June 1996 Issue: 141

Table of Contents

 President's Year-end Message
1996 LAUNC-CH Research Forum
Election of Officers for 1996-97
Member News/Library News
Live from the Olympics

President's Year-end Message

     As Summer approaches with its stifling heat and humidity, members of the Librarians' Association at UNC-Chapel Hill (LAUNC-CH) can relax and reminisce for the next two months on the progress which LAUNC-CH has made in 1995-96. Having tasty delicacies is a requirement for attracting a crowd. What more appropriate way could the Program Committee have begun the year than by throwing a party- "The Fall Social!" At that time colleagues from different areas got together to eat, drink, exchange pleasantries, and pay their annual dues. This committee further presented other stimulating and diverse programs throughout the year, including such topics as "The Library Development Effort and Fund Raising", and "Cataloging Internet Resources."
    The Conference Committee made the nearly 140 registrants from across Central North Carolina at the annual Spring Conference less apprehensive about the prospects of developing library collections in the 21st century. The inclement weather did not dampen the spirits of those who attended the Research Forum; indeed, the speakers were so enthused with their topic that the audience was energized, and longed for more information on Sir James Wilson and the incorporation of relevance feedback in information retrieval.
    Members of the Professional Welfare Committee made Chancellor Hooker aware of the inequities in salaries which librarians at UNC-Chapel Hill experience, in comparison with their colleagues at other large research libraries. The appointed treasurer, Anita Booth, provided us with clear, up-to-date records of the financial health of the association. Secretary, Sandra Dyer, carefully recorded all the deliberations at the meetings of the Executive Board, and Geneva Holliday and Lynn Eades, co-editors of the Newsletter, reorganized the contents of the monthly newsletter.
    A vote of sincere thanks is mandatory to all the committee chairs, the secretary, treasurer, newsletter editors and news coordinators, past president, and nominating committee members for their exemplary contribution to LAUNC-CH in 1995-96. Mention must be made of Peggy Morrison and her Conference Committee members for their tireless effort which helped make the Spring Conference a great success. Also, I express my gratitude to Frieda Rosenberg, Chair, and members of the Program Committee for presenting informative and interesting programs during 1995-96; to Libby Chenault, Chair, and members of the Professional Welfare Committee who fought for better salaries; to our treasurer, Anita Booth, for keeping LAUNC- CH financially solvent; to Hsi-Chu Bolick,Chair, of the Professional Development Committee, and her team for choosing appropriate speakers for the Research Forum; to Sandra Dyer for being such an efficient secretary; to Lynn Eades and Geneva Holliday for making the newsletter available to our members in any format they chose; and to Libby Grey, Chair, and other members of the Nominating Committee, who worked so diligently to encourage members to submit their names to be nominated for next year's offices.
    Finally, I am very grateful to all our members who supported me at a time when I least expected to take over the leadership of this organization. Linda Drake will still be our past president next year, and I can depend on her for sound advice. I am very appreciative to all those who willingly accepted to serve as chairpersons for 1996-97. Above all, I thank my God for sustaining me and answering my prayers especially in difficult times.
    Remember, this is your organization. There is always room for growth. If you can spare some time in your busy schedule to be a member of any committee, please contact me or any of the committee chairs. We look forward to hearing from you. Have a fun-filled Summer.

--Brenda Ambrose-Fortune

1996 LAUNC-CH Research Forum

     LAUNC-CH 1996 Research Forum, attended by about 40 people, was held on May 16th at Toy Lounge from 3:00-5:00 p.m. Dr. Page Life from Monograph Cataloging of Davis Library, and Mr. Bob Sumner, a PhD candidate from School of Information and Library Science at UNC-CH presented their researches respectively in: "Journals and shorthand of Sir James Wilson, 1780-1847" and "The Incorporation of Relevance Feedback and Degrees of Relevance in Information Retrieval: The Adaptive Linear (AL) Model."
    After Page's fascinating subject, Bob Sumner presented the topic "The Incorporation of Relevance Feedback and Degrees of Relevance in Information Retrieval: The Adaptive Linear (AL) Model."
    Bob first introduced the concept of the Adaptive Linear (AL) model for information retrieval, which is a model that employs relevance feedback. Under the AL model, the information retrieval system utilizes a user's relevance assessments of the retrieved documents to improve later iterations of the search. An advantage of the AL model over other models of relevance feedback is that it allows the user to assess the documents using more values of relevance than the conventional two values of "Relevant" and "Not Relevant."
    Bob further discussed an experiment that tested the AL model on a 74,520 document database consisting of Wall Street Journal articles. In the experiment, the SMART information retrieval system was used for the initial ranking of documents, and relevance assessments were made on the top 20 documents retrieved. The only two values of relevance used for assessment were "Relevant" and "Not Relevant."
    The retrieval performance for the relevance feedback run was much better than the performance of the initial ranking of documents. And, the performance was comparable to that of another relevance feedback model, the Ide dec hi model. Bob concluded that in the future, an experiment will be conducted that compares the two relevance-feedback models and where the relevance assessments for the AL model are made using more values than "Relevant" and "Not Relevant."

--Hsi-Chu Bolick

Election of Officers for 1996-97

     LAUNC-CH members went to the polls to elect their officers for the 1996-97 academic year. The new officers of LAUNC-CH are:

Vice President/President-elect:

Secretary: Treasurer: Brenda Ambrose-Fortune will continue as President and Linda Drake will continue on as Past-President.
    The following committee chairs have agreed to serve for the 1996-97 academic year:

Professional Development Committee:

Professional Welfare Committee: Program Committee:     If you are interested in serving on a committee or would like to chair the Conference Committee, please contact Brenda Ambrose-Fortune at 2-0153

Member News/Library News

Biology Library

Bill Burk presented a talk, "Emanuel D. Rudolph's Contributition as an Abstractor for Biological Abstracts," at the 105th Annual Meeting of the Ohio Academy of Science, held at Malone College, Canton, OH, the first week of May. His talk which reviewed the history of the preparation of abstracts for Biological Abstracts by volunteer abstractors and the role of Rudolph, noted botanist, in preparing abstracts, was followed by an interesting discussion of these topics.

Bill Burk and Dr. Ronald L. Studkey edited an article, "History of the Botanical Teaching Laboratory in the United States," by Emanuel D. Rudolph, American Journal of Botany 83 (May 1996): 661-671. The article reviews the establishment of teaching laboratories for botany in the United States from the early 19th century through the late twentieth century.

Davis Library

Marcia Tuttle spoke to the New England Chapter of ACRL in Boston on May 23 on the topic of serials pricing. On May 28-31 Marcia attended the Society for Scholarly Publishing's Annual Meeting held in Minneapolis MN. She is a member of Board of Directors of the Society.

Patty Vaught attended the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Material in New York City on June 1-5. The theme of this year's conference was "SALALM in the Age of Multimedia : Technological Challenge and Social Change."

Naomi Kietzke and Frieda Rosenberg attended the North Carolina Serials Conference in Burlington, NC on April 4th and 5th. Frieda is writing a report on the conference for Serials Review.

Natalia Smith, Digitization Project Librarian, participated in a panel discussion at the SOLINET Annual Meeting Preservation Pre-conference in Atlanta, GA on May 1st. She presented a case study of the UNC-CH pilot digitization project, Documenting the American South. Two other panelists included representatives from Southeastern institutions currently involved in scanning projects of their collections.

Geneva Holliday attended the Medical Library Association (MLA) Annual Meeting in Kansas City, MO, May 30th-June 5th.

Health Sciences Library

Julia Shaw-Kokot attended the LOEX Conference in Ypsilanti, MI, May 16th -18th. The theme of the conference was "Programs that Work."

The Health Sciences Library was well represented at the MLA Annual Meeting in Kansas City, MO, May 30th -June 5th. The theme of this years meeting was "The Information Frontier."

The following poster sessions were presented at MLA this year:

"Questions Asked and Answered in Community-Based Practice and Educational Settings: Preliminary Results," Carol Jenkins, Keith Cogdill, Charles Friedman and Michael Sharp.

"Successful Transitions to Multimedia Courseware," Jacintha Kompella and Michael London.

"Using Relational Databases for Performance Support," Carol Payne.

"Using Laptop Computers to Learn Evidence-Based Medicine Off-Campus," Jill Mayer and Margaret Moore.

The following presentations were made at MLA:

"Supporting Medical Education in Community Practice Settings" Margaret Moore, Diana McDuffee, Jill Mayer, Julia Shaw-Kokot

"Information needs in Community-Based Practice and Educational Setting: A Pilot Study" Carol Jenkins, Keith Cogdill, Charles Friedman, Michael Sharp

Law Library

Lolly Gasaway has been appointed as a member of the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admision to the Bar of the American Bar Association for a three year term that begins August 2nd. She was also a member of a panel discussion on Copyright in the Information Frontier at the MLA Annual meeting in Kansas City.

Debbie Webster and Marguerite Most attended the 6th annual conference on Law School Computers in Chicago.

School of Information and Library Science

Claudia Gallop, Assistant Professor and Carolyn Lipscomb presented the paper "Preparing Tomorrow's Health Sciences Librarians" at the MLA Annual Meeting in Kansas City.

Bert J. Dempsey, Assistant Professor, gave a seminar on Technologies for Distance Education on June 3rd, to participants in the Southeastern Institute for Faculty Training in Flat Rock, NC. The Institute is a four-day training center sponsored through the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at UNC that brings together leaders in early intervention programs from 15 states around the country, including specialists and faculty in special education, speech pathology, social work, medicine, occupational therapy, and child development.

Edward G. Holley, William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus, gave the School of Information and Library Science commencement address, "To See the Glass Half Full: A Challenge for Commencement Day," on May 12th.

Jerry D. Saye, Associate Professor and Associate Dean, attended the May 9-10th "DDC 21 Workshop for Library Educators" at OCLC Online Computer Training Center, in Dublin, OH.

Barbara Wildemuth, Associate Professor, attended the annual meeting of the ACM SIGCHI (Computer-Human Interaction) in Vancouver, in April. This included a tutorial on designing web pages.

Helen R. Tibbo, Associate Professor, gave a paper, "Finding the Forest for the Trees: Searching National Bibliographic Files for Archival Records," at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference on May 3rd, in College Park, MD. She is also chairing the SAA Task Force on the Future of the American Archivist.

Library News outside of UNC

David S. Ferriero has been named University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affiars at Duke University, effective October 1st. He is currently Associate Director for Public Services at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Live from the Olympics

     This year, the city of Atlanta will host the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. To get ready for this world event, here are sites on the Internet concerning the Olympics.

Official Atlanta "96 Olympic Games
http://www.atlanta.olympic.org/

NBC Sports Presents the Games of the XXVI Olympiad
http://www.olympic.nbc.com/

Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC)
http://204.146.47.40/noc/feanoc.html

International Olympic Committee
http://www.olympic.org/

The First Olympic Games - Athens 1896
http://exp3.wam.umd.edu/~yiannis/

One Hundred Years of Olympic History - NationsBank
http://www.96games.com/history/index.htm

Official Sponsors of the 1996 Olympic Games
http://204.146.46.188/sponsors/sponsors.html

1998 Winter Olympic Games - Nagano, Japan
http://www.linc.or.jp/Nagano/

100 Years of Women in the Olympics
http://www.atlanta.olympic.org/acog/news/pr/d-timeline.html

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Last updated: June 1996
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