BRASS Committee Reports

BRASS 25th Anniversary Planning Committee
BRASS will be celebrating its 25th anniversary with a reception and dinner at ALA Annual in Chicago on Monday evening, July 1; from 6:00-10:00 P.M. atFulton’s on the River BRASS members are invited to this free event. Please RSVP by May 23 by sending an email to RUSABRASS25@gmail.com. Many thanks to our Grand Sponsor, Gale Cengage Learning, and to our other vendor sponsors: S&P Capital IQ, ReportLinker, Morningstar, Annual Reviews, EBSCO, Mintel, PrivCO, SimplyMap, Mergent, and Emerald. The 25th Anniversary event will be preceded by a “Meet the Analysts” reception which will be hosted by Mintel in their new offices just across the river from Fulton’s. More details on that event will be forthcoming. Please visit our event website

Louise Feldmann, 2011-2013 Chair

BRASS Business Reference in Academic Libraries Committee
Core Competencies for Business Students Task Force

The Business Reference in Academic Libraries committee is continuing its work with Special Library Association’s (SLA) College and University Business Libraries (CUBL) group on the Core Competencies Task Force. This task force is charged with creating research proficiency standards for business students. The first phase of the project was brainstorming what librarians think are good research skills for students. Currently, the committee is evaluating the literature and discussing what professors, employers, and student experiences report as good core competencies. A big thank you to CUBL’s Carissa Marie Phillips for starting this phase of the project. The group is planning on meeting at ALA Annual in Chicago.

BRASS/ RUSA EMERALD AACSB Workshop for Academic Business Librarians

You may have also noticed a call put out to the BRASS-L and BUSLIB-L listservs about the upcoming Emerald sponsored workshop on business accreditation at ALA annual: How can the library continue to support the business school through the accreditation process? BRASS is fortunate to have as keynote speaker Dr. Dan LeClair, VP and Chief Operating Officer of AACSB International speak to us about changes in AACSB accreditation. The workshop will also address your experiences with AACSB business school accreditation standards and your library’s involvement and their creation. Please take a moment to fill out the survey and share your experiences with us. Remember that you are a valuable source of professional information and your input is greatly needed and appreciated! The link to the free registration page is above.

Charles Allan, 2012-2013 Chair

BRASS Business Reference in Public Libraries Committee
Business Reference in Public Libraries Committee Forum on June 29 from 2:00-3:00P.M.—“Business Librarian’s Reference Shelf”—a panel discussion featuring authors of valuable and practical books for the business librarian.

Check out our new Public Libraries Briefcase – Harness the Power of Branding by Eric Petersen from H&R Block Business & Career Center at the Kansas City Public Library.

Elizabeth Malafi, 2011-2013 Chair

BRASS Program Planning Committee
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Investment Success! Building & Managing Your Retirement Portfolio

Monday, July 1, 2013, 8:30-10:00 A.M.

Good personal investment education is important for librarians and library staff. We are an occupational group that is rarely able to access top financial advice. In this program, investment professionals will demystify the process and help us understand essential principles and how to apply them to make better decisions to meet our retirement goals. The presentation will include a discussion of the common mistakes investors make, why we make them, and how to avoid them.

Speakers

Charles Rotblut, CFA, Vice President, American Association of Individual Investors
Rotblut is a vice president of the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII). He is the editor of the AAII Journal. He authors the weekly AAII Investor Update e-newsletter and his commentary is published on both Seeking Alpha and Forbes.com. He has analyzed both publicly traded and privately held companies. Charles’ experience includes working for Zacks Investment Research, an investment research firm; INVESTools, an investment education company; Curian Capital, a money management firm; and McClure, Schumacher & Associates, a business valuation firm. Charles is a graduate of the University of Kansas, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Journalism. He is a holder of the right to use the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.

Jeremy Glaser, Morningstar Markets editor
Glaser is markets editor for Morningstar.com and responsible for directing all stock market coverage for Morningstar’s website for individual investors. Prior to assuming his current role in 2009, he was a senior equity analyst for Morningstar, covering the leisure, hospitality, and gaming sectors. He joined Morningstar in 2006. Glaser holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Chicago.

Peter McKay, 2012-2013 Chair

BRASS Business Reference Sources Committee
The Business Reference Sources Committee Publishers’ Forum Sub-Committee headed up by Penny Scott has been hard at work finalizing details for the program.

The Publishers’ Forum will be held from 1:00-2:30 P.M. on Sunday, June 30 and is currently schedule in N227a of the McCormick Place Convention Center. The program is titled “Finding Business Information in a Googlized World: The Future of Business Research and Discovery Layers”. “What is the impact of discovery services on business information? How are discovery services affecting business publishers, particularly on the specialized business databases side? Most of the discovery platforms tend to be focused on articles, not pulling out data that business researchers seek. Representatives from Proquest, OCLC, Ebsco, and Ex Libris will speak and, more importantly, answer questions about their services and how they are working to incorporate these more specialized data sources”.

Ed Hahn has also been riding herd on the Reference Sources Nominating Sub-Committee and getting additional sources nominated for consideration by the committee as a whole. Currently we have twenty-nine titles nominated, but we would still like to have more as we get ready to make our final determinations. Please contact Ed (edwardhahn@weber.edu) or myself (hurstsj@miamioh.edu) if you have Business Reference sources you would like the committee to consider.

This year as our meeting time at ALA has been cut to one hour (4:30-5:30 P.M., Saturday, June 29); the Committee will be trying something new. We will hold a virtual meeting in May to discuss the nominated titles and make some preliminary decisions. This will hopefully free up some time at ALA to allow us to discuss other topics, including choosing next year’s nominating coordinator and making final preparations for the Forum as well as finalizing the winning titles and selecting who will write the reviews for each of them for the RUSQ column.

Susan Hurst, 2012-2013 Chair

BRASS Discussion Group Committee
The BRASS Discussion Group will host an open forum at ALA’s Annual Conference in Chicago on Sunday, June 30, 2013 from 8:30-10:00 A.M. Two main points of discussion:

  1. Working with the tech transfer process and the librarian’s different roles in University, Public, and Private Sector. What we can learn from each other.
  2. Doing Market Research for online businesses. What are the best resources for researching the online environment? As always, there will be time for the lively open forum. A short all-BRASS membership meeting will precede the discussion topics.

Jason Dewland hosted the first Discussion Group online webinar on April 5,Commercialization Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CRIE). CRIE is the first patent database that will allow researchers to data mine all US patents with the ability to download up to 500,000 records per query. The webinar was well attended with about twenty-four people from around the country. Please be on the lookout for our first online BRASS Discussion Group announcement.

Have a topic idea? Please post suggestions to the BRASS Suggestion Wall. Past discussions have focused on working with businesses and entrepreneurs, free business related web resources, publishing, and other topics related to business librarianship. We look forward to hearing your suggestions.

Jason Dewland, 2012-2013 Chair

BRASS Education Committee
The BRASS Education Committee will be presenting the 2013 preconferenceBusiness Reference 101: Core Competencies for Business Librarianship on June 28 from 8:30 A.M.-4:00 P.M. at the ALA Annual conference in Chicago. It will address the most common business reference issues and core resources, evaluation of your business collection, and licensing electronic business products. The registration is in full swing, and we are expecting another successful event! You don’t need to be registered for the ALA Annual Conference to attend this workshop. Register here.

Our proposal to the BRASS Executive Committee to tweak the webinar submission and approval process was approved. The goal of the proposal is to increase visibility of BRASS initiated webinars. We are glad to report that RUSA will be adding section affiliation to the webinar submissions and publicity. The second proposal to offer discounts at the section level was unfortunately not possible.

Jennifer Boettcher will be offering a free webinar on industry research as part of the RUSA’s “one-free-webinar-per-year” initiative. As part of this program, she will cover updates on using the Census information for industry research. Stay tuned for more details!

Natasha Arguello, 2012-2013 Chair
University of Texas at San Antonio
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http://brass.libguides.com/

BRASS Membership Committee
Don’t you LIKE us? Please become a “friend” of BRASS Facebook page. See pictures and events. Committee chairs this is your opportunity to publicize your events and previews of your speakers. You can LIKE US viahttps://www.facebook.com/ala.rusa.brass.

Kelly Janousek, 2012-2013 Chair

BRASS Vendor Relations Committee
The BRASS Vendor Relations Committee has continued to assist the BRASS 25th Anniversary Planning Committee by reaching out to new vendors and working with longtime partners to help secure funding for the event. We are looking forward to celebrating in style! Committee members include Paul Brothers and Lydia LaFaro.

Celia Ross, 2011-2013 Chair

BRASS Publications and Communications Committee
In anticipation of the upcoming ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, the BRASS Publications and Communications Committee is working on updating the BRASS web pages. We are trying to clean up links and content to ensure that we can deliver all the information needed for BRASS members to have a great and productive time at Annual, including events related to our BRASS 25th Anniversary celebration. At this time we are also working on producing a BRASS events schedule—this popular resource shows all the BRASS-related events at the Conference so everyone can find and enjoy all that BRASS has to offer. We will post it to the BRASS listserv and to the BRASS web page.

Finally, one more bit of great news: We are delighted to welcome Annette Buckley to the BRASS Publications and Communications Committee as our new Webmaster. Buckley has already done some great work on the BRASS website, and we look forward the many innovations she has planned for the future!

John Gottfried, 2012-2013 Chair

BRASS Section Review Committee
This is the year for the review/evaluation of the committees that comprise the BRASS section of RUSA. If you are a committee chair, you should soon be contacted by a BRASS member asking permission to be included on the agenda of your committee’s meeting at the ALA annual conference in June. More information to follow soon. Thank you in advance.

Paul Brother, 2012-2013 Chair

BRASS Morningstar Public Librarian Support Award Committee
The committee for the Morningstar Public Librarian Support Award is proud to announce this year’s recipient; Salvatore DiVincenzo, business librarian at Middle Country Public Library in Long Island, New York. The award, sponsored by Morningstar, offers $1,000 in travel funds for ALA’s Annual Conference to a business librarian from a public library.

Melissa Jeter, 2011-2013 Chair

BRASS Gale Cengage Learning Excellence in Business Librarianship Award Committee
Michael R. Oppenheim is the 2013 recipient of the Gale Cengage Learning Award for Excellence in Business Librarianship. Oppenheim is the Collections & Reference Services Librarian at the Rosenfeld Management Library, UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management. He is the co-author of: Marketing Information: A Strategic Guide for Business and Finance Libraries, and co-editor of the recent The Basic Business Library: Core Resources and Services (5th ed., 2011). He has also made countless contributions as a leader in professional associations. One of his colleagues summed it up best, “he is the business librarian’s librarian”.

Congratulations, Michael!

Patricia Kenly, 2011-2013 Chair

BRASS Gale Cengage Learning Student Travel Award Committee
Kelly LaVoice, graduate student of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University, and current business librarian intern at the University of Pennsylvania’s Lippincott Business Library, is being awarded the 2013 BRASS Gale Cengage Learning Student Travel Award. The award, sponsored by Gale Cengage Learning and the Business Reference and Services Section (BRASS) of RUSA, offers $1,000 and a one year membership to BRASS to an outstanding MLIS student to fund travel to the ALA Annual Conference.

Todd M. Hines, 2012-2013 Chair

BRASS Business Expert Press Award Committee
The BRASS Business Expert Press Award for Academic Librarians Committee is proud to announce this year’s recipient of the travel award to attend the annual conference in Chicago. Please congratulate Annette Buckley, Business Research Librarian at UC Irvine. By the way, some of you may know Annette as the upcoming volunteer BRASS Webmaster—A BIG THANK you from your BRASS colleagues!!!

Paul Brothers, 2012-2013 Chair

BRASS Emerald Research Award Committee
The Emerald Research Grant ($5000) was awarded to the following person:

Jennifer Boettcher, Business and Economics Reference Librarian at Georgetown University Library. Her winning proposal, “Zombie List: for information sources that should not die,” outlined the process of developing an online finding aid of business-related sources that have been discontinued or changed formats and list alternate ways to get the same or similar information. Boettcher’s research interests are in government sources and industry research.

Christy Goodnight, 2012-2013 Chair