Virginia Boucher Award: Recognize a distinguished interlibrary loan librarian

The Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) is seeking nominations for the annual Virginia Boucher Award, sponsored by OCLC.

This award recognizes a librarian for outstanding professional achievement, leadership, and contributions to interlibrary loan and document delivery.  The award consists of $2,000 plus a citation.

Nominations must be received by December 15, 2012.  Self-nominations are welcome! You can download the nomination form (PDF) here.  A complete application will include this form; a resume detailing the nominee’s career and outstanding contributions to the field; and a letter of recommendation. For complete information about the criteria for this award, please visit the award page.

Questions and nominations can be directed to Megan Gaffney, 2012-2013 Boucher Award Committee Chair, at gaffneym@udel.edu.

Gale Cengage History Research and Innovation Award: Seeking history and history librarianship researchers to apply for grant

Are you interested in history research?  Do you wish you had funding to assist in your research? RUSA’s History Section is now accepting nominations for the Gale Cengage History Research and Innovation Award.  The nomination period is open until December 15, 2012.

The award will be granted to an MLS degreed librarian from an ALA accredited school to facilitate and further research relating to history and history librarianship. The award winner will receive a citation and up to $2500 which may be used at the winner’s discretion to pay for research-related expenses.  This new award will be presented at the ALA 2013 Annual Conference.

Submissions and questions should be directed to the committee chair, Janice Schultz, (816) 252-7228 or email jschultz@mymcpl.org.

Exceptional RSS members wanted for RUSA’s 2013 RSS Service Achievement Award

Do you know an outstanding RUSA Reference Services Section member deserving of national recognition? Nominate him or her for the 2013 Reference Services Section (RSS) Achievement Award. This award honors an RSS member’s contributions to the section. The recipient will be chosen based on either sustained contributions towards attaining the goals of RSS or a single significant contribution that has resulted in a positive impact upon the work of the section.

Please send your nomination detailing specifically how the nominee has met either of these criteria to Virginia Cole (vac11@cornell.edu), the award committee chair, by December 15.

Learn more about RUSA’s Reference Services Section.

A Grand Opening in Second Life

I took the opportunity to attend a lecture and the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of the virtual campus of the San Jose State Unviersity's School of Library and Information Science in Second Life yesterday. The campus is very large and impressive (I'm building an album of screenshots here). The commitment by the university to using Second Life to extend their educational program and reach is also quite impressive. The lecture involved a live demonstration of their own virtual environment learning system called SLoodle, which connects Second Life (SL) with Moodle. Because I've been testing out Moodle as a possible alternative to the courseware management system we're using for our RUSA Professional Development Online course, I was very curious about SLoodle.

All avatars present at the lecture were invited to click on a tape recorder on stage and agree (opt in) to being recorded sloodlechatx350.jpgon a transcript generated in SLoodle's chat room. (Good thing I'd already registered!) See the image to the right, it shows Second Life in the background window, with SLoodle open to the chat transcript, with particpant icons to the far right. By typing into chat boxes in either window, the text was shared, meaning that someone could particpate whether they were in Second Life or not, or whether they had “opened” SLoodle. Having used WebCT's chat rooms for the past two years, I could see right away what a wonderful advantage this would be for handling discussions. In the Reference Interview and Readers' Advisory courses, we pair off particpants to roleplay interviews between librarian and information seeker. SLoodle would add another dimension to such activities. (It's also a shortcoming of SL that transcripts aren't automatically generated.)

When I asked about security issues, which have been raised by people I know and trust, I was told that Moodle is being used by a wide range of universities with very few issues. I'll be taking a course from the University of Illinois starting next week that uses SL and Moodle, so I'll ask about their experience with security as well as see from the student perspective how this blending of technologies works.