ACRL New England Chapter News Online

ISSN 1527-0106

Spring 2006, Number 108

In This Issue (Home):

President's Letter

Annual Conference Summaries:

C & B Committee Report

Legislative Report

Interest Group Reports and Announcements:

Board Meeting Minutes, March 10, 2006
Calendar Listings

Information Technology Interest Group Report

Susan McMullen, Roger Williams University
Frances Schlesinger, University of Massachusetts - Boston
Co-Chairs, Information Technology Insterest Group

ITIG’s March 17th program, “Using Google Technologies for Information Sharing and Library Instruction” was co-sponsored with NELIG and was held at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. It was a smashing success with over 90 people in attendance. The first speaker was David Cobb, Curator of the Harvard Map Collection, speaking on Google Maps and Google Earth. Using the online mapping services, he demonstrated their strengths and weaknesses. He stressed the importance of evaluating what you see. These products will not replace GIS because they do not have the data behind them and they do not basic information such as scale, date, etc. Angie Locknar, Instruction Coordinator for Engineering and Science Libraries, MIT and Jennifer Hanson, Coordinator of Instruction/Reference Librarian, Emerson College discussed using and teaching with Google Scholar. Ms. Hanson started off with a presentation showing how Emerson College Library has woven Google Scholar into the EN100 introductory classes. Using Google Scholar has brought students back to Emerson’s databases to retrieve the articles cited in Google Scholar and also increased interlibrary loan for articles located in Google Scholar. Ms. Locknar discussed the MIT’s interactive workshops on Google Scholar. Through the workshops the students gain an understanding of limitations of Google Scholar, learn that it might do as a starting point for undergraduates, but that it is not satisfactory as a graduate level research tool. The final speaker was Rich Wenger, Systems Programmer, MIT Libraries. He covered the technical side of Google Scholar in his presentation, “Connecting to Google Scholar”. Wenger explained how to link a library’s holdings to Google Scholar and discussed the implications of doing so as well. He stressed that Google Scholar is in beta and it is unknown what the costs will be to libraries once it is out of Beta.

The final ITIG meeting of the year will be held on June 16, 2006 at Salve Regina University. It will be an informal group discussion on electronic resources management. Sarah Tudesco, Harvard University’s Manager for HCL Collection Logistics, will start the meeting with an overview of ERM and then serve as the resource person for the discussion. Following the program will be a brief ITIG business meeting.

ITIG people notes: Shikha Sharma, Undergraduate Librarian at UConn took over as the ITIG Listserv moderator. Over 60 new people have joined ITIG-L. Olga Verbeek continued as ITIG's webmaster. Bridget Rawding continued as secretary. Janice Schuster is chair-elect for 2005-2006.