BRASS Notes

Elizabeth Malafi, Editor

Message from the BRASS Chair

Hi BRASS Members (and potential BRASS Members),

Many thanks to everyone in BRASS for all your work over the past few months. BRASS is fortunate to be made up of members who are passionate about business librarianship and contribute to the success of our organization. We had a good turnout for our All-Committee Meeting and Discussion on Sunday morning at Midwinter in Atlanta and are now looking forward to Annual this summer in Chicago. Committees are making plans for our program, forums, meetings, and receptions. Please look for more information on these events this spring with announcements on brass-l as well as the BRASS website and Facebook page.
Best,

Louise Feldmann, BRASS Chair, 2016-2017
Louise.Feldmann@Colostate.edu

BRASS Representative to RUSA Conference Program Coordinating

Starting with Annual 2018, ALA is considering revamping how many programs will be offered (the proposal is for fewer) and how long programs will be (generally an hour instead of longer periods of time), and because fewer programs would be offered not every RUSA section may be able to do a program every year. The proposal can be viewed at http://connect.ala.org/node/261211

This would affect the BRASS Program’s length and whether we will be able to do it every year. We will report more information as it becomes available.

Todd Hines, Chair

Business Reference in Public Libraries

Participation is up. We added new members (doubled committee size) and we are getting great response in virtual meeting attendance. We have a diverse group of librarians and great ideas are being exchanged.

Currently working on our Forum topic for Annual – The Many Paths of Empowering Your Business Community, which will include a panel of speakers at various levels in their development of business services and how they are supporting local businesses.

Sal DiVincenzo, Chair 2015 – 2017

Education Committee

The Committee split into Teams to cover all major projects for the year: Webinars Team, Best of the Best Business Websites, LibGuide Team and Liaison to Emerald ALA Annual 2017 Event.

• The Webinars Team discussed a theme for a series of RUSA paid webinar proposals in the fall, contacted potential speakers, and facilitated the submission of three successful webinar proposals under the series title ‘Data in Libraries’: Data Basics and The Reference Interview, Open Data, and Data Processing and Visualization.
• The Webinars Team has been working on promotion for the webinars, as their presentation dates approach, and the first webinar had 25 registrations about equally split between individuals and group registrations. RUSA was very pleased with the first webinar, reporting: “feedback has been outstanding aside from the disappointment at the lack of recording.” (The presenter forgot to hit ‘record’.) RUSA has contracted to have technical support sit in on the rest of the webinars. Open Data is set for 03/16/17 and Data Processing and Visualization will take place on 05/04/17. The Teams will provide additional advertising as necessary.
• The Best of the Best Business Websites Team: The team chose the theme of “Corporate Social Responsibility” for 2017 and gathered submissions which were voted on in the Fall. The three winners, which were announced at Midwinter, are Ceres, United Nations (UN) Global Compact Library, and The World Bank: Sustainable Development. In addition, the Best of the Best Business Websites team developed and voted on a Badge that BOTBBW winners can use on their website. We are awaiting the approval from RUSA and BRASS Executive Board before we go forward. BRASS Exec did approve the change from “Best of the Best Business Reference Websites” to “Best of the Best Business Reference Web Resources” at their Midwinter meeting.
• The LibGuide Team has been focused on the goals of: continual updating and editing of the existing BRASS Business Guides, creating a formal process for committee members to propose new guides and the creation of a new guide for business citations, exploring how the BRASS Education Committee will promote guides in the future, and providing the BRASS Education Committee members with training for LibGuides creation. SpringShare training opportunities were communicated to Committee members and a number took part in these learning sessions. Work on the other goals is ongoing and we will hopefully have more to report at Annual.
• The Committee was informed there would not be free webinars offered this year and so did not develop such an offering, despite this being a common cause for the Committee in past years.

Robbi De Peri, Chair 2016-2017
Ashley Faulkner, Chair 2015-2017

Publications and Communications Committee

Nothing new to report at this time.

Chad Boeninger, Chair 2015-2017

Vendor Relations Committee Report

BRASS is fortunate to have loyal sponsors that support the section activities and awards. Confirmations for award sponsorships were received from all sponsors:

• Mergent for the Excellence in Business Librarianship Award, $4000
• SimplyMap for the BRASS Student Travel Award, $1250
• Emerald Group for the BRASS Research Award, $5000
• Morningstar for the Public Librarian Award, $1250
• Global Financial Data Travel Award for new academic librarians, $1250

Plans are underway for Annual 2017 sponsored events for Chicago. Sponsorships for the following BRASS events are:

• S&P Global Market Intelligence for the Monday BRASS Program Breakfast
• InfoGroup / ReferenceUSA for the Friday BRASS Member Reception
• Mintel for coffee break during the BRASS Discussion Group and New Business Librarians Discussion Group
• Springshare for the ongoing hosting of BRASS LibGuides.

In addition to the stated award amounts RUSA receives 20% for maintenance and management of the awards. The funds are used for vendor publicity, certificates and award receptions.

Ann Fiegen, Chair 2015-2017

Award Committees

Emerald Research Award Committee

The Committee has selected the recipient of BRASS Emerald Research Grant Award this year – Raymond Pun, Henry Madden Library, California State University, Fresno.
The committee members unanimously voted for this proposal – “Mapping Collaborations Between Business Librarians and Career Counselors”, because collaborations with career centers is a meaningful topic to BRASS and RUSA in recent years. The committee members were impressed with the practical approach Raymond designed to research into what business librarians/business libraries are currently doing to support career centers and to look into best practices for supporting career centers and best practices for assessing those activities. The committee felt that Raymond’s research will produce results that will be of value and practical use to academic business librarians broadly. This research will benefit the library profession and it will contribute greatly to the existing business library literature. Congratulations to Raymond!

Chubing Tripepi, Chair 2016-2017

Morningstar Librarian Support Award Committee

We had six nominations, all great examples of public business librarianship. We’ve selected and notified the winner, and they will be announced in March.

Ed Rossman, Chair 2016 – 2017

BRASS SimplyMap Student Travel Award

Ian Richardson, a student at Wayne State University and a staff member at University of Louisiana is the recipient of the 2017 BRASS SimplyMap Student Travel Award. We thank SimplyMap for their continuing support and look forward to welcoming Ian to the profession and BRASS.

Bobray Bordelon, Chair 2016-2017