email protected]

Contact List – Previous Employers

Bring with you a comprehensive list of your previous work history. Whether you meet with a Librarian first or a HR person, you will eventually be asked to complete an application form. Do not be surprised at the length of the form and the detailed-oriented questions. Applications can be as long as 5 pages. Although application forms require a copy of your resume, you will be asked nonetheless to complete the form.

Christine Mills Head of Reference Lehman Brothers, Inc. 745 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10019 [email protected]

Application forms could ask you for your work history up to 10 years or since your undergraduate degree. Completing the application fully and quickly will benefit you most of all, especially if you are in a time crunch. ChapterNews Special Supplement

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SLA Special Supplement: Career Day Template For Resumes Name Address Telephone Email LIBRARY EXPERIENCE Month/2000 - Present

Position / Title Company Name (type of company)- City, State Bullet points in present tense List Primary responsibilities in order of value or uniqueness Provide concrete but brief examples of assignments completed or initiatives you introduced

Month/1999 - Month/2000

Position / Title (Part-Time) Librarians R’ US (Temporary Staffing Agency) - Chicago, IL Bullet points in PAST tense Same as above List Names of Companies you were sent out to OR list separately the very same companies you were sent out to

Month/1998 - Month/1999

Intern Dotcom Corporation (venture capital firm) - San Francisco, CA Bullet points in PAST tense Same as above

WORK EXPERIENCE Month/Year - Present

Month/Year - Month/Year

Month/Year - Month/Year

EDUCATION

Position / Title Company Name (type of company) - City, State Bullet points in PAST tense Same as above Position / Title Company Name (type of company) - City, State Bullet points in PAST tense Same as above Position / Title Company Name (type of company) - City, State Bullet points in PAST tense Same as above Certificate - New York Institute of Finance Corporate Finance - Month/Year of [Expected] Completion MLS - School Name - [Expected ] Month/Year B.A. (major) - School Name - Month/Year

ONLINE SKILLS

List names of databases in the order of confidence/comfort level (e.g. Lexis/Nexis, Dialog) List names of programs, word processing or spreadsheet applications (e.g. FrontPage, HTML, Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint)

LANGUAGES

French (fluent), Italian (Read & Write)

REFERENCES

List 3 references: Name, Title, Company Name, Daytime telephone number Ms. Sally Smith, Director of Libraries, Dotcom Corp., 415-777-7777 Ms. Mona Jones, Sr. Reference Librarian, XYZ Inc., 212-555-5555 Dr. John Doe, Professor, Information Institute, 312-333-3333 Or “Available upon Request”

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SLA Special Supplement: Career Day Student Guide 2002-2003

Career Day

A program held in Spring. This program is opened to the public.

Message to Students

Representatives from MLS programs, placement agencies and information providers are present. Seminars and workshops are held to provide full exposure to the information profession.

The New York Chapter is dedicated to our Members. We realize that our Members’ needs begin even before they are practicing professionals. We hope that students will take full advantage of the programs and events that the Chapter organizes exclusively for their career development. Please contact us with your questions and suggestions.

Networking

Networking lunches and dinners are planned throughout the year by the Midtown and Downtown networking teams. Students are encouraged to attend. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet potential mentors.

Our student programs have reached full circle with our student membership becoming full regular members of SLA. Once students; now they are professionals volunteering their time for the benefit of current students.

Scholarships

We have several scholarships available every year for students based on Merit. Please visit our chapter and national website for applications details.

We hope that you will follow their lead with your full participation and student membership. We hope you will come to depend on us as an important professional resource.

Benefits of Membership

New York Chapter of Special Libraries Association is the information hub of what’s going on in our profession. We organize programs and events that benefit our members. In the last four years, we have extended the benefits of membership to students.

In June 2003, the national conference for SLA will be held in New York City. Our chapter will be in the spotlight. For information on how to volunteer for our chapter or specifically for the national conference, please contact us. Suzan Lee Outreach Chair, SLA-NY Chapter, February 2002

We encourage you to become a member of SLA. We will keep you abreast new events through our Chapter Website – http://www.sla.org/chapter/cny/, through our discussion list (please sign up immediately) as well as through our ChapterNews (now available electronically on our chapter website).

Programs Professional/Student Mixer

A Mixer is held in late Fall. This is a social event where information professionals and students meet. This 2-hour event is geared towards students that have many questions about a multitude of topics concerning the information profession. This event is set in a relaxed environment where peer friendships and mentoring relationships are readily formed.

With a student membership of $35, you are also connected to the national association with journals and magazines that are relevant to our profession. Student Membership form is available on our chapter website. http://www.sla.org/chapter/cny/

Internship Program

Internships range from information interviews to full for-credit internships. This program does not follow an academic calendar. It was designed to be as flexible as possible for both student and sponsor. Applications are available on our chapter website under “Students”.

Below are just some of the benefits that student membership provides: • • • • • • • • •

Evening with an Information Provider

This is a two-hour program where students are exposed to databases that are regularly used in our profession. A presentation is followed by either hands-on training or a career-chat session with the information provider/speaker. Speaker Bureau

We have speakers available to meet with student groups or in a class setting on special topics. At the invitation of MLS programs, our speakers have held job/interview process workshops, spoken about careers in Special Libraries. ChapterNews Special Supplement

Chapter meetings Subject-specific group meetings Chapter newsletter Professional development programs Networking Luncheons JobLine Special Activities & Programs Discussion Lists Publication

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SLA Special Supplement: Career Day Chapter Officers

(Continued from page 18)

Participating MLS Programs

President Martin Cullen Lehman Brothers, Inc. [email protected] Tel: 212-525-3667 Fax: 212-526-4613

Long Island University

Palmer School of Library and Information Science Brookville, NY http://palmer.cwpost.liu.edu/ Pratt Institute

President Elect Bethann Ashfield New York Stock Exchange [email protected] Tel: 212-656-5792 Fax: 212-656-7275

School of Information and Library Science Brooklyn, NY http://www.pratt.edu/sils/ Queens College

Graduate School of Library and Information Studies Flushing, NY http://www.qc.edu/GSLIS/

Awards Martha Schweitzer INFOdot Enterprises LLC [email protected] Tel: 516-944-9738 Fax: 516-944-9766

Rutgers University

School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies New Brunswick, NJ http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/ St. John’s University

Library School Liaison/Outreach/Diversity Suzan Lee UBS Warburg LLC [email protected] Tel: 212-821-3128 Fax: 212-821-4840

Division of Library and Information Science Jamaica, NY www.stjohns.edu/pls/portal30/sjudev.school.sjc Southern Connecticut State University

Department of Library Science and Instructional Technology New Haven, CT http://www.southernct.edu/departments/ils/

Career Day Cliff Perry Warburg Pincus LLC [email protected] Tel: 212-878-9314 Fax: 212-878-9451 Membership Roberta Brody Queens College [email protected] Tel: 718-997-3790 Tel: 516-767-9056 Fax: 718-997-3797 Director of Publications (& Interim ChapterNews Editor) Thomas Pellizzi InfoSpace Consultants [email protected] Tel: 212-644-9471

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