News From the Field

University of Florida
George A. Smathers Libraries | Health Science Center Libraries

George A. Smathers Libraries

Appointments, Departures, and Promotions

Joe Aufmuth, UF's GIS Librarian, has recently been appointed Assistant Chair for Government Documents and Interim Head of the Map and Imagery Library. These functions were previously performed by Dr. HelenJane Armstrong, who retired December 31, 2005.

Kelley Cunningham is the new Grants Coordinator of the George A. Smathers Libraries. She earned a BBA in marketing from Lambuth University, Jackson, Tennessee. Kelley brings more than 3 years of grants experience from the College of Engineering Contracts & Grants Office. In order to maintain the Libraries grants agenda, she will work diligently with library staff, faculty, and others. The Grants Management Committee of the George A. Smathers Libraries has been developing a more proactive approach and program to help library staff search, apply for, and administer grants, and obtain the requisite training and advice. Their work includes a brochure and a Grants Management website. Kelley Cunningham is working closely with this group as well.

Jason Fleming has accepted the position of Technical Support Librarian/Assistant University Librarian. He graduated from UF in 1999 with a BA in religion, and will receive his MLS in August from University of South Florida. The Technical Support position is based in the Central Bibliographic Services Section. Principal responsibility is coordinating the implementation of innovative methods of acquiring and cataloging library resources, testing software for possible application to work process, such as MacroExpress, and tracking and maintaining monthly and annual OCLC usage statistics to help ensure the most efficient use of OCLC and SOLINET services and products. Technical Support responsibilities also encompass serving as liaison with OCLC/SOLINET, DLC, Systems, FCLA, library units, sections, and departments on specific functions/issues.

Sara A. Russell Gonzalez was appointed Science Librarian/Assistant University Librarian at the Marston Science Library. Her responsibilities are in the areas of physics, astronomy, and geology. She has BA from the California Institute of Technology and a PhD in Seismology and Geophysics. She decided to make a career move to librarianship and will soon receive her MLS.

Carrie Newsom began as Science Librarian/Assistant University Librarian at the Marston Science Library in January, 2006. She received her MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin in December, 2005. While in school, she worked as a graduate research assistant for the office of the library director. In 2002, she earned her BS in botany from the University of Florida, and then worked as a research assistant for various departments on the UF campus (anatomy & cell biology, zoology, and entomology). Her current areas of specialization are chemistry and chemical engineering.

Jingfeng Xia, Digital Projects Metadata Librarian in the Cataloging and Metadata Department, left UF in January to join his family and take another position. Jingfeng accepted an Assistant Librarian position for Reference and Instruction (Social Sciences) at the John Cotton Dana Library at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.

Retirements

Dr. HelenJane Armstrong, Map & Imagery Librarian at the University of Florida is retiring after 33 years of service. Dr. Armstrong transformed twelve map cases into a collection that is one of the largest academic map libraries in the United States. She has held numerous offices, including President, in the Map and Geography Roundtable (MAGERT) and has written many publications, two of which received awards. She was the U.S. representative to the committee that revised the AACR2 Cataloging rules for maps. In addition, she designed the unique compact shelving to house map cases that served as a model for the National Archives and secured the only collection of Florida aerial photos that are now scanned and available to researchers all over the world.

After thirty years of library service, Gary Cornwell retired from the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida (UF) on February 28, 2006, and was awarded emeritus status. Gary was a strong leader for Public Services and the Smathers Libraries generally. He began working for the Libraries as a student assistant and was first appointed as an Assistant Librarian in the Documents Department in 1980. In the Documents Department, he coordinated activities relating to UF's Regional Depository for U.S. federal documents and supervised the Technical Services Unit. He served as Assistant Chair and made a special contribution by developing online processing and online access to bibliographic records for documents. In 1995, he was appointed Acting Chair of the Humanities and Social Sciences Services Department and has served as Chair of that department since 1996. Gary was very involved in the life and governance of Smathers Libraries and the University of Florida, and with professional issues regionally and nationally. His noteworthy activities relate to U.S. federal documents. He served on both the ALA and GODORT Legislation Committees, including a year as Chair of the GODORT Committee. He was member and Chair of the Federal Depository Library Council and also served on two Government Printing Office Ad Hoc Committees – one on regional library structure and the other on reducing costs of the federal depository library program. He played a leading role in bringing together several collaborative groups that tackled the very difficult issues relating to the dissemination of U.S. federal government information (Co-Chair of both the Dupont Circle Group and the Chicago Conference on the Future of Federal Government Information, organizer of COMA, and editor of the ALA/COL/GODORT Task Force on Restrictions on Access to Government Information). For these and other activities, he was given one of the most important awards in documents librarianship, the CIS/GODORT/ALA/Documents to the People Award. He also serves on the editorial board of Government Information Quarterly.

In Memoriam

Nobuko Pourzadeh-Boushehri, who served for many years as the Smathers Libraries Japanese Studies Collection Manager until she retired in the fall of 2003, died on December 28, 2005. Nobuko was born in Kyoto, Japan and moved to Gainesville in 1962 to attend the University of Florida. Nobuko worked in the Documents Department as an Archivist processing foreign and international material, and selected materials for Japanese Studies as a part-time added responsibility. Her friendly smile, cooperative spirit, and extensive language skills, including familiarity with the older Japanese language and literature courtesy of her erudite family history, have been sorely missed by library and university faculty colleagues.

State/National/International Activities

Tom Caswell and Ann Lindell of the Architecture and Fine Arts Library hosted the annual meeting of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Southeast Chapter. The meeting was held in St. Petersburg, Florida, November 10-12, 2005. Tom Caswell is Chapter President for 2006.

Ann Lindell graduated from the 2004-2005 Sunshine State Library Leadership Institute, Summer 2005. For information on the Institute, visit http://www.neflin.org/leadership.

Paul Victor (Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Librarian) has been accepted to ACRL's National Immersion Program. Immersion is a competitive program that allows instruction librarians the opportunity to work intensively on major aspects of information literacy. He will be participating in the Teacher Track, which focuses on developing personal instruction skills. The curriculum of this track encompasses information literacy topics such as assessment, classroom techniques, learning theory, and leadership. The 2006 National Immersion Program will be held at Simmons College in Boston, July 28 through August 2.

Papers, Publications, and Presentations

Joe Aufmuth, GIS Librarian, presented a paper entitled "The Red Sea Rangers: A Case Study on Using Spatial Collections and Remote Sensing to Protect Aquatic Resources" at the 31st IAMSLIC Conference in Rome, Italy. The paper will be published in the conference proceedings. The conference theme was "Information for Responsible Fisheries: Libraries as Mediators." Aufmuth is currently working on an invited article for the Fall 2006 "Geographic Information Systems" issue of Library Trends.

Steven Carrico, Gifts & Exchange Librarian, published "Online Bookselling at the Smathers Library Bookstore," in Library Resources & Technical Services 49, no. 4 (2005).

Tom Caswell and Ann Lindell had their article, "Recognizing Distinction in the Southeast: Twenty Years of the Mary Ellen LoPresti Awards for Excellence in Art Publishing," published in Art Documentation 24:1 (2005).

Tom Caswell (Architecture and Fine Arts Librarian) and Leilani Freund (Humanities & Social Science Reference Librarian) researched and published SPEC Kit 288 entitled "Scanning Services For Library Users." The Kit was published in 2005 by ARL and "provides a snapshot of what scanning services are currently being offered to users in ARL libraries and the variety of ways these services are offered, secured, evaluated, and publicized … [and] … includes documentation from respondents in the form of equipment and service descriptions, scanner instructions, position descriptions, and promotional materials." The table of contents and executive summary from this SPEC Kit are available at http://www.arl.org/spec/SPEC288web.pdf.

Michele M. Foss (Head, InterLibrary Loan) co-authored "HSCL LibQUAL+ 2004: From Numbers and Graphs to Practical Application" in the Medical Reference Services Quarterly, v.25, issue 1, p.1-15, with Amy Buhler, Lenny Rhine, and Beth Layton.

Iona R. Malanchuk, Head of the Education Library, and Marilyn Ochoa, Assistant University Librarian for the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, published "Academic Librarians and Outreach Beyond the College Campus" in Southeastern Librarian, v. 53, no. 3 (Fall 2005), pg. 23-29.

Exhibitions and Related Activities

The Special and Area Studies Collections Department mounted an exhibit in support of "Comics and Childhood," the 4th University of Florida Comics Conference, organized by the English Department and held February 23-25, 2006. The exhibit, "Comics and Childhood: from Katzenjammer to Klarion," was set up by the Department to commemorate the occasion, and several librarians participated in the conference itself. Rita Smith, Baldwin Library Curator, spoke on a panel organized by Special Collections on how academic libraries provide access to popular culture that has become the basis for scholarly study. The paper, entitled "Curating the Quotidian," used the Big Little Books series and their collector, Sol Davidson, as the "example" of this process. Suzy Covey, Systems Librarian, spoke on another panel on the topic of "Comics as Data." She discussed various types of metadata that can be applied to comics, illustrated with examples of vintage Sunday comic strips from the UF Libraries' Sol and Penny Davidson Collection.

An exhibition of highlights from the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries' Caribbean archival and library materials opened February 24, 2006 at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida in Miami. The exhibition, "Caribbean Collage: Archival Collections and the Construction of History," spans five centuries of Caribbean history and focuses on the British West Indies, Haiti, and Cuba from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Department of Special and Area Studies Collections and the Map and Imagery Library. Materials for the exhibit were selected from the holdings of the Latin American Collection, Special Collections, and the Map and Imagery Library. "Visitors to the exhibition will have an opportunity to examine first-hand accounts of some of the most dramatic events in Caribbean history and will be encouraged to construct their own interpretations of the region's past and its impact on the present," says Dr. Stephen Stuempfle, chief curator of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida. The exhibition runs through June 4, 2006.

Faculty and students of the UF Department of Landscape Architecture collaborated with John Nemmers, Manuscripts Librarian, on an exhibition entitled "John Ormsbee Simmons Remembered: Visionary Landscape Architect, Planner, Educator, and Environmentalist (1913-2005)," October, 2005 - February, 2006. To view the exhibition catalog, visit http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/exhibits/simonds.pdf.

To view the catalog of the October, 2005 exhibition "75 Years of Blondie: 1930-2005," visit http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/exhibits/Blondie.pdf.

Awards and Honors

Denise Beaubien Bennett, Pamela S. Cenzer, and Paul Kirk have been selected as the recipients of the 2006 Reference and User Services Association's (RUSA) Reference Service Press Award for their article "A Class Assignment Requiring Chat-Based Reference," Reference & User Services Quarterly, 44 (2) : 149-163 (Winter 2004). The award, which consists of a plaque and $2,500 cash, is presented to recognize the most outstanding article published in RUSQ during the preceding two volume years. The article is selected on the basis of originality, timeliness, relevance to RUSA areas of interest and concern, and quality of writing.

Library Grants, Donations, and Acquisitions

Chelsea Dinsmore and Marina Salcedo have received notice that their application for the ALA and Nextbook's "Lets Talk About It" program grant has been awarded. The program, "Jewish Literature: Identity and Imagination," will take place at the UF Libraries in the fall of 2006. Nextbook is a gateway to Jewish literature, culture and ideas. For further information, visit http://nextbook.org/ala.

Hikaru Nakano, East Asian Cataloger, has been awarded a Multi-Volume Set grant from the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources. Ms. Nakano worked closely with David Hickey, East Asian Collection Bibliographer, to provide the documentation supporting this grant application. To quote the NCC director, the application was a "clear standout, particularly amazing because it was a first-time application both for Florida and for Hikaru herself." With this support, the East Asian Studies Collection will be able to purchase the "Bideo ni yoru genchi minyō kenkyu shiryō (ビデオによる現地民踊研究資料)." It is a set of 15 videos recording the minyōs of many communities of Japan, a traditional art form combining dance, song, and religious worship. One of the terms of the grant is that the set be available for interlibrary loan.

Funded Digitization Projects at the Digital Library Center

Rewiring Florida's News: From Microfilm to Digital, funded by the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), September, 2005. The purpose of this project is to change the preservation model for newspapers from microfilm to digital and to create the core collection of the Florida Digital Newspaper Library by digitizing and making internet searchable and viewable local Florida newspapers beginning with January 2006 issues. This grant will set up the technical infrastructure to be expanded over time to include more newspaper titles and years, thus creating a digital resource that is useful to all Floridians and can be integrated into the Florida Electronic Library.

Journal of the Florida House of Representatives Digitization Project, funded by the House. The complete run of the Journal of the Florida House of Representatives from 1845-1995 is being digitized into a fully searchable collection. The project began in the fall of 2005.

Faculty Governance at the George A. Smathers Libraries

On December 6th, 2004, the Faculty of the Libraries at the University of Florida met to discuss the results of the summer 2004 University of Florida Faculty Survey. One of the outcomes of this discussion was the desire to explore Faculty Governance models that are in use within the broader UF community and other ARL level libraries for possible implementation at the UF Libraries.

 Beginning in the fall of 2005, the UF Senators (Naomi Young, Cataloging & Metadata; Joe Aufmuth, Map & Imagery Library; Cathleen Martyniak (Preservation); and Michele Tennant (Health Sciences Library Center) facilitated the formation of the UF Library Faculty Assembly (LFA) and a series of nine meetings were planned throughout 2005-2006 … "with the dual purpose of gathering feedback on University-wide Senate issues and allowing a face to face forum where all Library Faculty can explore Governance issues."

The Faculty Governance Working Group (FGWG) began in November, 2005 to study possible shared faculty governance models for the Libraries at UF. Candidates for an interim chair and secretary were nominated in December, and in January Carol Ritzen Kem (Associate Librarian, Marston Science Library) was elected Interim Chair, and Chelsea Dinsmore (Assistant Librarian, Government Documents Department) was elected Interim Secretary. The Faculty Governance Working Group is also beginning to work on a set of bylaws for the governance of the Libraries.

Building and Automation

For photographs and updates of the new addition to Library West, visit http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/pio/construction. The last details are being worked out - landscaping, compact shelving, furnishings. The latest projected date for the grand opening is now summer, 2006.