Engineering Libraries Division Newsletter September 1999

(Ed. note - no message was submitted by the Chair.)

The Engineering Libraries Division seeks papers pertaining to the role of libraries and librarians in engineering education. Relevant topics include information literacy, scholarly communication, engineering information resources, and engineering library operations and management. Projects describing collaborations between engineering faculty and librarians are also appropriate. The deadline for submission of abstracts is October 1, 1999. Abstracts should be submitted using the Web at www.asee.org/conferences/annual2000/html/caps.htm.

Please consider submitting an abstract for the ELD poster session at the ASEE Conference next year in St. Louis. The poster session will be Monday afternoon, June 19, 2000 from 2:30 - 4:15 p.m. This is an excellent opportunity to share progress and gain feedback on your research and projects from your colleagues in a casual setting. You may submit your abstract via CAPS (www.asee.org/conferences/annual2000/html/caps.htm) through October 1, 1999 or directly to the poster session moderator, Leslie Reynolds, from October onward. Leslie's email is reynolds@purdue.edu and her phone number is 765-494-2870.

Believe it or not, the program for St. Louis is beginning to take shape. Headquarters staff will soon depart for a visit to St. Louis to make the final decision on the picnic location for Sunday evening. I'm waiting to see which location is chosen before we commit to our Tuesday evening banquet location or other entertainment activities. Under consideration is a dinner cruise aboard a riverboat, our traditional meal at a fine local restaurant, or a catered event at an area museum. If you have a preference, please let me know. The Cardinals baseball schedule for the 2000 season has not yet been released so I can't say yet if we'll have a chance to catch a Mark McGwire homerun ball. Beer fans take heart. The Anheuser-Busch Brewery tour is close to downtown, fun, free and is well-suited for large groups such as ours.

Lest you think I've only been planning the food and fun, the ELD programs for the conference have begun to take form as well. We will begin with the traditional Get Acquainted Session on Monday morning, followed later that day by other sessions including the Poster Session and a new type of session - the Innovations & Ideas Exchange. The IIE will give attendees an opportunity to follow up on questions from the morning's Get Acquainted Session, exchange ideas, share innovations, and swap solutions. Innovators (this means YOU!) will give short presentations about their accomplishments and there will be ample opportunities for open -microphone questions, exchanges and networking.

Other theme sessions planned for the conference include:

• Engineering Data Resources (Tom DePetro, moderator)

• Libraries/Librarians and the Engineering Curricula (Mark Shelton, moderator)

• Collection Development Issues Forum
• Professional Issues Forum

If you are interested in participating as a speaker at any of these sessions or would like to present a paper on another topic, submit your abstract via CAPS (www.asee.org/conferences/annual2000/html/caps.htm) by October 1, 1999 or contact a session moderator or me, your program chair, Linda Musser at Lrm4@psu.edu or 814-863-7073.

Linda Musser, Program Chair, ASEE/ELD

The Nominating Committee invites you to send nominations for two positions: (1) ELD Secretary-Treasurer and (2) ELD Director. Questions about the specific duties of the positions can be found in the ELD Bylaws (http://www.englib.cornell.edu/eld/bylaws.html); other questions can be asked of one of us. Please submit the names of possible nominees to any member of the committee by December 15, 1999.

A list of candidates for these two positions will be published in the May, 2000 ELD Newsletter. Nominations will also be accepted from the floor at the ELD Business Meeting of the 2000 ASEE Annual Conference.

Committee members are: Larry Clemens, (410) 293-6926 or clemens@nadn.navy.mil, Jill Powell, (607)255-8701 or jhp1@cornell.edu, and Beth Brin, (208) 426-3136 or bbrin@boisestate.edu

Beth Brin, Chair, ELD Nominating Committee

Fall 1999

At UCLA, Three days, Fall 1999: Thursday, September 30, 1:00 PM to 9:00 PM, Friday, October 1, 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM, and Saturday, October 2, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, 1999. $395. 2.1 CEU (Continuing Education Units 814.14 Reg # D7804U +1 (310) 825-9971 to register by phone. The UCLA Extension catalog is at http://www.UnEx.UCLA.edu/catalog/

(Use "Document Imaging Document Management" as the search keyword).

This course is for managers who have been assigned to manage a document imaging system or digital library, and must start immediately. Students will gain an understanding of how document imaging can be used and managed in both small and large scale organizations.

For those persons who cannot attend the class, most of the class materials are available free at http://www.ArchiveBuilders.com/abpapers.html

For more information, contact the course instructor, Steve Gilheany, at (310)937-7000 or SteveGilheany@ArchiveBuilders.com.

June 22, 1999 4:30 p.m.

Charlotte, NC

Beth Brin began the meeting by presenting the agenda followed by announcements concerning the location of a mentoring meeting and banquet directions. This was followed by PIC IV news at which time the PIC IV representative, Duane Abata arrived to speak to the group. He gave an overview of PIC IV, reminded all of the PIC IV awards luncheon, and asked for ideas or questions from the floor.

Q: Concerns were voiced about speaker registration problems, e.g., asking speakers to register for full conference rather than just one day.

A: There is a process for obtaining one-day passes through the program chair and PIC IV chair which occurs early spring.. He responded that he'd work with Headquarters on this particular case since it wasn't clear what exactly had happened but that Headquarters staff should be able to reimburse the difference.

Q: Is PIC IV trying to expand membership opportunities in ASEE to non-engineers?

A: Yes. They are exploring liaisons with the European equivalent of ASEE and other constituencies. [A suggestion from the floor was to consider computer scientists.]

Q: Can ELD be more mainstream within ASEE?

A: He thought we were fairly visible but would be happy to work with us to try to get a mini-plenary.

Q: What’s this about the operating account liberalization?

A: Your officers will be hearing more about this. Basically, you can spend your operating account funds in many more ways than were previously allowed.

Q: Can we get the ASEE member's price for equivalent professionals? For example, can a librarian who is a member of SLA get the member's price for attending the conference?

A: Yes. This is an excellent idea and fits into the ASEE’s goals of increasing membership and visibility. Write it up and send it to me and I’ll submit it.

Q: Can we start programs on Sundays?

A: Yes. Just call it a workshop.

Q: Can ASEE award the most active division or have a ‘biggest growth’ award?

A: Possibly. Write up a proposal and sent it to me.

There was a call to approve the minutes of the 1998 ELD Business Meeting. There was a motion and a second followed by unanimous approval of the minutes. Linda Musser presented the Treasurer’s report, a copy of which appeared in the May 1999 ELD newsletter.

Suzanne Weiner presented four awards on behalf of the Awards Committee. The Homer I. Bernhardt Award was given to Robert Schwarzwalder. The Best Reference Award was awarded to John G. Webster, editor of the Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. The Best Paper Award was given to Tom Conkling and Kelly Jordan for their paper ""Enhancing NTIS Database Access at a Multi Campus University" published in Science & Technology Libraries 16, n.2(1997) 27-35. The Ford Motor Company Digital Librarian Award was given to Honora Ford Nerz.

The following committees had updates to their reports as published in the May 1999 ELD newsletter:

Accreditation and Standards - Karen Andrews

Nestor Osorio collected information from librarians who participated in ABET 2000. They plan to develop guidelines for site visits and best practices for students and librarians. Ideally, these will appear as an article in the Journal of Engineering Education. They are also compiling an accreditation consultants list. They also reviewed and revised the statistical survey .

Awards Committee - Suzanne Weiner

There was good response this year to the Homer I. Bernhardt call for nominations. It was not so good for the other two awards. They did not investigate corporate sponsorship of the awards.

Membership Committee - Glee Willis

The number of members in attendance at this conference is approximately 70. There are a lot of new members attending this year.

Publications - Godlind Johnson

Forty-six literature guides were sold this year. There were no new guides completed this year. The fourth edition of the Union List is forthcoming.

ELD Website - Jill Powell

The ELD Website moved to the Cornell Engineering Library webserver in November 1997. It occupies 37.7 MG or computer space, with 1,197 files. It is difficult to measure the cost of maintaining this server. A local commercial internet service provider in the area charges $100 per year to maintain a web server, and the labor is estimated at 10 hours per year.

The webmaster strives to keep the information on the webpages current and useful. This includes conference information, bylaws, list of officers, newsletters, publications for sale, awards information, and links to the ASEE/ELD Duplicates Exchange and Engineering Libraries webpages. Anyone may submit information that they feel should be added to the pages to Jill Powell at jhp1@cornell.edu.

The incoming Secretary/Treasurer is Mel DeSart. There were two names put forward for Director - Kate Lee and John Saylor. A ballot was distributed at the meeting and resulted in the election of John Saylor for Director.

There was a discussion about electronic distribution of the newsletter. Tom Conkling reported that only two print copies were sent last year, indicating that most ELD members have access to email. The difficulties encountered with distributing the Word version of the newsletter have been solved and it should go more smoothly this year. There followed some discussion about whether it is really necessary to distribute the text of the newsletter given improvements in email clients. An announcement of the newsletter's availability along with the URL might be sufficient. Tom agreed to discuss the idea with Jill Powell, ELD Webmaster, to see if this is feasible.

Changes to the Bylaws were unanimously approved.

Formation of an ELD-SPARC group was announced and there was a general call for interested parties and helpers.

ACRL/STS Partnering Proposal update - a report on this initiative will be shared after the ALA meeting later in June.

JSTOR update - Dorothy Byers reported that JSTOR is not ready to think about engineering yet. Funding to assist with conversion might help change their stance, however. Members suggested pursuing funding from associations. This topic will be discussed further at the Professional Issues Forum on Wednesday and at the Extended Executive Committee meeting.

World Wide Web reference - Dorothy Byers asked for ideas. Further discussion was recommended for the Professional Issues Forum.

The meeting was adjourned at 6:15 p.m.

Minutes submitted by Linda Musser.

A name change to report - Lynn Tinsley is now Lynn Berard. Her email address has changed to lberard@andrew.cmu.edu.

The University of Southern California Science & Engineering Center libraries are the recipients of a large part of the Chevron Petroleum Technology and Research Center Library in La Habra, California. Over 115 boxes of books, 50 atlases, and other library items were acquired. The School of Petroleum

Engineering also received a number of audio-visual

materials, equipment, and accompanying furniture.

USC will benefit greatly from these gifts. This Chevron facility in Southern California will be closing permanently by the end of this calendar year.

Najwa Hanel

Head, USC Science & Engineering Library

Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology is pleased to announce the fulfillment of a $30,000 grant from Allied Signal Federal

Manufacturing and Technologies. This generous grant supports installation and development of RELAIS, an

"intelligent" document delivery system. Linda Hall Library annually supplies over 60,000 documents to clients around the world because of its extensive collections in science, engineering, and technology. In an effort to provide better service to the customer, the library has chosen the RELAIS System to help improve its capability of processing and

providing documents more efficiently.

Kathleen L. Alshouse

Special Services Librarian, Linda Hall Library