My #libday8 post

Here is my LibDay8 post.

My day started with a 9am once-a-month PIRLS meeting.  (PIRLS is short for the Professional Information and Reference Library Services Team).  Some of the stuff we went over was: Brainstorm programs to accompany the October 3, 2012 Presidential Debate; in the renovated building, what should we call the "Access Services Desk" [Not that]; look at new mockup of ILL webpages and GIST; Law catalog merger issues and fixes; Genre now listed in the catalog; Policy Council and other team reports.

The meeting broke at about 10:15am, and then I was able to attack my email.  I only had about 30 emails that had come in over the last 16 hours.  (I usually don't check my email at home, since I want to deal with work problems while I am actually at work.)

Some of the things that I dealt with were:

• A question about the SLA All-Sciences Poster Paper Session. (An official announcement will go out tomorrow.)
• An ILL popout screen does not work properly in IE (but fine in Firefox and Chrome), so I reported it to the relevant fixit people.
• I started to draft out an email as a reminder to DU LIS students about the RMSLA Shirley Alldredge Lecture and Annual Business Meeting, but someone else beat me to it. I am the SLA DU Student chapter adviser.
• Forwarded information about the SLA Engineering Division $1200 SPIE DigitalLibrary Student Travel Stipend Award.
• One of our staff wrote a new blog post on the Academic Commons page, so I posted it to our Twitter, Facebook and our Google+ accounts. I finally set up the Academic Commons blog on TwitterFeed so it would autopost to Twitter.  I had been meaning to do that. I also FBed and G+ed some other items from our other blogs, the Penrose Pen and Good Answers.
• I am going to be speaking to science undergraduate students on the evening of February 15th (free pizza!), so I looked at a draft of a flyer that is going to be distributed to advertise the event. Looked fine to me.
• Sent out a draft of a future blog post on the Penrose Pen concerning the book display for February.  It will have a focus on "African Americans and the West."  Another Reference faculty member agreed to post it on Monday the 6th. [January is here.]
• Agreed to meet with the President of the Rocky Mt Chapter of SLA for a chat. (Hi Rachel!)  Recommended that some of the students in the SLA Student Chapter and some others from RMSLA should join us. She will send us a Doodle.
• My Chemistry Department Liaison had not heard of the Elsevier flap going on, so I sent him a mess of links concerning the issue.  I told him -- There are many, many news items. Here are some of the major ones in just the last week or so. 
• http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/01/publishing/petition-targeting-elseviers-business-practices-begins-to-snowball/ 
• http://www.economist.com/node/21545974 (The price of information - Academics are starting to boycott a big publisher of journals) 
• http://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/01/elsevier-needs-to-get-out-more.html 
• http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/01/31/why-boycott-elsevier/ 
• http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120130/13030217589/will-academics-boycott-elsevier-be-tipping-point-open-access-another-embarrassing-flop.shtml 
• http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/elsevier-publishing-boycott-gathers-steam-among-academics/35216
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/01/28/elseviers-publishing-model-might-be-about-to-go-up-in-smoke/ 
• http://the-scientist.com/2012/01/18/cracks-form-in-anti-open-access-push/ 
• http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/testify-the-open-science-movement-catches-fire/ 
• For a list of posts done before January 17th, see http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2012/01/around_the_web_some_posts_on_t_1.php  
• I heard back from the Chemistry Professor, and he noted some economic concerns in favor of the commercial publisher.
• I contacted a prominent scientist in the UK about arranging a meeting this fall for my sabbatical on scholarly communication issues, but I have not heard back from him yet.
• Chatted with one of our acquisition staff about two journals (One I ordered and one was supposed ot be cancelled, but it looks like we won't be able to get the new journal, because the new publisher won't let us cancel the old journal.  Long story. 
• Sent out this announcement about the Executive Director opening at the Alliance. Are you interested?
• Wrote this blog post concerning LibDay8.

I still have 34 minutes left to my day here, so I will try to spend a little time working on my article concerning OA resources that are used in Africa, maybe clean up my desk a little.

We are going to have a major snow storm tomorrow, so I think I will take my laptop home with me in case tomorrow is a work-from-home day. I am supposed to come in for a monthly Penrose Library Faculty Meeting, but that might be cancelled.  We will see.