I’m beginning to become more of a Facebook fan, after many years of wondering why it’s so popular.  It really can be a way to keep connected with friends and colleagues.  And to gather information, as it turns out.

After the delightful symposium at ALA sponsored by OCLC, I have connected with a number of the OCLC folks that I met and got to know.  One of them, Alice, has a new widget on her Facebook page that intrigued me.

It’s called Cite Me.

WorldCat app has just been released on Facebook called CiteMe. Type in a title, author, subject, or isbn and presto! A formatted citation comes up, right in the Facebook environment.

Of course, if you’re looking to do a whole bibliography in a click, staying on the WorldCat.org site is the way to go. You can build a list of all your works and generate your Works Cited page, quickly and easily. But for one or two listings or a quick refresher when you’re posting out–this new Facebook app can’t be beat!

Oh. My. God.  How cool is that???  (And where was that when I was in school??)  I can’t wait to figure out how to coordinate this with the services for the library at MPOW.

I’m back in Minnesota, after a delightful if quick trip to ALA. The OCLC symposium went rather well and it was an honor to be on the dais with Susan, David, and Michael.

It was great to meet up with the WebJunction folks at their reception, which is getting to be the party in town.  (If you haven’t been, you’ve been missing a great time and some amazing food.)  I’m still getting the boa feathers out of my clothes and luggage.  It was an added treat to have dinner with Jennifer Peterson of WebJunction, who has become a friend through our many encounters.  I wish we loved closer!

As if that wasn’t enough of a treat, I went to dinner with David and the OCLC folks to a beautiful restaurant with an amazing view of the city.  The food was delicious and the company was entertaining.

One interesting tidbit about this very swanky restaurant.  Their signature side dish is cream corn, served family style.  Cream corn. Seriously?  The stuff from my Midwestern childhood?  We each had an obligatory spoonful, if only to remind ourselves that we hate cream corn.  One of the dishes was left untouched, leading one of the group to wonder how much of the stuff goes uneaten.

I hope all of you that remain in Anaheim have a wonderful conference!

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Originally uploaded by WebJunction.

Jen having fun at the WebJunction reception. Those feathers were everywhere by the end of the night.

I’ll be heading to ALA in Anaheim on Thursday and will be part of an OCLC symposium on The Mashed Up Library. It’s on Friday, June 27th from 1:30 to 4:00 at the Anaheim Marriott. I’ll be part of a panel that includes Susan Gibbons from the University of Rochester (no, the other one) and David Lee King.  Michael Schrage, Research fellow at the MIT Sloan Center for Digital Business will be the keynote speaker. We’ll be talking about innovation and mashups and there will be ice cream.  (Yes, that’s a bribe.)

If you’re heading to Anaheim, stop in and say hi!

Buddy Susan sent this interesting calculator my way.  It’s from the folks at the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services and it calculates the cost of employee turnover.  It’s rather startling.   As Susan puts it,

Really makes ya think (or at least made me think) about ALL the costs associated with turnover, not just the obvious ones. I mean, we all know turnover costs, but when you start splitting it out…yeesh….kinda makes you want to hang onto the employees ya got.

Take a look.  You may just decide to coach that employee, rather than look for a replacement.

As we speak, MPOW is hosting a symposium on Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology.  Our partners in this venture include some august institutions: Mayo Clinic, IBM, the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, and the Hormel Institute.

I just sat through the keynote presentation on the MI3C, a collaboration between IBM and Mayo.  The MI3C is the Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center, and it’s incredible.  (Maybe it should be MI4C.)  From the news release on its inception in January:

Today, Mayo Clinic and IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the creation of a collaborative research facility aimed at advancing medical imaging technologies to improve the quality of patient care. The Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center (MI3C) is an extension of a Mayo-IBM collaboration announced in 2007, the results of which have given physicians the ability to register medical images up to 50 times quicker and provide critical diagnosis, such as the growth or shrinkage of tumors, in seconds instead of hours.

The afternoon will feature breakout sessions on topics such as “Bioinformatics: Proteomics” and “Biomedical Data Mining.”  There will be team meetings on “Normalization in Global Mass Spectrometry Studies” and “Mining Genetic Determinants of Human Disease” along with three other projects.

I sat there this morning, after chatting with the guys who run the IBM Supercomputer, with the realization starting to dawn on me that this group of people was in a very real sense changing the world.  And in a chat with the Big Boss afterward, he wondered how anyone could possibly find math or science boring after listening to what these guys are talking about.

It’s a whole new world out there.  How cool that I can peek in the windows and see what’s going on.

I like it.

A few folks have written about Wordle, the new site that creates beautiful word clouds. I just tried one for our new Master in Biostatistics program, and here’s the cloud:

I LOVE this!  I think I’ll make one for each of the majors.  How cool would it look to decorate the library with matted and framed versions of these???

Now cracks a noble heart.

Good night, sweet Prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. (Hamlet, V, ii)

A dear man passed away last night.

DBF’s father, who I’ve known for over 30 years, was a gentle, dignified, brilliant man. He loved dogs and opera and good food and wine. He played piano. He owned a vintage Mercedes that has over 350,000 miles on it, and save an occasional glitch, has done all of the maintenance on it himself.

Hugh was an aerospace engineer (yes, he really was a rocket scientist) and worked at one point for an airline manufacturer. Those windows that are currently in airplanes? His design. Next time you’re on a flight looking out the window, thank Hugh.

We will miss him. I will miss him.

Political folks have increasingly been using the internet and various social networking tools to reach voters. This never-ending campaign season, especially, has seen candidates embracing social networks and attempting to reach young voters, especially.

This morning I had a friend request from a candidate. While I know this is going on, I was still surprised. (I’ve removed the candidate’s name, since it’s not germane to the conversation.)

Dear Olmsted County Caucus Goer,

You are invited to join FaceBook if you aren’t already a member. This will provide greater opportunity for updates beyond email distribution.

Thanks for your support!

Sincerely,

[Name Here] for Congress.

I’ve added him as a “friend.” It will be interesting to see what sorts of communication I’ll get.