Austin this week

I’m off to SAA in Austin early tomorrow morning.  Hopefully, I’ll survive the heat, learn some things, meet/reconnect with good people, and eat great food.

Google wonder wheel

This is old news at this point, but I figured I would share the archivist searches I tried on the Google Wonder Wheel a few weeks ago. I enjoyed the spin off action. Related websites are displayed on the right (click for full image.)  This brings me back to grad school search and retrieval courses, but less painful.

New UM/Google deal

With the impending Google settlement, the University of Michigan and Google have come to a new agreement.  From the UM news service:

The agreement opens up the U-M library’s extensive collections of 8 million works to readers and students throughout the United States with free previews, the ability to buy access to the university’s collections online and through subscriptions at other institutions.

Through provisions in Google’s pending settlement with authors and publishers and the amended U-M agreement, Google will provide a free public access terminal, allowing every public and collegiate library in the country that chooses—from those in small towns to those at large universities—equal access to the U-M materials.

See:

U-M first to sign new digitization agreement with Google

Google Book-Scanning Pact to Give Libraries Input on Price (NYT)

OHS poll

The Save the Oregon Historical Society Research Library & Staff! Facebook group sent out this message last night:

“Oregon Historical Society Polls Stakeholders

The Oregon Historical Society has put up a short poll asking for feedback on what’s most important to its stakeholders:

http://tinyurl.com/q3ucxh

This is an excellent opportunity to let OHS know what’s important to you.

Please take the time weigh in! Thank you!”

If you’re in Oregon or used any resources at OHS before consider taking the short poll.

National Archives loses hard drive

From the Washington Post this morning: National Archives Loses Hard Drive

Poster presentation resources

Reflecting on putting a poster presentation together, I figured I should share some links and resources I used in the process.  Much of what I could find on the web was related to scientific poster presentations, but still useful for non-scientific posters.  The UBuffalo and UNC pages are good places to start with lots of links to additional resources.  It would have been nice to find more examples of social science posters.  Let me know if you know of any good ones!

Resources, guidelines, and tips:

• Poster presentations (University of Buffalo Libraries)
• Poster and presentation resources (UNC Grad School)
• Scientific poster production how to (Portland State)
• Developing a poster in the Social Sciences (George Mason University)

PowerPoint Templates:

• Georgetown Medical Center
• Wake Forest School of Medicine
• Harvard University (PPT)
• University of California
• UC Davis
• Penn State
• CAIN Project (Rice University)
• Postersession.com Templates
• PosterPresentations.com Templates

OAH Poster

A much belated post.  My poster session went well.  I got a few good questions and there were no major mishaps putting the poster up.  Posters are still a pretty new thing for historical conferences.  I think it is something that should be promoted among more in the profession, particularly among graduate students to showcase their research.  Choosing busier times during the conference and perhaps leaving posters up for a whole day would increase visibility, dialog, and hopefully generate more participation in future years.

Other important thing I learned: the color on your computer screen is not the color the fancy printer in the architecture school will print out (ie. blue = purple.)

Here’s a jpeg of our poster (WordPress was not letting me upload the pdf for some reason.)  Our main motivation was to do some public outreach to one of our major user groups: academic historians.

OAH

I’m at the Organization of American Historians’ annual meeting presenting a poster with a colleague this weekend. I’m taking notes and will be sure to make a few posts about the conference, including some on our poster.

For now, I’m out to fine some caffine and breakfast before the next panel begins.

Keeping me busy

I have been fairly silent on here the past few months. During most of the fall I felt I had time to get everything done at work without being too busy. Then January came and since then I felt like I was continually playing catch up with regular tasks as well as various projects. I think I have finally devised a good system in recent weeks to devote time to my various responsibilities and projects. I am feeling less overburdened and more productive most of my days now.

Here’s some of the things I’ve been working on this winter:

• Archivists’ Toolkit Initiative Team
• Dealing with backlog accessioning/correspondence
• Structuring work flows for donor correspondence
• Accessioning/Processing procedures for digital manuscript collections
• Organizing/submitting/preparing for a session for the Northwest History and Heritage Extravaganza, a joint meeting of the Northwest Archivists, Northwest Oral History Association, Oregon Heritage Conference, and the Pacific Northwest History Conference. (accepted!)
• Submitting/preparing a poster session for the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. (accepted!)

There are buds on the trees outside my house this weekend! Here’s hoping that the spring brings continued/increased productivity.

OHS Research Library to close

“[D]ue to severe budget reductions, the Oregon Historical Society will be closing its Research Library beginning this Saturday, February 28th. The collections will no longer be open to the public, and all library positions will be eliminated beginning March 13th.  A few positions will remain to handle orders for photo and film reproduction. It is not known at this time if or when the library will re-open and at what capacity. As many of you know, the OHS Research Library has the largest collection of archival documents relating to the history of Oregon, including its nationally-renowned photograph collection containing over 2.5 million historical photographs, more than 32,000 books, 25,000 maps, 12,000 linear feet of manuscripts, 3,000 serials titles, 16,000 reels of newspaper microfilm, 8.5 million feet of film and videotape, and 10,000 oral history tapes….The board decided to continue support, with some reductions, for our museum and its traveling exhibits and outreach programs.”

More information will be posted on the OHS website in the coming weeks.