On Friday March 16th, ASIS&T@UBC is hosting a brown bag lunch with:

• Shirley Lew, Coordinator, Library Systems & Technical Services at Vancouver Community College
• Courtney Mumma, Digital Archivist at City of Vancouver Archives

This informal round table discussion will touch on topics related to systems librarianship, use and development of opensource software, and digital archives. As well as any other topics that come up. There will be lots of time for discussion and questions.

When: Noon, Friday March 16th until around 1pm.
Where: Trail Room in SLAIS lounge area
What: Brown Bag Lunch, you bring your lunch and we provide drinks and goodies

Space is limited to 15 seats so please register through Eventbrite (no login necessary).. Unless we get a lot of interest in which case we will try to book a larger room. [UPDATE: It's almost full and getting a bigger room might be harder than we thought, so if you're on the fence about the event sign up soon!]

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).

Thanks to everyone who came out for our chat with Rex and Allan today. If you couldn’t make it (or your memory was affected by whatever delicious lunch you were eating – my chocolate cake was distracting me early on) here’s a quick recap.

Discussion ranged over a bunch of topics, most of which were about being a non-traditional librarian. Both Rex and Allan have jobs that aren’t exactly the things that put them in the majority at library conferences, which is something most of our attendees seemed interested in. They talked about funky titles librarians in other academic systems have and how that actually makes a difference in how you’re perceived outside of the library field. Both of them talked about the importance of marketing ourselves as information problem solvers before being librarians. We’re the humanizers of the computer science tools, which is a role that needs filling.

The other thing was how little our schoolwork matters in professional life and how we should be diversifying our experiences to be good infopros, constantly upgrading. This is something I’ve heard from a bunch of visiting professionals in my year here at SLAIS, and is a good reason for coming out to our ASIS&T@UBC events! (I’m sorry for the gratuitous plug, but really, getting involved is a good thing to do.)

That’s the main gist of how the talk went. My (very) rough notes are online if you want to take a look. They’ll be giving a talk on the New Age of Librarianship in April at the BCLA conference in Victoria (their talk is scheduled for Friday morning).

Thanks very much for taking time out of your schedules, it was a well-spent hour.

When: Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Where: IBLC 460
What: ASIS&T@UBC is very happy to announce that information professional Rex Turgano (founder and editor of thegreenpages.ca) and a couple of his info-professional friends will be having an informal, bring your own lunch Q&A session with us.

This’ll be a good chance to talk to someone who uses the IT side of his information training in a number of different ways. If you have questions about how IT is used in an academic environment like UBC, bring ‘em. If you have web startup kinds of questions, bring them. If you have general “what will I do with my career?” angst, heck, bring that too! (Note that this lunch may not be enough to cure your angst in and of itself.) It should be a fun informal kind of chat. There’s no set agenda, just a chance to talk to some techie information professionals like we might be some day.

The event is open to all SLAIS students, but there is limited space available, making it first come first serve. So if you want to attend, just send us an email to let us know to save you a spot. If in the event that all spots are taken, Jessie’ll put your name down on a wait list. If you do sign up but later realize that you can no longer attend the lunch, then please let Jessie know so we can let people on the wait list in.

Bring your questions and lunches February 23!