Each year FAN recognizes a current or former member who has contributed significantly to the division over the years. The recipient of the Distinguished Member Award is selected by the Awards Committee based on nominations submitted by FAN members. The winner is announced at our Breakfast/Business meeting at the Annual Conference and receives a plaque and a $250.00 cash award.

Award Criteria:

1) Nominee must be a member or former member of the FAN Division for at least 5 years.

2) Nominee must have demonstrated exemplary work for the Division, Chapter, and profession.

The winner of the award will be chosen on the basis of the merit described in the written application form.

Submitting a Nomination:

1) Identify a person for this honor by reflecting on FAN’s various activities and the person or persons connected with them.

2) Using the format outlined below, submit a biographical sketch and a description of activities and accomplishments for the nominee. If you don’t have the information, you can contact other FAN members as well as the person’s Chapter President for assistance.

3) Please note that self-nominations will not be accepted.

View past recipients

The FAN Division has elected a new slate of officers, to start service in 2012. Please join us in welcoming incoming officers:

Kevin Adams as Chair-Elect
Melody Royster as Director
Rebecca Godwin as Treasurer

Thank you to the Nominating Committee and to everyone who participated in the election this year.

The National Agricultural Library’s Agricultural Thesaurus (NALT) is now available as Linked Open Data.

The NALT, which contains more than 82,000 terms, is primarily used for indexing and for improving the retrieval of agricultural information, including the supporting biological, physical and social sciences.

With the NALT’s RDF/SKOS files updated with persistent URIs, Web developers can now use the NALT to specify relationships between isolated data silos, making research into agricultural topics more productive.

For more information, read NAL’s full announcement or download the SKOS file and join the linked data cloud.

Contact: Lori Finch, Thesaurus Coordinator, National Agricultural Library

(301) 504-6853 / NAL.Thesaurus@ars.usda.gov

This issue includes a summary of the annual conference with session reports by FAN members (including Terry Horsmann’s recap of Mary Ellen Bates’ guide to elevator speeches).  Don’t miss chair-elect Kevin Adam’s always stellar biotechnology column (this issue’s focus is on the FAO) as well as Noël’s preview for the 2012 conference.

Food for Thought volume 42 issue 1

Hello everyone,

The election is now open for voting. It will be available for just over two weeks, until 5pm EST on Friday, September 2nd. You will need your SLA membership ID to logon, which can be found on an Information Outlook mailing label. Please go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FANelect to complete your ballot.

We have one slate this time: Kevin Adams for Chair-Elect, Rebecca Godwin for Treasurer, and Melody Royster for Director. Val Davis, Jacob Westendorp, and I would like to say a loud, fervent Thank you! to them for agreeing to run.

Remember to vote by 5pm EST on September 2! We’ll be sending out reminders throughout the voting time frame.

Early in his tenure at NAL, in the spring of 2010, Dr. Simon Liu challenged AgNIC to “move to the next level” with content and services. Oklahoma State University Libraries Veterinary Librarian, Heather Moberly arrived at this same time to have a six-month sabbatical at the National Agricultural Library and took up this challenge. Planning for the animal health portal immediately shifted to address how to expand the coverage and resources targeting animal health, but expanding the overall AgNIC content and services in the process. The AgNIC Animal Health Portal targeted animal health information from the PubMed system (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed with 1.5+ million records) from AGRICOLA (http://agricola.nal.usda.gov/ with 4+ million records) and from several institutional repositories. Both sites utilized the WorldCat API (http://www.worldcat.org/) feature which allows the user to find a particular resource in the closest library.

Other new AgNIC features include:
• Searching terms in Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/
• From a MARC record (AGRICOLA) users can now email or SMS the link or view the citation in APA or MLA format
• Ability to export into RefWorks or EndNotes
• View the MARC record for bibliographic citations, or have a “Librarian view”

In May 2011, NAL hosted the AgNIC Annual Meeting which drew 57 participants from around the U.S., Costa Rica, the Philippines, Argentina, and Italy. The keynote speaker was Anne Kenney, University Librarian at Cornell University. Ms. Kenney spoke about the challenges libraries face and the 2CUL which is a transformative partnership between Cornell University Libraries and Columbia University Libraries. At that meeting, Oklahoma State University Libraries received the first, “AgNIC Partner of the Year” award for their support of Heather Moberly’s sabbatical. Connie Britton, from The Ohio State University, was recognized for “AgNIC Distinguished Service” and her contributions and service to AgNIC over the years.

During the past year, AgNIC was very pleased to approve three new institutional partners. These are Fort Valley State University Libraries, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Agronomía, Biblioteca Central and Arizona State University Libraries.

Come to the All Sciences Poster Session and Reception
When: Tuesday June 14, 2011, 5:30-7:00 p.m.
Where: Marriott Ballroom AB
Moderator: Rebecca Godwin

The Biomedical & Life Sciences, Chemistry, Food Agriculture Nutrition, Physics Astronomy Mathematics, Science & Technology and Engineering Divisions of SLA encourage you to see what your colleagues are doing!

The latest edition of Food for Thought is now available. This issue has plenty of SLA Conference attendee tips, Kevin Adams’ Biotechnology Column and an interview with database provider CABI. Take a few minutes to get updated on the division, current events and vendors!

Food for Thought volume 41 issue 3

Visualizing Science Session
Come to this FAN, Academic, Chemistry, Environment and Resource Management, and Science-Technology sponsored session. Speakers include Dr. Chaomei Chen, Dr. Kristi Holmes, and Gali Halevi.
When: Monday June 13, 2011 from 4:00-5:30 PM
Where: Convention Center Ballroom AB

FAN would like to thank our generous sponsor, Elsevier

Dr. Chaomei Chen, Drexel University

Dr. Chen is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel and is the author of Turning Points: The Nature of Creativity (Springer/HEP 2011), Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon (Springer 2004, 2006) and Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization (Springer 2003). He is the founder and the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Information Visualization and an editorial board member of Journal of Informetrics. Dr. Chen created the widely used software CiteSpace for visualizing and analyzing emerging trends in scientific literature. His scholarly publications have been cited over 4,000 times according to Google Scholar. He received his bachelor degree in mathematics from Nankai University, China, his master’s degree in computation from the University of Oxford and his doctorate in computer science from the University of Liverpool. He will be presenting on the recent advances in the world of data visualizations.

Dr. Kristi Holmes, Washington University School of Medicine

Dr. Holmes received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Iowa State University and joined the Washington University’s Becker Medical Library where she is involved in developing and implementing the library’s Bioinformatics@Becker program. Kristi serves as the National Outreach Coordinator for the VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists effort (http://vivoweb.org) and will serve as the program chair for the 2011 VIVO conference, to be held August 24-26 in Washington, DC. She will talk about visualization in biomedical research and will showcase visualizations she created for research groups on campus using the open source software, Network Workbench.

Gali Halevi, Elsevier
On May 10th, some of the most prominent scientific leaders in the area of Scientific measuring and mapping gathered in Santa Fe, NM for a daylong symposium which covered various measurements metrics, visualization methodologies and applications. The event was a results of a close collaboration between Elsevier and Los Alamos National Lab. Eugene Garfield, Henry Small, Henk Moed and Jevin West discussed existing and emerging scientific impact measurements and metrics while Katy Borner, Kevin Boyack, Brad Paley and Johan Bollen presented mapping and visualization of scientific output. Gali Halevi, from Elsevier, the organizer of the event, will be presenting highlights from the symposium and lessons learned via the panel discussion and participants feedback.

Learn more about what products and services are provided at our exciting Vendor Speed Dating session.
When: Monday June 13, 2011 from 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Where: Convention Center 109A

Moderator: Noel Kopriva

We are honored to have Ebsco and Wolper as sponsors for this session!

FAN Board of Directors Luncheon
Sunday June 12th, 2011 12:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Taking place off-site at Caribou Cafe, 1126 Walnut Street

The 2011 FAN Division officers and committee chairs will meet to review the past year and set goals for the coming year. Attendance is for FAN board members or by invitation.
Contact FAN Chair Valrie Davis (vdavis@ufl.edu) with questions – or if you would like to attend.

This session is proudly sponsored by IFIS

Learn about efforts to help researchers collaborate across disciplines. Speakers include representatives from FriendFeed, Mendeley, Collexis, VIVO and BibApp.

Session: Collaborations across Disciplines
When: Monday June 13, 2011 from 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Where: Convention Center Ballroom AB

Speakers include:
Jan Reichelt, Mendeley
Michael Warden, Elsevier
Kristi Holmes, VIVO
Ruth Kneale, Friend Feed
Sarah Shreeves, BibApp

FAN would like to thank our kind vendor sponsor: Springer

This event is co-sponsored by the following divisions: Academic, Chemistry, Environment & Resource Management, and Science-Technology

Welcome to the Farmers’ Market, Tuesday June 14, 2011 from 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
Learn more about the difficulties of providing information to today’s agricultural sciences communities. Get the latest on local agriculture food movements, such as farmers’ markets, CSAs, educational programs, family farms and organic foods. Bring a bag lunch and a reusable water bottle!

Speakers include:
Helen Smith, Agricultural Sciences Librarian, Penn State
Ann Karlen, Fair Food Philadelphia
Jennifer Cessna, The Hershey Company
Patricia Neenan, Head, Business Development, CABI
Moderator: Kevin Adams

We are honored to have Taylor & Francis Group as sponsors for this session.

Please join us for the No-Host Fan Dinner on Saturday June 11^th at 7 pm!

We are meeting at:

Vietnam Palace
222 North 11th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107-1721
(215) 592-9596

We will be ordering off of the menu.  If you are interested in attending please email Pat Alpine at   alpinep at simplot.com

The Contributed Papers Committee of the Food, Agriculture and Nutrition Division of SLA invites submissions for its contributed papers session to be held by teleconference on Wednesday, July 27, 10 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Central time.

Papers that discuss original research, innovative projects, or other professional activities of interest relevant to the theme: Innovations and issues in agriculture, food and nutrition, or life sciences information will be considered.

Read more

by Valrie Davis, Florida & Caribbean Chapter, Food, Agriculture & Nutrition Division

Many of us understand that we have moved beyond Web 2.0 and into Web 3.0 – sometimes called the Semantic Web.  But what does it all mean, how can librarians become a part of the effort, and can we take it a step further and, ourselves, become Librarian 3.0?  The World Wide Web, as we know it, is adding a new underlying semantic layer that allows machines to find, share and communicate meaning. Librarians are long familiar with the connections between data – but not how these types of connections might change or become enhanced with machine readability. Librarians have no reason to fear for our jobs (or rather, there is no reason to fear for our jobs as we know it) as there is a role for us in the new world of semantically driven information. We too can shape development and assist in the building of common links between data, resources, and services.

I am looking forward to attending the Sci-Tech Division Contributed Papers that will be presented at the “Data: The Next Generation” session. It will be on Wednesday, June 15th from Noon till 1:30pm. Light snacks and beverages will be served.