LACASIS/SLA-SCC

Tuesday December 7 I attended the Joint LACASIS/SLA-SCC Holiday Program featuring the speaker Dr. Kevin Starr, a historian who writes about California. He was also formerly California State Librarian. He spoke somewhat autobiographically about his experience at Harvard with the California collection in Widener, and about his experience as State Librarian. Throughout he emphasized the importance of librarians as knowing content, not just data facilitators, as can happen in the digital age.

LACASIS/SLA-SCC stands for: Los Angeles Chapter ASIS / SLA Southern California Chapter. They have joint meetings once in a while. This was held at a hotel in Long Beach. I was surprised at the number in attendance, and at the diversity. Among the attendees was Doris Helfer, Department Chair Technical Services at CSUN Northridge. She is running for President of SLA. Her Dean Susan Curzon was also there. She invited me to see their robotic retrieval system and also their digital archive, running on CONTENTdm Multimedia Software . (Wayne at USC tells me they looked at this software when Documentum was selected for USC. The proprietary metadata structure limited the ability to create or label your own fields.) The CSUN Northridge archives can be viewed at http://library.csun.edu/spcoll/digi_coll.html .

Other librarians represented law firms, Aerospace Corporation, bank archives, the California African American Museum just south of the USC campus, hospital librarians, 20th Century Fox librarians, representatives from Ebsco, Lexis Nexis, and of course many academic librarians.