Christine N. Turner
Electronic Resources Librarian
Acquisitions Department
W.E.B. Du Bois Library
154 Hicks Way
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003-9275

(P) 413.577.1026
(F) 413.545.6494
(E) cturner@library.umass.edu
(W) http://people.umass.edu/cturner

Here I present a collection of random bits of my professional life, with some personal touches along the way.

Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Massachusetts Amherst:

The daily-ness of my job includes:

• negotiating licenses,
• retrieving and managing use statistics,
• performing the various mechanics necessary to make newly acquired resources publicly available;
• performing the various mechanics necessary to maintain public availability and accurate records of e-resources, in the midst of changing publishers, content hosts, costs, community needs, etc.

Beyond acquiring these resources, presenting and publicizing them in ways that are useful to faculty, students, researchers and the UMass community at large is another challenge. One means is through blogging:

Last spring (2007) I joined the newly formed Web Coordinating Committee for the library, and this summer I participated in an offshoot working group to redesign "the thing you use to find the database you need for your research." The result is the new Research Databases page.

Of late, I've also been trying to decipher and implement a new, "buggy" and complex electronic resource management system for our department. This may be a long quest.

Association of College and Research Libraries/New England Chapter:

For several years I've served on the Board of ACRL/NEC, first as the newsletter editor and Communications Committee Co-Chair, then as an officer. I'm currently Past President following tenures as President and Vice President/President-Elect. As V.P. I chaired the organizing committee for our 2006 Annual Conference, Leveraging Our Strengths: Alliances, Interdependencies and Developing Services.

Sabbatical, September, 2005 - February, 2006:

Working at UMass Amherst brings many benefits, and I've just enjoyed the crown of them all: a sabbatical. My primary area of research was how higher ed. institutions are integrating library services and information literacy in their course management systems. I made site visits to the University of Wollongong, the University of South Australia, Boston College, and Connecticut College. I met and worked with some wonderful people for whom I will be ever-grateful.

Here are some of my 'outputs':

• Course Management Systems, Libraries and Teaching: Exploring Relationships for Learning, (Word file), research summary, May 2006.
  
• University of Wollongong and University of South Australia: Preliminary Observations on Learning Management Systems and Libraries, (Powerpoint file), presented at Boston College, December 2005. Handout (Word file).
• Course Management Systems, Libraries and Teaching: a Presentation and Discussion of Sabbatical Research, (Word file), "Brown Bag" at University of Massachusetts Amherst, July, 2006.
• Christine in Oz. Personal blog of travels in Australia, November, 2005.

Federated Searching:

Though it has been abandoned (temporarily?), the Five College Libraries had a notion that each would use MetaLib to offer some services from their web sites. As project manager, I coordinated Five Colleges' MetaLib Implementation. From that experience came these public offerings:

• Bits About Federated Searching, and ... Managing the Five College Libraries' Implementation, at a ACRL/NEC Information Technology Interest Group meeting, February 4, 2005.
• Do We Step Together, In the Same Direction, At the Same Time: How a Consortium Approached a Federated Search Implementation, (Word file). Forthcoming in Internet Reference Services Quarterly. Co-authored with Lori Mestre, Beth Lang and Barbara Morgan.