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News from the Department of Information Science (formerly SIM)

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AASL Conference student award

Purpose
The AASL Conference Student Award is intended to introduce a library school student interested in a career in architecture school librarianship to the membership and activities of AASL through attendance at the organization’s annual conference. The upcoming conference will be held in Miami, FL, April 10-12, 2014.

Award

  1. $500 for travel expenses (disbursed to the recipient following the annual meeting after the post-conference report is received by the Awards Committee Chair).
  2. Waiver of the annual meeting registration fee
  3. Waiver of annual AASL dues for a period of one year

Eligibility
Any student who is currently enrolled in an ALA accredited graduate program and alumni of ALA accredited graduate programs who have graduated within twelve months of the application deadline are eligible to apply.

Guidelines
Prior to the deadline applicants must submit:

  1. completed online application form
  2. a current résumé to the AASL Awards Committee Chair Elizabeth Schaub: eschaub@austin.utexas.edu

Requirements

  1. The recipient of the award must confirm in writing via e-mail that s/he is able to meet the requirement of full conference attendance.
  2. The recipient of the award will submit a brief post-conference report for posting on the AASL Website. The report should outline conference activities and experiences and include an account of how the award supported professional development goals.

Deadline Friday, February 14, 2014, 12 am PST

Inquiries about the award should be directed to:
Elizabeth Schaub
Director, Visual Resources Collection
School of Architecture
The University of Texas at Austin
310 Inner Campus Drive, B7500
Austin, TX 78712-1009
e-mail: eschaub@austin.utexas.edu
phone: 512.471.5003

Closing of science libraries

The  Department of Fisheries and Oceans has announced that it will close 7 of it 11 regional libraries to save an annual cost of $430,000 by consolidating these resources into two locations.

Dr. Peter Wells, an adjunct at SIM, is quoted in this article that discusses the closure of seven regional libraries by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Below is a summary of some of the impact statements that have been made in the news media:

Peter Wells: I see this situation as a national tragedy, done under the pretext of cost savings, which, when examined closely, will prove to be a false motive… A modern democratic society should value its information resources, not reduce, or worse, trash them.

Burton Ayles: It’s a loss of historic material, it’s a loss of the grey [not widely published] literature.

Tom Siddon: I call it [closing libraries] Orwellian, because some might suspect that it’s driven by a notion to exterminate all unpopular scientific findings that interfere with the government’s economic objectives …You do not extinguish national libraries of knowledge or history in an arbitrary way any more than the government would be allowed to extinguish the record of cabinet deliberations or to burn the books of Hansard.

David Schindler: Paranoid ideologues have burned books and records throughout human history to try to squelch dissenting visions that they view as heretical, and to anyone who worships the great God Economy monotheistically, environmental science is heresy.

We at SIM welcome an open discussion about these closures and their impact.

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