Our Annual General Meeting happened today. After last week’s Brown Bag Lunch with Shirley Lew and Courtney Mumma and the previous week’s Cool Tools Day we had a great turnout. We held our elections today, each position was filled by unanimous vote, and I’m pleased to announce our new executive for 2012-2013.

Chair: Kristof Kessler
Vice Chair: Jonathan Kift
Secretary: Sam Mills
Treasurer: Allison Trumble
Communications: Nick Josten

Thanks very much to Andrew Berger, Adam Brownfield, Jamie Fong, Justin Unrau (and Kristof) for their work on the executive this past year.

Present: Adam, Kristoff, Jamie, Joy, Andrew, Mary.

• Cool tools days re-cap: We still need to put a write up on the Wiki. Discussion also turned to re-organizing the wiki to better suit our long-term needs of transferring information from one exec group to the next.
• Next cool tools day set for November 8 from 12 noon to 1PM in the Terrace Lab. We’ll serve timbits (Jamie) and coffee (Adam). We’ll also live blog the re-cap (Adam).
• Trivia Night: still need a location. Tossing around some off campus ideas. May mean that event is more of a social gathering than fundraiser if we need to slip in to an existing trivia night.
• RFID brown bag: Andrew to email David re: his contact.
• Conferences: Andrew attended part of Access 2011. He will email link with videos of presentation to ASIS&T listserv. Also, on Nov 12 there is a conference in Washington that he will send more info about. THAT Camps?
• Next meeting: Tentatively set for second week of school in January. Will email when date is closer to pin down time. Need to have it confirmed before January cohort orientation.
• End of meeting.

Sorry for the delay in posting these, and thanks for coming out!

September 21, 2011
ASIS&T@UBC
Trail meeting room
Noon to 1pm

Present: Andrew, Jamie, Adam, Kristoff, Michelle, Joy, Trevor, Jonathan, Kerry, and Alex, Heather O’Brien (faculty rep),

1. Introduction of ASIS&T and current executive (Andrew, Jamie, Justin, Adam)

2. General plan for events this year.

• Cool Tool days twice a semester
• Speakers etc.
• Trivia Night with LWOB
• Research Day in March 2012 (ASIS&T group will offer to volunteer)

3. Policies and procedures of ASIS&T@UBC chapter.

4. Explanation of open Vice-Chair role and call for nominations. Kristoff self-nominated, seconded by Andrew, and voted in unanimously.

5. Next event: Cool Tool day on October 4th in Terrace Lab from noon to 1pm. Joy will handle coffee, Michelle will get snacks, and Trevor will be around to help with set up etc.

6. Next meeting: October 26th at noon in the Trail Room.

-end of meeting-

We’ll post the minutes from the last meeting of the year sometime soon, but before that I just wanted to thank everyone for coming to all the events we’ve had this year. Also thanks to Bronwyn for writing up such a nice post about our Cool Tool Days for HackLibSchool (which you should completely be reading if you’re at SLAIS).

Special thanks to our outgoing executive members Mahria, Tosha, Shannon and Jessie, who made this an efficiently-run student group that did a bunch of useful and fun stuff. It was a pleasure working with you all. We had elections at the meeting today and hopefully Andrew, Adam and Jamie will be up to continuing the work come September. Expect more trivia and tools that are cool and research and all that good stuff. We don’t really do meetings in the summer semester, so the blog here’ll slow down a bit. We’ll try to keep some content trickling through on our linkblog to tide you over.

Our third Cool Tools day happened on January 25th, 2011. Thanks to everyone who came out to learn/share about some neat technological tools! If you missed the event, well here’s a summary of what went on (courtesy of our ASIS&T@UBC Secretary, Jessie).

Presenters and their “Cool Tools” (Also available as a PDF)

Catie “Library Value Calculator” & “FreeFoodUbc”
Niagara Falls Public Library Value Calculator

• Calculate the value of your library use
• It doesn’t subtract your fines or other glitches
• You can see the value of your library card

FreeFoodUbc

• “Freefoodubc” Twitter account
• Not interactive, instead just like calendars of where to find free food on campus at any time
• Kept up to date

Bonnie’s – “Web of Trust (WOT)“

• communitive based firefox add-on
• “revenge on malicious websites” and promoting safe websites, etc.
• Uses colour codes (ex. green means ‘safe’)
• Good for warning against sites with viruses/malware etc.
• Informative video available on youtube
• video is called “WOT: Web of Trust demonstration”

Andrew’s – “Readability” & “Readefine”
Readability

• Reformatting text tool
• Designed to find large chunks of text, highlight it, crop it, and bookmark it
• Can have small glitches in cutting out part of text at the beginning or the end of
  the text (because mistaken for advert image etc.)
• Is a Firefox (or Chrome) add on
• Can change how the text displays on your browser

Readefine

• Need Adobe AIR
• Or can use in web browser
• Can do RSS, html, etc.
• Will sync with Google Reader
• Works really well with keyboard
• Can upload files, copy and paste text
• Both tools can be used to change the display of online readings (like news sites, etc.), and are nice for net books

Justin “Quora“

• Alternative search engine
• Need to login
• Since it is a social search “asking questions and getting answers” instead of keywords
  etc.
• Gives guidelines on formatting questions
• It is other users answering queries (not spider bots)
• Place your queries according to topic categories (different users can follow different topics)
• Can ask obscure, difficult to Google questions – and people will offer synthesized answers
• Not very efficient
• New and currently getting a lot of buzz in the tech community
• There are a lot of opinion questions asked, library topics, many things to search and
  follow

Yolanda’s – “linear footage calculator” & “Skim”
linear footage calculator

• Good for archival/preservation purposes (and class assignments!)
• Tool meant for measuring boxes etc.

Skim

• pdf annotator for Mac
• Highlight, make boxes around things, anchor notes, works on a lot of pdfs, can
  take notes and export them out other document

Schuyler “GoodReader” & “Dropbox”
GoodReader

• Free reader for the iphone (also $2.99 in the app store)
• Some issues – trouble getting annotated documents from the phone to the
  computer
• Works well with dropbox!
• For iPad use – good for changing documents into pdfs and then annotating them

Dropbox

• Online cloud based storage system
• Organization tool – keeping all of your files, folders etc. in one place and accessible
  from any computer with internet access
• Efficient back up strategy
• If you get others to sign up from an invite, you then get extra file space
• Starts off with 2GB free – which is plenty for pdfs/school readings

Again, thanks to everyone for showing up, and to the presenters who piped up in the presentation. We’ll be having another Cool Tools day before the semester is done, and we’d love to hear from you.