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.

Ada Lovelace A first rate technical mind

If it hadn't been for Suzanne, our Collections Development manager here @ ERAU-Prescott, I might never have known about Ada Lovelace. What I discovered is fascinating and certainly share-worthy, not only to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, March 24, 2009, but for women interested in science and technology everywhere.

According to the SDSC (San Diego Supercomputer Center), Ada Lovelace (December 10, 1815 -November 27, 1852, London), "was the daughter of a brief marriage between the Romantic poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke, who separated from Byron just a month after Ada was born."

"Lady Byron wished her daughter to be unlike her poetical father, and she saw to it that Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music, as disciplines to counter dangerous poetic tendencies (her father's!). But Ada's complex inheritance became apparent as early as 1828 (she was 13 years old!) when she produced the design for a flying machine. It was mathematics that gave her life its wings. "

"One of the gentlemanly scientists of the era, (part of Ada and her mother's social circle) was to become Ada's lifelong friend. Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, was known as the inventor of the Difference Engine, an elaborate calculating machine that operated by the method of finite differences. Ada met Babbage in 1833, when she was just 17, and they began a voluminous correspondence on the topics of mathematics, logic, and ultimately all subjects". It was this relationship with him that eventually lead Ada to refer to herself as "analyst & metaphysician".

"Babbage had made plans in 1834 for a new kind of calculating machine (although the Difference Engine was not finished), an Analytical Engine. His Parliamentary sponsors refused to support a second machine with the first unfinished, but Babbage found sympathy for his new project abroad. In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine. Babbage enlisted Ada as translator for the memoir, and during a nine-month period in 1842-43, she worked feverishly on the article and a set of Notes she appended to it. These are the source of her enduring fame.

Ada called herself "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)," and the combination was put to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage but was better at articulating its promise. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. It was suited for "developping [sic] and tabulating any function whatever. . . the engine [is] the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity." Her Notes anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music. "

To find out more about the woman Babbage called the "Enchantress of Numbers", be sure to check out these books, from which much of the above information is culled: Doris Langley Moore's, Ada: Countess of Lovelace (1977. London: John Murray); Joan Baum's The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron (1986. Archon Books) and Betty A. Toole's Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers (1992. Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press).

Ada Lovelace Day - March 24th, 2009

Watch this blog for more on Tuesday, March 24th about Ada Lovelace, Analyst, Metaphysician, and Founder of Scientific Computing!

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!!!!

The Bravest Librarian

Some days we are busy from early morning to late day, reading, writing, planning and meeting.

But while our work is busy and important, it can't compare to THIS librarian imbedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq.

Read her blog and view these incredible pictures from Tikrit here @ http://101dayswith101st.blogspot.com/

Now this is a BRAVE librarian!

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!

WOW! the New Hazy Library & Learning Center

It's week 2 in the new Library. The official Opening Day of Embry Riddle's new Christine & Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Library and Learning Center went off exactly as planned with balloons and snacks galore, flowers on the desk and two writing pads on both downstairs and upstairs floors for users to write their comments.

Patrons commented most on the SPACE, window views of the mountains and main campus, the 'blue' lit staircase, the utter newness and fresh smell of a 35,000 sq. foot facility devoted to Books and magazines, DVDs (main floor) and the HUGE Information Commons with 40 computers upstairs (adding tot the 40 desktops in the downstairs Instruction Room), as well as the state-of-the-art Media Center with production suites for video editing.


For now, we're still in the Honeymoon stage, wandering around and figuring out how everything works. With so much space to manage, it will likely take about 6 months to get truly acclimated, but we have much to do meanwhile. New Library CDs informing new students about the services offered here in the library, fresh signage pointing to the new spaces and how to monitor all this space!

More insights about the new library later as we approach May's official Dedication for the new library (May 3, 2008).