Friday, July 30, 2010

Notes from the "Vendor Support Brainstorming" session

Here are some of my notes from yesterday's session.

Ask vendors to sponsor something that involves not just money. The Government Information Division website has a newsfeed that is sponsored by Lexis Nexis. A publisher (AMS) helps The DPAM division print a member directory.

Vendors could provide a speaker for an event, but there are political issues to work out with this.

Don't give out tax advice to the Vendors. Recommend that they talk to their lawyers and accountants to make sure they can write-off an in-kind donation. If they can get a tax break, provide the SLA Tax ID number to them. They might be able to get a tax break on their business travel expenses.

Recognition. They want it.

Get donations from companies who are not in the library or information field. A coffee place could donate gift certificates to be given away at a meeting. A gift basket could be given away. The people attending the WebEx do not recommend a raffle for legal reasons.

Create a "Top 10 list of reason" why a vendor should sponsor your division or chapter.

Create a spreadsheet that documents who in the division or chapter has good relationships with what vendors.

Do your homework on the needs and interests of the vendors, and the people who work for them. They are people, just like you. What is their budget cycle like?

The Xtreme Reference Conference was mentioned.

Offer various levels of sponsorship. Be creative with the naming of the levels, not just Gold, Silver, Bronze.

Vendors want to participate in conversations about products and services. They don't want to simply have a logo slapped up onto a website somewhere. Keep talking to the sponsoring vendors after the event is done.

Smaller vendors could consider cheaper table top booths at the SLA conference.

Sometimes, smaller vendors might be willing to sponsor something big, since they are looking for a way to get more name recognition.

What should the division/chapter do if the vendor doesn't send a check? There are a variety of methods one could use to communicate your needs and the ramifications for not cooperating.

After the fact -- Tell vendors the things that were written on the evaluation forms for their sessions. Ask the vendors what they thought were the positives and negatives of the session. Ask them what they would like to see in the future.

Put up the evaluation forms and the results up onto the unit wiki, such as this from DST (See the section concerning "Slides, Handouts, Evaluations" Need to login to the wiki.)

Ethics. When you ask for a donation from the vendor, you are a representative of SLA, not of your place of employment.

Give the vendor an SLA or a non-work related business card. SLA has business card templates. Provide SLA business cards to the leadership of the unit.

Other advice on fundraising can be found in this PDF document.

The WebEx session was sponsored by the IEEE.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Library Day in the Life 5 post

Ok. Here it is.

Got in to work a little before 9:00am. Normally, I would open up my email first thing in the morning, but today, CAL was holding a training session for SecondLife. We met at the Sustainable Living Library. Even though I am not a member of CAL, they attendees welcomed me to the session. I used to use SecondLife when I first discovered it about three years ago, but I haven't used it lately. I also knew that they changed their interface, so I wanted to put it through its paces. The new interface is ok, but I was experiencing some severe time lag issues. Once I teleported to a different island, then my performance got better. In any case, I had a good time chatting with several other Colorado librarians.

Once I was done with that, then I got my chance to look over the email that accumulated over the weekend. I had 27 messages in my main inbox, 69 items had gathered in various filter folders based on certain topics or projects. I also had 25 that were listed in the junk folder. One of the items in a filtered folder was from the Library Journal Academic Newswire. There was an article about a new JISC report concerning Generation Y researchers. I found it interesting, so I put it into my delicious account.

That reminded me that I wanted to put in something else into delicious. One of my colleagues wrote an article concerning collaborative collection development. At the end of the day, I ended up tagging 5 things.

I have some saved searches in Google Scholar. One is for "Information Seeking" and the other covers the topic of collaboration and libraries. I usually get about 3-5 items on both topics every couple of days. I was going to blog about a new article concerning collaboration in libraries (for Collaborative Librarianship News), but then I saw that the article actually came out about 12 years ago -- not exactly new news.

I sent an email to a discussion list for LIS students at the University of Denver concerning #LibDay5. I hope some of them will be able to use some of the insights from the various librarians participating in this project.

I also responded to emails concerning Morgan & Claypool and an article in an obscure chemistry journal.

I was at the Research Desk (formerly called the Reference Desk) from 1-3pm today. Normally, we have graduate students work the desk during the summer, but we needed to have some time slots filled, and I was happy to cover for a couple of hours.

I got some questions concerning:
  • Income tax and depreciation codes and books
  • Our collection of foreign films and DVDs.
  • A newly cataloged browser book that was still in "processing", so we had it rush processed while the patron waited. (Great service guys and gals!)
During down times at the desk, I continued a discussion concerning social media and social networking tools with Walt Crawford, so I read up on his blog, Cites and Insights to get the inside scoop on his opinion.

I became of friend of Gulliver the Turtle -- he is the mascot for the Open Access publisher BioMedCentral.

I also read other documents to get ready for an SLA Sci-Tech Division Leadership Webinar meeting the following day.

Once I got home from work, then we finished painting Mr. 10's bedroom. The weekend project turned into three days worth of work, but the room looks pretty good.

I have also been wanting to try to load Linux on an old laptop (Over 7 years old) that we have, but Ubuntu isn't working out for me. It isn't loading from the flash drive, even though I changed the BIOS settings. I also tried to install with a CD-ROM, but it was taking way too long. I will give Puppy Linux a try the following day. I have read some reviews that it works very well on old machines with small amounts of RAM. The laptop has 512MB, so that should be more than enough. I will let you all know how that works out.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Scholarly Communication Institute at UVa

Wish I could have gone to this conference (SCI 8: July 14-16, 2010, Experimental Approaches to New-Model Scholarly Communication) sponsored by the University of Virginia's Scholarly Communication Institute. The program and the speaker and participant list is impressive. I will be following along their tweets.