Defense Professionals Learn Their ABCs -- March 22, 2010

By Chris Vestal

It's no bombshell that military leaders and scholars have unique information needs. However, it is surprising to learn how similar their research process is to more traditional settings.

Librarians from around the country received helpful pointers in military research on March 22, 2010, during the Defense Technical Information Center’s 2010 Conference session, ABCs of Military Resources, co-sponsored by DC/SLA’s Military Librarians’ Group. Lily McGovern, a DC/SLA chapter member from National Defense University, and Greta Marlatt, from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, co-taught the session.

McGovern guided attendees through the process of conducting military research, quickly pointing out how similar it is to any other research process. “Techniques you’d use for any reference query can work in an area not familiar to you,” she explained. The first stage in the research process was the reference interview. Researchers need to pay careful attention to what military service the patron is interested in as acronyms could have multiple meanings across different service organizations. The next step is thinking about where you could find the needed information. McGovern recommended thinking about what organizations might collect or generate the needed information. For military or defense information, McGovern said using specialized databases is usually the best route to take. However, she also recommended using regular search engines and limiting results to .mil or .gov domains to cut down on the number of false drops. One interesting contrast to traditional research is that military information professionals may have to consider whether or not the requested information is classified or restricted in some way. The patron’s clearance level will affect whether or not the information professional will perform the research. If the patron has a high enough clearance the researcher may have to leave his or her regular work-station and search on a computer approved for viewing restricted information.

After attendees got a feel for how the process worked, Marlatt reviewed a myriad of useful specialized resources. These sources ranged from the webpages of libraries that are part of a military graduate program, to “think tanks” and even “WikiLeaks” (a wiki dedicated to encouraging and disseminating leaked information, http://wikileaks.org/). According to Marlatt, when using any of these sources, searchers should explore them as much as possible, even the ones that say they are restricted access only. Marlatt explained that while many of them do have sections that are restricted or pay-only access, if you take the time to mine through them there is often quite a bit of freely available information. For example, she cited the RAND Corporation’s website (http://www.rand.org/) where links to purchasing reports are prominently displayed at the top of the page, but near the bottom of the page you'll find links to view the same reports for free.

Following the session, attendees divided up into smaller groups and had dinner and lively conversation at five Old Town Alexandria restaurants.

To view the presentation with active links to all the recommended resources visit http://tinyurl.com/yzuwpe3

Picture 1. Attendees signing in to the ABCs of Military Research:

Picture 2. Attendees enjoying dinner after the Military Research event in Alexandria, VA:

March Librarians & Friends Fiction Book Club -- Books on Food!

In spite of the lure of celebrating St. Patrick's Day elsewhere, a good crowd showed up on March 17th, enough to fill the hour with plenty of discussion on books. The topic for the month was books with a food theme.

The books read by the group included:

• Dying for Chocolate by Diane Mott Davidson - a woman goes into the catering business in the hills of Colorado and has a mystery to solve
• Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs - an aging host of a TV cooking show must reinvent herself and her career while dealing with intergenerational family issues
• Beat til Stiff by Claire Johnson - a pastry chef comes to work early and stumbles over a dead kitchen employee tied up in a laundry bag and takes on the task of finding out who killed him
• Snack Thief by Andrea Camilleri - translated from the Italian, this is an Inspector Mollinari mystery, with a food theme concerning regional snack food
• Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout - From the Nero Wolfe series, this mystery involves food and chefs.

We also had one non-fiction holdout - Fish on Friday, by Brian Fagan, discusses the role fish has played in the lives of cultures around the world throughout history.

All the books were recommended by their readers and we also strayed off to other books that had a food theme of some sort while finishing up the discussion.

Next month, we will be reading and discussing DC-themed books concerning events from the 20th century, any time between 1900 and 1999. No excuse for having trouble with this topic - it will more than likely result in way too many options. Please join us on Wednesday, April 21st, at VNS Group, 805 15th Street, NW, right near the MacPherson metro station at 6pm. All readers are welcome! RSVP to Barbara Folensbee-Moore at bfolensbee-moore morganlewis com. More info is here.

Thanks to Our Volunteers in 2010 -- from DC/SLA President James King

I would like to take a moment to thank the 90+ volunteers who have already signed up to help in nearly 40 different committee and volunteer positions this year. Check out the official DC/SLA committee page on the chapter site to see who's doing what.

An active and diverse group of volunteers is critical to our success as we move into the second century of SLA and strive towards our vision of being "the recognized model of excellence as it prepares knowledge leaders for the future." Volunteering in DC/SLA provides you with a great opportunity to network with other professionals in the area and gives you a chance to develop or improve upon skills that can also be used in your career.

Care to join us on this journey? Please review the list of DC/SLA volunteer opportunities at this site: http://signupgenius.com/go/chapter

In particular, we need help with our dine-arounds. Last year, we had a record-setting 22 dine-arounds all over our region with between 4-24 people at each location. Chris Vestal, our Dine-around Coordinator in 2009, has agreed to manage our Chapter Notes newsletter (and is doing a terrific job) so we need to find someone who can take over for what he did last year. The Dine-Around Coordinator advertises for dine-around hosts and coordinate the dates with the chapter’s master calendar. A Dine-Around Host (which we also need) chooses a dinner location and manages the reservation for that location. If you love to talk and eat (not necessarily at the same time) please consider helping us!

Our biggest and newest committee is the January 2011 SLA Leadership Summit local host committee! SLA has announced that the DC Chapter will play host to this winter leadership training meeting – the first time in nearly 12 years. This also falls less than two years since the SLA Annual Conference was here in DC so we have lots of experience hosting but will need lots of hands to make this happen. If you would like to help or lead this effort, we need help with finding sponsors, planning the receptions, updating the local host wiki, planning dine-arounds, and so much more!

If you have any questions about any of the chapter activities listed on the volunteer site, please feel free to contact me.

-- James King, James.King@nih.gov

The ABC's of Military Resources Event: A Link to Share

Thanks to the participants for making last night a success!   We had over 70 people last night and the presentation was well received.  If you would like to view the presentation, please feel free to download our zip file at the following link: http://units.sla.org/chapter/cdc/events_files/ABCMIlitaryResources.zip


If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me.

Thanks so much.

Diane Schnurrpusch at dschnurr@dtic.mil

Roberta Schaffer, Law Librarian of Congress, Energizes the Profession

The DC/SLA Leadership Lecture Series was kicked off on 22 February 2010 with our distinguished guest, Roberta Shaffer. Shaffer has worn many hats in her career: lawyer, law librarian, dean of various library schools, staff assistant at the Library of Congress, former FLICC /FEDLINK Executive Director, and current Law Librarian of Congress. What better way to begin a series on leadership than with a leader who can share her deep and varied experience with and enthusiasm for law and librarianship, as well as her energy and love for life?

The lecture series was held at the law firm of Covington and Burling, one of the stops on Shaffer’s career journey. Mary Talley, DC/SLA vice-president, conducted the program as an interview session. Over the course of an hour, Talley asked Shaffer questions about her career path, position as Law Librarian of Congress, management and leadership philosophy, attitudes towards educating and hiring professionals, and what she does for fun.

Shaffer, with great dramatic humor, relayed the story of how she went to Emory Library School following a serious horseback riding injury during her first year at Tulane Law School. She went to Atlanta for physical therapy and ended up in Emory’s library program at the urging of her father who, mistakenly, thought librarianship would offer her a sedentary profession, which would improve her chances of recuperation.

Judging from Shaffer’s very lively, energetic discussion, “sedentary” is not a word in her career vocabulary. She eventually returned to Tulane to complete her law degree and practice law for a very short time. Her love for librarianship eventually drew her back to the profession, where she combined her expertise in law and librarianship to become the first assistant to a Librarian of Congress (Dr. Billington). From that moment on she was smitten with the great role of the Library of Congress in accumulating and disseminating the world’s knowledge and dreamed of returning someday as the Law Librarian of Congress.

Although she tells that dream as a sort-of joke, she kept it as a clear, if distant, goal throughout her career, from her work as director of the Covington and Burling law firm library, to Dean of the Library School at University of Texas, to Executive Director at the Federal Library and Information Center Committee. Dreaming big paid off; Shaffer did indeed reach her goal.

Among the interesting things the audience heard from Shaffer:

- Never stay in one job for your entire career.
You become stale in one place and bogged down in one culture. Even changing jobs in one organization leaves you caught up in a single work culture. By changing positions throughout your career, you learn new ways of thinking and working, which will make you more valuable in each new position you take.

- Listen to your gut.
If you take a job and it doesn’t “feel” right, don’t do it. Shaffer gave an example of a position she accepted in Washington based primarily on family considerations, leaving a job in Texas that she loved. She took the first job that was offered to her, and it turned out not to be a fit. She said it didn’t feel right when she accepted the position in D.C. and taking the job was something she regretted.

- Take risks, and, as a manager, reward risk-taking in the people you manage.
Obviously Shaffer has taken risks in her career and succeeded, always keeping her eye on the ball. She admitted to occasions when risks she took did not result in a success, particularly when she had not followed her own instincts. She also tries to make it safe for her staff to take risks, rewarding them for their efforts, even though they may sometimes fail. The failure isn’t rewarded, lessons are learned from that, but the risk taking is rewarded with a ceremony and a certificate for the risk-taking effort.

- Hire energetic staff.
The more intangible qualities Shaffer values in job candidates are a high-level of energy and enthusiasm. The positions she fills at the Law Library of Congress, she feels, are not ones that allow staff to sit quietly behind a desk or computer and wait for a request. They are all very physical, requiring movement, drive and energy. She stated with some pride that the Law Library of Congress reference staff worked through Christmas Eve during the historic Senate healthcare reform vote.

In response to the question “Where do you want to take the Law Library of Congress in the next few years?” Shaffer talked about how the law affects almost every area of daily life and how important it is to democracy to make the law readily accessible to the average citizen. She believes the Law Library of Congress has a big role to play in educating the citizenry about the law. One step the Library is taking now in that direction is to register the Law.Gov site so it can eventually host it as a one-stop shop for federal, state and international government and legal information.

The evening closed with Ms. Shaffer sharing some personal information about herself and her dog, Snowflake, a West-Highland terrier, that she has raised as a “reading dog.” Snowflake has worked with autistic children and currently curls up with kids with reading difficulties while they read out loud to her. When Shaffer retires sometime in the future she wants to devote more time to working with her dogs to help troubled children.

As for retirement, it isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Shaffer admitted that she works long hours, doesn’t sleep a lot, and works weekends too. How else could she have fit so much into such a productive and successful life?

We are all so lucky to have Roberta Shaffer as the Law Librarian of Congress.

- Anne White-Olson, Informationist, National Institutes of Health Library, DC/SLA Program Planning Committee
- Mary Talley, Information Strategist, Vice-President, President-Elect, DC/SLA

Librarians and Friends Fiction book club March topic - fiction with a food theme - March 17 from 6-7 pm

The book club will hold its March meeting on Wednesday, March 17. The time is from 6-7pm and the location will be at VNS Group, 805 15th Street, NW, Suite 100-14. It is right near the Macpherson metro exit. Our host will be Vesselina Stoytcheva.  I have included some possible reads for you below. There are a lot of books with a food theme so it shouldn't be too hard to find something that suits your interests. Join us and tell us about what you found.

 

Scarlet Feather, Maeve Binchy,(2001)

 

Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather hope to take Dublin by storm with their new catering company but not everyone shares their enthusiasm. Cathy's mother-in-law disapproves of her new hobby, while Cathy's husband buries himself in his legal work. Tom's ambitious girlfriend struggles with her career and Tom's family expects him to follow in his father's footsteps.

 

Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, With Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies, Laura Esquivel, (1992)

 

The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter weeps so violently she causes an early labor and is born amidst the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life and the child, Tita, grows up to be a master chef. She shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story.

 

Beat Until Stiff, Claire Johnson, (2002)

 

Cranky Mary Ryan has sunk a lot of time and talent into the in-vogue American Fare, the town's hottest spot, while grieving over her broken marriage. At work very early one morning, she steps on a laundry bag stuffed with the dead body of one of her employees. The investigation soon exposes all the dirty secrets that the food business would like to keep secret.

 

Death Dines In, (2004)

 

This collection of stories that mix crime and cuisine features 16 acclaimed mystery authors who serve up suspenseful tales with all-new recipes. Includes works by Carol Nelson Douglas, Lyn Hamilton, Claudia Bishop, Donna Andrews, Rhys Bowen and others. Each story comes with its own recipe

 

 

As always, a list of books that were read on our most recent topic - librarians in fiction - is below.

 

• Lethal Legacy by Linda Fairstein - involves the New York public library in the story. 
• The Aurora Teagarden series by Charlaine Harris - involves a public librarian who in the first book is a member of a club that discusses well-known murders and ends up with one of their own. 
• Mobile Library Mysteries by Ian Sansom 
• Dewey Decimal System of Love by Josephine Carr 
• The Rover by Mel Odom - first in a series of books that are fashioned on a Tolkien style world where books are threatened and librarians have adventures rescuing and conserving the books 
• Catalogue of Death by Jo Dereske - mystery where the detective is a librarian in Bellehaven, Wa. 
• The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett -one of a series of books - the librarian is an orangutan.

 

 

 

Barbara Folensbee-Moore. Director of Library Services, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, 1111 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20004
Direct: 202.739.5131
Main: 202.739.3000
Fax: 202.739.3001