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!

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.

Have 6 months Really Passed in LibraryLand?

It has indeed been that long -- guess time really does fly when you're having fun. We spent most of the months of September and October teaching information literacy classes in Room 123 -- the new Instruction lab. This room has 40 computers and is very popular with faculty. Where else can they get their students all in one room and working on software programs all together? The other buildings on campus have computers here and there -- 10 in one lab or perhaps 20 in another.

This month is Aviation History Month so we created a display (see photo) with a timeline of aviation history and included some old model planes we have in our collection as well as some rare pilot books. Perfect for an aviation university such as ours.

This new Hazy Library has an additional 40 computers upstairs in the Information Commons -- the place to see and be seen! It gets so busy up here that the computer stations are soon filled, and students spill over downstairs to the Instruction Room computers or borrow a laptop.

We are now working on completing an application/proposal to enter the John Dana Cotton Awards sponsored by ALA -- an award for outstanding marketing and advertising programs in libraries. We're pulling together the information to submit our application detailing all the work we did for Opening Day @ the Hazy Library in March, 2008. Wish us luck! If we win, then Suzie may go to Washington D.C. for the award ceremonies -- RAH!!!!

What I found on the Way to something Else: U-M's (Michigan) EJournal site

It all started with watching the streaming vid of the Dalai Lama from the University Michigan's website. His Holiness was in Ann Arbor April 20th to celebrate Earth Day. The Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment introduced the UM President Mary Kay Coleman who then introduced the Dalai Lama.

On the way to finding the School of Natural Resources and Environment, I came across the UM Libraries (19 in all) website and looked for ideas on how to re-design our own ERAU-Prescott Hazy Library website.

From the UM Harlan Hatcher graduate library website, I found the eJournals link where one can choose from a list of dozens of topic areas (http://www.lib.umich.edu/ejournals/) And from there, I clicked on Natural Resources and Environment -- whoah!

653 titles appear with journal titles and websites ranging from Acta Oecoligica to Agronomy Journal and onto Country Living Gardener, Endangered Species Bulletin, Human Ecology, Journal of Animal Science, North American Journal of Aquaculture, Plant Diseases and USDA Bulletins. I'm in information heaven here!