Hi there everyone, especially those of you just starting at SLAIS. If you’re coming here after meeting someone from ASIS&T at the LASSA orientation on Wednesday, thank you very much for following up the face to face into the digital. I’m not sure that makes an entirety of sense, but let’s roll with it.

ASIS&T@UBC’s most visible function throughout the term is running our Cool Tools days in which you (yes you!) get to tell your peers about the cool digital tips tricks and tools you use. You can also come and just absorb information if you want. (Check out some notes from previous Cool Tools Days on our wiki.) We haven’t scheduled our first Cool Tools day of the term yet but we’ll be doing that at our first meeting.

That meeting is scheduled for Thursday, January 12 from 12pm to 1pm in the Trail Room and we hope to see you there. Also, we’re on Twitter @asistubc where we’ll try to keep you informed as to what’s going on.

ASIS&T@UBC’s next Cool Tools Day will be Tuesday November 8th in the Terrace Lab from noon to 1pm.

Cool Tool days are an informal means of sharing and learning about helpful tools. Some that might improve your scholastic skills and others that are just fun to know about. We also welcome new presenters with hidden gems or just new ways to use technology. You don’t have to member of ASIS&T to present or attend – everyone is welcome.

You can see the schedule on our wiki and sign up as a presenter here. Presentations are 5 or 10 minutes in length including a minute or two to ask and field questions. The wiki also contains re-caps of the previous Cool Tools days if you’re interested in learning more about what sort of content is covered.

Thanks and we hope to see you there!

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!

The next ASIS&T meeting is this coming Wednesday from 12:30 to 1:30 in the Trail Room (note that there is a slight time change from what we discussed at the last meeting).

You might want to come if you are interested in any of the following things we’ll be discussing:

• Re-cap of the last Cool Tools Day and planning the next one in early November.
• Planning an informal lecture/discussion on RFID.
• Planning a trivia night or two with LWB.
• And other general melange of things related to ASIS&T.

The ASIS&Ters who are in Vancouver hope to see you there (and the one in Australia is looking forward to hearing about it).

What: Cool Tools Day
Where: Terrace lab @ SLAIS
When: Tuesday October 4, 2011 noon-1pm

Cool Tools Day is an event we put on to share some of the neat tech tools that are useful for infopros like ourselves. Last year we talked about DropBox, bookmarking accounts, podcasts, visual search engines, visualization tools, screencasting software, and loads more.

You can sign up to present on our ASIS&T wiki-page. (It’s really informal and a good way to practice explaining technology in a short amount of time.) If you don’t want to present and are just interested in learning about tools, come on down. There will also be coffee and some sort of snacks.

IMPORTANT: You do not need to be a tech-nerd to attend or even to present at Cool Tools Day. Please come and share your knowledge.

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.

Thanks to everyone for coming to the Dewey Know Our Trivia fundraising event last week. It was a lot of fun and a tight race to the very end. The top three teams were:

1. #winning
2. Brian Patrick & Woodrow Wilson
3. See Also:

We raised some money and had a good time. Many thanks to Shannon, Mahria, Heidi and Jessie for organizing the event and to Koerner’s Pub for providing us with a location. Do you think we should do more of these next year? Let us know in the comments, or you could show up at our next event and talk to us in person.

What? A next event? Why yes! On Tuesday March 15th we’ve got our final Cool Tools Day of the term in the Terrace Lab from 12:30-1:30pm. Learn/share about some nifty tech tricks before it’s too late. Too late because we won’t be doing any more until at least September. Sign up here!

Also, we’re going to hit you up for coming to our last meeting of the year on March 29th. If you’d like to be involved with ASIS&T@UBC next year we’ll be holding elections at that meeting so let us know if you’re interested.

The coffee and donuts at Cool Tools days (along with the gifts for the speakers we have come in) don’t pay for themselves. Shocking, I know. Supporting SLAIS Research Day is another part of our mandate that takes cash. So, to raise some money, we’re joining up with the SLAIS Librarians Without Borders student group for a trivia night fundraiser. (I’m unsure which group is responsible for the punny title. Perhaps that will be a trivia question?)

Who: SLAIS students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members
What: Trivia Pub Night: Form teams of 2-4 to compete for a round of beverages
When: Wednesday, March 9, 5:30 – 7:30pm
Where: Koerner’s Pub, in the basement of the Graduate Student Centre at UBC
Why: A fundraiser for SLAIS student groups ASIS&T and LWB
How: Pre-register your team to guarantee a table by emailing Heidi at hkschiller@gmail.com, or just show up at the door!
Cost: $20 suggested minimum donation per team (cash only please)

For more information, email Heidi at hkschiller@gmail.com

Want to find out more about LWB? Here’s their website.

When: February 2, 2011 12:30-1:30 pm (but probably shorter)
Where: The Trail room
What: This is just a short checking in kind of mini-meeting. We’ll recap Cool Tools Day 3, pass around a signup for Cool Tools 4, discuss some fundraising possibilities, and talk about the Rex Turgano and Friends Variety Hour Lunch we’ve got coming up on February 23rd. Here’s the agenda in PDF form. Hope to see you there!