NASIG Conference: Call for Poster Sessions

The North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) Program Planning Committee (PPC) invites poster session proposals for the 26th NASIG conference in St. Louis, Missouri, June 2-5, 2011. The theme of the conference is "Gateway to Collaboration."

Posters will be on display 9am-5pm on Saturday, June 4th. Presenters must be available to discuss their topics during the afternoon break on this day.

Poster sessions provide an opportunity to share innovative ideas, new workflows, and new applications of technology. Sessions may present a report of a research study, an analysis of a practical problem-solving effort, or a description of an innovative program that may be of interest to the serials community. Proposals should name any particular products or services that are integral to the content of the poster session. However, as a matter of NASIG policy, programs should not be used as a venue to promote or attack any product, service, or institution.

To propose a poster session, please use the online form.

Proposals must be received by 5pm PDT on Friday, April 1, 2011. Members of the Program Planning Committee will evaluate abstracts, and presenters will be notified in April 2011.

Inquiries may be sent to the PPC co-chairs, Anne Mitchell and Michael Hanson, at prog-plan@nasig.org.

We look forward to seeing you in St. Louis!

--Anne Mitchell and Michael Hanson, PPC Co-Chairs

ALCTS webinar: RDA and Serials Catalogers

ALCTS webinar: RDA and Serials Catalogers: Will Our Work Really Change?

Date: March 2, 2011

All webinars are one hour in length and begin at 2pm Eastern, 1pm Central, noon Mountain, and 11am Pacific Time.

Description: How will RDA affect serials cataloging? This webinar will provide an overview of the work done by the ALCTS Continuing Resources Section’s Continuing Resource Cataloging Committee in testing RDA. It will also highlight issues affecting serials cataloging that have arisen during the national RDA testing.

Audience: Cataloging staff who already have some experience with serials cataloging and who want to know how their current practices will change with RDA.

Presenter: Steve Shadle is Serials Access Librarian at the University of Washington Libraries where he is responsible for local systems and services that provide access to electronic serials (including library cataloging). With Les Hawkins (CONSER Program Coordinator), he developed the Electronic Serials Cataloging Workshop for the Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program (SCCTP) and also serves as a trainer for a number of SCCTP courses. In 2010 Steve received the Ulrich’s Serials Librarianship Award in recognition of his work on eSerial cataloging continuing education. Steve is on the Editorial Board for Serials Review and is the current Vice-President/President-Elect of the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG).

This is the third is a series of five webinars on RDA. The webinars included in the RDA series are:

February 2, 2011 - Changes from AACR2 to RDA. Part 1: Description
February 9, 2011 - Changes from AACR2 to RDA. Part 2: Access Points
March 2, 2011 - RDA and Serials Catalogers: Will Our Work Really Change?

March 16, 2011 - Linked library data: tuning library metadata for the Semantic Web

April 6, 2011 - Preparing copy catalogers for RDA

To Register, complete the online registration form at http://www.ala.org/ala/onlinelearning/reg/webinar.cfm

for the session you would like to attend.

Fees for individual webinars:

Group Rates - ALCTS Members & Non-Members: $99

Individuals - ALCTS Members: $39; Non-Members: $49

Participants outside the United States may register at the ALCTS member rate. 

Pricing for RDA Series: (All 5 webinars)
Group Rates - ALCTS Members & Non-Members: $346
Individuals - ALCTS members: $120; Non-members: $160

Participants outside the United States may register at the ALCTS member rate. 

All webinars are recorded and the one-time fee includes unlimited access to the webinar recording. All registered attendees will receive the link to the recorded session so if you are unable to attend the webinar at the time it is presented, you will have the opportunity to listen to the recording at your convenience.

For questions about registration, contact Tom Ferren, ALA Senior Registration Coordinator at 1-800-545-2433, ext. 4293 or tferren@ala.org. For all other questions or comments related to the webinars, contact Julie Reese, ALCTS Events Manager.

Posted on behalf of the ALCTS Continuing Education Committee.

CONSER Editing Guide Revision: Request for Comments

CONSER requests comments on their draft revisions for the CONSER Editing Guide.  The deadline for comments is January 31, 2011.

View the draft revisions and instructions for submitting comments on the CONSER website.

Applications are being accepted for NASIG Awards & Grants

The North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) is now accepting applications for various awards and grants.

View the announcement here.

The application deadline in January 18, 2011.

LRTS Request for Grant Proposals

Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS), the journal of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), announces the availability of grants of up to $1,000 (funded by an ALA Carnegie-Whitney Grant) to assist authors with preparing literature reviews. 

The purpose of the grants is to provide funds that will be used for clerical and research support, thereby allowing the author/s to concentrate on analyzing the resources and writing the literature review.  Possible tasks might be collecting citations, sorting and organizing citations by themes and categories, locating and gathering resources to be reviewed, verifying citations, funding purchases of articles not owned by the home institution of the author, and so forth.  Funding also could provide a mentoring opportunity by  funding assistance by a library school or information science student.

Highly cited, literature reviews provide an essential professional service to practitioners, scholars, and students by identifying the key themes and the most important publications appearing in successive two year periods.  Books and articles by accredited scholars and researchers, i.e., primarily peer-reviewed publications provide the basis for a literature review.  A good literature review is evaluative, selective, and critical, and goes beyond summarizing and quoting from the selected sources.   Literature reviews explain why the sources cited are important and valuable, may compare them to prior works, and create a structure that organizes the two-year body of content to make it comprehensible and to identify themes, not only for those who have followed the developments it describes, but to future researchers.  All sources referenced appear in the endnotes; a separate bibliography is not published.  Although commissioned, LRTS literature reviews go through the same double-blind peer review process as unsolicited manuscripts.

 LRTS seeks authors for the following topical areas and coverage periods:

• Acquisitions literature published 2010-2011
• Serials literature published 2010-2011

Papers should be submitted not later than June 30, 2012. Grant recipients will be required to submit progress reports to the LRTS Editor twice a year.

The grant proposal must include:

1. Requester name, title, and contact information
2. The literature to be reviewed (see list above) 
3. The requester's credentials to write the literature review
4. The amount requested
5. Budget plan and rationale for how the funds will be expended 

Proposals are due by January 31, 2011.
Applications and inquiries should be submitted to Peggy Johnson, LRTS Editor, lrtseditor@ala.org

2010 CONSER Annual Report Now Available

The 2010 CONSER Annual Report has been posted to their website. Highlights include:

• information on new CONSER member libraries
• highlights from the May 2010 operations meeting
• information on the Open Access Journal Project
• Serials Cooperative Cataloging Training Program (SCCTP) update

CONSER RDA Testing

The CONSER Program has shared some of their Resource Description and Access (RDA) testing information.

A three-part document covers issues related to RDA, the CONSER Standard Record (CSR), and the Library of Congress Policy Statements (LCPSs).  It includes the following sections:

• RDA as Modified by CSR: Recommended Guidelines
• Differences between CSR, RDA, and LCPS
• Using Existing OCLC Bibliographic Records for Serials: CONSER RDA Testers

A webinar recording from September 29, 2010, consisting of RDA test discussions for CONSER catalogers is also available.  It is just under one hour long and will be of interest to RDA testers and those dedicated to following the test process.

Helpful links were shared in the webinar:

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging has a web page devoted to RDA testing: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/RDA-PCC.html

The University of Chicago Library has kindly shared its RDA testing information as well:  http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/staffweb/depts/cat/rda.html  Included is a link to Renette Davis' presentation "Changes from AACR2 to RDA for Cataloging Serials."