One Day in the Life of Arizona Libraries

Today our Hazy Library is participating in Snapshot: A day in theLife of Arizona Libraries.



An initiative of the Arizona Library Association, libraries are encouraged to share what happens @ our library on a single day: Customer visits or door counts, circulation, reference assistance, newspaper and magazine or book use in the library and even special events the library is involved in. (Choose your 'Hatitude'; photo: p. watkins)

Tomorrow is statistics collection day when numbers and photos will paint a picture of One Day in the Life of the Hazy Library - great fun and a wonderful idea for celebrating Arizona libraries!

Snowy Library Day

There's nothing like looking out @ the snowy campus through the library's ceiling-to-floor windows. Granite Mountain is totally obscured by clouds in the distance. But it's a great day for creating LibGuides - finding books, journals and databases about public policy to publish in a resource guide.

This snowy, cold winter wonderland will be but an historical memory in June when Prescott's normal highs reach the low 80s, but today, I love being nearly alone in the library on a snowy day @ ERAU in January.

Snow Day @ ERAU!

Sort of .. what started out as a snow day turned into a "Can you make it into work"? day. Slogged through 6 inches of snow and now wet, cold, windy rain. The campus is virtually deserted, but a few brave souls from the community ventured in and some students who live on campus have arrived intermittantly. A few questions here & there.

the STELLA UNConference

In Denver is a great place to be this January. We communely and casually meeting @ the University of Denver to discuss library-related issues.

Joe Kraus, librarian @ U-D, coordinated our meeting space, got ProQuest, IEEE, IOP and a couple of other vendors to help with breakfast and lunch meetings to offset costs. Bottom Line? Rather than expensive conference fees, this is a very modest way to chat with our library colleages affordably and easily.

Airline, $139, LaQuinta hotel, $119, shuttle/transportation service $60, Food/miscellaneous, $60. Library conference for under $400? PRICELESS!!

2009 Fall Semester

Begins next week @ Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona. The campus is buzzing this week as staff & faculty hold their department retreats. New student Orientation begins this week, Thursday and Friday.

Hazy Library is offering tours, informational guides, candy & HOMEMADE cookies, and a raffle both days with prizes! We've managed to muscle gift certificates from local businesses for essential student needs: FOOD! from Subway, Taco Bell, Robek's Smoothies, Brown Burger, Nick'N'Willy's and the Prescott Brewing Company. All have generously donated gift certificates as have Great Clips and Method Coffee.

A Librarian with a jones for Travel

I've discovered another great thing about a library career -- the opportunity to travel. Now that May graduation is behind us, long summer weekends loom. And there's no better place to begin the summer travel season than than Greer, Arizona!

Greer, in the upper northeast quadrant of the state, lies in Apache Country, in the middle of Arizona's White Mountains. Driving north, the high desert of mid-Arizona quickly gives way to tall pines in 8,000 elevation, approaching ShowLow and Heber, Arizona.

The mountainous drive winds along scenic Highway 260 into 'rim country' -- Arizona's Mogollan Rim -- through the small towns of Strawberry, Pine, and Payson, clean mountain air and piney smells, assailing the senses. No trip through Pine is complete, however, without a stop @ the small antique galleries on Highway 87, or the Herb Shop and the Nifty 50s Diner for breakfast.

Next trip? perhaps that long-awaited look into Navajo land @ Monument Valley.

Another techie pioneer: Susan Gerhart on Ada Lovelace Day

Susan Gerhart, a semi-retired computer scientist living in Prescott, Arizona, will be a keynote speaker at the 2nd IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2009) in Denver, April 1-4, 2009. Her presentation entitled “The Disability/Mobility Challenge: Formulating Criteria for Testing Accessibility and Usability” reflects recent work on topics related to vision disability and assistive technology.

Susan’s Ph.D., from Carnegie-Mellon in 1973, preceded academic stints at the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies and undergraduate programs at Toronto, Duke, and Embry-Riddle Universities, teaching mainly software engineering, Java, discrete mathematics, and data bases.
Her research was primarily in the field of formal methods at USC Information Sciences Institute and the MCC Austin research consortium.

She worked with NASA at Langley and Johnson centers in research and technology transfer and at the National Science Foundation as a Division Director, continuing to serve as a reviewer for NSF and Science Foundation Arizona. Currently, Susan writes the "As Your World Changes" blog on using technology to overcome vision loss.

Her blog articles show how podcasts and digital talking books provide classy replacements for printed media, supported by speech-enabled reading technology. She advocates that mainstream user interfaces should embrace speech as natural channels of expression for applications and websites, while striving to streamline interactions for the betterment of all users.

A demonstration speech-driven podcatcher assists her in maintaining a library of over 1,000 podcasts on topics related to vision disability and assistive technology. Susan has sustained her fascination with software code, starting in the Sputnik era, through logic programming, search analysis, and educational animation.