Fall 2009

Submitted by admin on Tue, 06/01/2010 - 14:31

Chair's Column

Hello, LACASIST members and friends! It's November already! Where did the months go? It's been a while since our last newsletter issue, but no worries, we've been busy setting up for the new 2009-2010 fiscal year. Since the last time you saw us, we've gone through a number of transitions:

  • a new Executive Board coming in,
  • a new website look and feel,
  • a new newsletter format,
  • a new (for us) mailing list server
  • and, as our past chair loves to say, new blood!

That's right! This year marks a new strategy for LACASIST. We're changing the way we do things on the web and in the flesh. We're making new friends with twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We're making our new website more search optimized, more accessibile. Most importantly, we're making new adjustment to get to know YOU a little better than in the past. At our last board meeting of 2008-2009 in September, Sharon Shafer acknowledged all the hard work done by the Executive Board and Advisory Council and all the volunteers who offered their time and effort to give us:

  • CISTA award presentation to Dagobert Soergel and his talk on "The Task-Centric Revolution" in February. We had a lovely time at Napa Grill afterwards where we talked and checked out cool mobile applications
  • Annual Workshop on "Accessibility: Are You Reaching Everyone?" in May with 4 extremely knowledgeable speakers

It has been a very good year for LACASIST and we have much to look forward to in the coming year. Looking forward, LACASIST is cooking up a lot of changes. Technology is moving faster than ever and we're just catching up. A small preview of what we have in stock for you:

As the incoming Chair, I am excited about the programs we're bringing you this year and working with the 2009-2010 Executive Board and Advisory Council. I am looking forward to meeting you at one event or another. I encourage you to come on by, attend one of our events, check out a workshop, chat during happy hour as we tour Los Angeles, get scrum-friendly at a  board meeting.

Signing off,

Grace Lau, 2009-2010 LACASIST Chair

Collaboration Tools: Best Practices and New Trends

What does it mean to collaborate in today's Web 2.0 world? A panel of speakers pooled from LACASIST and the LA-UX (User Experience Meetup Group) will give a breakdown for best practices on keeping your head above water on collaborative documentation and team productivity. They will talk about collaboration tools and tips for better communication, every day productivity, and shared documentation. Some topics covered include using collaborative document sharing (Google Apps), online project management tools (Basecamp, etc.).

Date and Time:

Thursday, November 19, 2009 - 7:00pm - 10:00pm

Location:

UCLA Law School

405 Hilgard Avenue, ROOM 1357
Los Angeles, CA, 90095

Daily parking permit is $10.

Driving and parking information:

Registration:

This program is free. Please fill out the RSVP form so we may get a head count.

2009 Holiday Party with SLA-SCC

You are invited to the SLA-SCC & LACASIST Joint HolidaySocial!

This year’s Holiday Party is brought to us in part by Library Associates Companies.

Please join us for a fun and festive evening at the Skirball Cultural Center and Museum!

  • Savor delicious hors d’oeuvres, desserts and beverage bar
  • Enjoy fun games and win prizes
  • Receive a gift at the white elephant gift exchange
  • Network with librarians, infopros, library support staff, students and vendors in a relaxing atmosphere

Friday, December 4th

5:30pm-8:00pm

Skirball Cultural Center & Museum
2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90049

Cost: $27 per person

Everyone is welcome! Please bring your family, friends and co-workers!

See the registration form at the SLA-SCC website for more information.

Informaniacs Meetup Group

by: Christina Salazar

LACASIST has helped to form a new Meetup group: Informaniacs of Los Angeles (http://www.meetup.com/informaniacs-of-LA/)! The Meetup site is a social networking website that facilitates face to face meetings of like-minded people. Meetup helps people, “Do something • Learn something • Share something • Change something.”

Informaniacs is for those of us who are looking to merge our professional interests with some good food, good fun, good company and good drinking! We're professional men and women who are involved in Information Architecture, Information Technology, Information Literacy, Knowledge Management, Research and other Information Professions in Corporations, Museums, Libraries and Archives. We want to get out there and enjoy the best of what LA has to offer, while having quasi-geeky conversations about technology, new media, hacking and the habits of information consumers. Join us! We seek to both enlighten and entertain!

As of today, this group has had two in person meetings and 60 interested members. As we gain some momentum with the group in addition to casual “get-togethers” we hope to have relevant speakers, events and topical discussions. Our first to Meetups however, were simply opportunities to meet new people over some appetizers and techie conversations, first at the Library Bar in Downtown Los Angeles and then at the Culver Hotel in Culver City. If you’re interested, please join us for some professionally themed fun by clicking on the link above!

Event Review: Accessibility: Are You Reaching Everyone? Workshop

by Michael Habata

The Los Angeles Chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (LACASIST) organized a day-long workshop on Friday, May 8, 2009 at Cerritos College on the topic of accessibility and meeting the needs of people with disabilities.

Opening the program was keynote speaker Rhea Joyce Rubin, a longtime library consultant who was instrumental in the development of the 2001 ALA policy on serving people with disabilities. Rubin provided statistical data to illustrate disparities on the quality of living, and offered suggestions for considerations for changing misconceptions and improving relations between people with disabilities and people without disabilities. The following is a summary of key points:

  • An estimated 20% of the U.S. population has some form of disabilitiy, although different surveys offer slightly different figures. 

  • Studies show that people with disabilities have much lower rates of satisfaction with their lives than those without disabilities.  Disability can be viewed as a lack of fit between a person's goals and capacities and how they are able to interact with their environments, and libraries can play an active role in helping people to create a better fit with their environments. 

  • Some considerations for better serving disabled persons:

    • Don't generalize about people, and don't make assumptions. 

    • A person with a disability is the expert on what can be done to better accommodate their needs. 

    • Treat people with respect, and think of the individual first, not the disability. 

  • The American Disability Act requires that libraries provide people with disabilities equal access to their services, and services must be provided in the most integrative way possible. 

  • The concept of accessibility (the availability for use and benefit) is often paired with usability (how something can be used for ease and effectiveness).  The concept of assistive (designed for use by people with disabilities) goes together with that of adaptive (modified from their original use for people with disabilities). 

  • Universal design is a way of looking at a product so that everybody can be able to use it without any modification.  For example, the Berkeley Public Library has elevators with "kick buttons" for people who cannot reach the traditional elevator buttons, as well as traditional buttons with Braille descriptions.

Patrick Burke, coordinator of UCLA's Disabilities and Computing Program, discussed the different types of computer and Web-based adaptive technologies.  He provided a brief overview of the relevant federal legislation (including the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and the 2000 Rehabilitation Act), and then discussed the major types of adaptive software on the market.

  • Speech recognition software currently requires individual voice training for higher accuracy. 

  • Reading assistance software can be used to help readers with various learning disabilities, and is most often needed for users of digital libraries. 

  • Low-vision software assists people with visual impairments, and includes screen magnification and variations in color settings. 

  • Speech-output screen readers convert the text on the screen into synthetic speech. 

The basic principles of accessibility for web content are that the content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Finally, Patrick Burke demonstrated the JAWS screen-reader software for the workshop participants, where the entire content of a Web page was read by the software program.  One striking highlight from his demonstration was the caveat to not have audio or video automatically play on page load because such compete with screen readers. 

Gerald Hanley oversees library, accessibility technology, and academic technology initiatives for the California State University system.  His office was faced with reconciling a system-wide directive for complete accessibility with what was achievable in a short period. Here are some of the lessons that he offered from his experiences. 

  • In order to implement a policy, it is necessary to create a managed strategy to achieve the relevant goals. Without enough guidance, a climate of fear will result and become the guiding philosophy of how to reach the mandated goals. 

  • To create an environment to foster effective learning, one must consider how to accommodate the learning needs of every individual. It is desirable to deliver services in an empowering manner and to personalize the services for each individual. Good management requires both governance processes (such as decision-making and communications) and implementation processes (such as providing thoughtful feedback for annual reports).

  • When large vendors' products do not meet the requirements for accessibility, make sure that the vendors understand what the requirements are, hold a second round of Requests for Proposals, and help the vendors to pass the requirements.  The vendors may make significant changes to their products which lead to greater accessibility for everyone. 

  • Federated searches and aggregators will provide 'normalized' descriptions.  Metadata about materials can be managed at their origins by many technologies and communities. 

  • Simulations and dynamic virtual environments require more than alt tags, and need intelligent metadata tools. 

  • Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs) can be used to improved accessibility, and methodology can be better managed through use of VPATs. 

Susan Cullen is the Campus Accessible Technology Initiative and Online Support Coordinator for Cal State University Northridge.  She spoke about Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework to organize opportunities to engage learners regardless of their individual processing styles, using three principles:

  • Providing multiple methods of representing information, giving individual options for acquiring information and knowledge.

  • Allowing students options in demonstrating their knowledge in various modalities.

  • Engaging students' interests in challenging, relevant, motivating ways

Cullen demonstrated various tools such as a large accessible keyboard which used different overlays, and showed other tools such as a Sip and Puff, camera mouse, and a foot mouse that allows for accessibility by different individuals.   

She also noted that it is a good idea for professors to tag or describe their own graphs, charts, and illustrations so the content is described correctly.

McKinley Scholarship Winners

by: Bo-Gay Salvador

LACASIST is pleased to announce that Ann Roll is the first-place winner of the 2009 Margaret McKinley Memorial Student Scholarship Essay Competition. As the winner, Ms. Roll receives reimbursement funding up to US $1,000 for registration, airfare, and hotel expenses to attend ASIS&T’s 2009 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, and a one-year membership in ASIS&T.

Ms. Roll is enrolled in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s LEEP Online Distance Program and plans to complete a master’s degree in Library and Information Science in May, 2010. She also holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis. She is interested in visual information and has special interests in image retrieval and information visualization. Ms. Roll is currently an Acquisitions Librarian at the Getty Research Institute, where she has been employed since 2005. She is a member of ALA and ARLIS/NA and the Southern California ARLIS chapter.  

Essays submitted by Margaret A. Driscoll and Donna LaFollette tied for runners-up. Both students receive a one-year membership in ASIS&T. Ms. Driscoll is currently enrolled as an MLIS candidate at San Jose State University and plans to graduate in 2012. She has an AAS in Library Technology from Mesa Community College and a BA degree in English from Ottawa University. She is interested in digitization of course reserves material, copyright and Fair Use, information literacy, reference, Open Access, and scholarly publishing. She is currently the Reserves/eReserves Coordinator at CSU Channel Islands Library. She is a member of LACASIST, ALA, and CLA, and is a past-chair of the ExLibris Southwest User Group.

Ms. LaFollette was enrolled in the LEEP online program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned her MLIS degree in May, 2009. Upon graduation, she received the Library School Alumni Association student award. Her coursework in user interfaces and metadata led her to a less traditional librarian role, as she recently joined the non-profit Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) as their Business Manager. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in Russian Civilization from UCLA, and is a member of the Society for Scholarly Publishing and ALA.   

LACASIST congratulates this year’s Essay Competition winners!

LACASIST using Drupal

by: Grace Lau

It is with great pleasure that I present to you: the new LACASIST website running on Drupal!

Background

The LACASIST community is a widely dispersed regional chapter that spans Southern California, Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia. It has been a challenge to bring programming equally to information professionals in the region. Over the years, we've maintained an online presence primarily via a website that is maintained by one person. The plan to re-design and re-strategize the LACASIST website began in July 2008. Over the past year and a half, Tommy Keswick, John Khuu, and Grace Lau worked on at least 3 versions of the website to design and develop what we hope to be a useful and engaging source of information for the LACASIST community.

Project Goals

  • Consolidate websites (business wiki, newsletter wiki, newsletter archives)
  • Minimize confusion (consistent navigation and user experience)
  • Encourage people to participate and learn
  • Encourage transparent and open volunteer opportunies
  • Provide valuable and useful workshops and networking opportunities
  • Provide value to the community

The importance of improving our ad-hoc online publicity became apparent when we conducted an informal content audit was conducted and we found web content spread across 4 different places, namely, the existing website (circa 1998), Wikidot for our business wiki, Wikispaces for the OASIS Newsletter, as well as CSUSM for newletters before the award-winning wiki format. A proposal was made: let's re-organize the LACASIST websites and in doing so let's make LACASIST more approachable to event attendees, interested students, prospective members and speakers.

The existing website was maintained using Dreamweaver and Dominique Turnbow did an amazing job keeping the site going for the past couple of years. However, this structure of a singular dedicated web administrator defeated the purpose of today's fast developing collaborative and informative technology resources. To fulfill the LACASIST's mission to engage and bring together information professionals and technology, we needed to set the momentum using the fastest developing medium: the internet.

Project Process

Discovery

Before any design or development started, we had a prolonged process of gathering site requirements, focusing on the following questions:

  • what is the purpose of the site?
  • who are the users?
  • what functionality do we want to enable users?
  • when do we expect users to find the website helpful for their information needs?

After basic requirements gathering, we put together a content audit of the existing content, created site maps based on the existing site structure and proposed a site structure that allowed greater flexibility.

Design and Development

The goal of this site re-organization is to pull together all the LACASIST content from various servers under one domain and minimize a site visitor's confusion upon visiting our site, that is, avoid the "Franken-site" syndrome. To achieve this, we decided upon using a content management system to provide a unified entrance to various sections: a public-facing website as well as a private internal wiki point of reference.  We decided upon using Drupal, a highly-customizable open source content management system, one that we had some experience using.

Over a 9-month period, we set up the site structure and populated the general sections of the website with existing content. Using Drupal 6 and rely heavily on numerous contributed modules (Views, CCK, Organic Groups), we created taxonomies for the newsletter and configured breadcrumbs and global menus to allow consistent navigation.

The look and feel you see is called 960 Robots, courtesy of Lullabot, a Drupal consulting company.

Planned Future Releases

Future incremental increases include:

  • improved event registration and online payment
  • post-event participation
  • newsletter submissions
  • award nominations

I invite you to check out the site and provide feedback using our Contact form or email website@lacasist.org.