Info Index

SUNCOAST INFORMATION SPECIALISTS
INFO NEWSLETTER
VOL 12, NO 2
MARCH 1998

EDITOR'S CORNER
by Jackie Jackson

We have two "firsts" to announce in this issue of Info Newsletter. Betsy gives details of our new listserv which has been set up with the cooperation of TBLC. Subscribe and participate in the discussions! Also, as mentioned in our last edition, the next meeting will be in combination with the American Society for Information Science local members. This is taking place on a different evening of the week, and perhaps some of you who cannot attend on a Monday will be able to participate on a Thursday. We look forward to an interesting presentation and hope to see you there.

Please note the changes in the Officers’ addresses for Deb Factor who has updated her email address, and we corrected a mistake in the spelling of her U.S. mail address.

APRIL MEETING
by Trudi Root

The next SIS meeting would normally be scheduled for the first week in April. Instead, we are going to have a joint meeting with ASIS at the University of South Florida in Tampa on MARCH 26. This will be a Thursday evening. The meeting will begin with a reception at 6:30 p.m. in the CIS Atrium (in the new wing of the Education Building) and the program will follow at 7:30 p.m. The speaker will be Dr. James Carey whose topic is in the area of cognitive science and human machine interaction. His talk will take place in EDU 115 (not far from the CIS building). Any visitors to the USF campus without a USF sticker will need to stop at the Information Building on the right as you enter the campus, to obtain a visitor’s parking permit. This should be a very interesting evening and we look forward to sharing this meeting with the ASIS members.

FEBRUARY MEETING
by Debbie Factor

Twenty-one intrepid SIS members attended the meeting at Reflectone in Tampa on the dark and stormy night of February 2, 1998. The meeting was chaired by Trudie Root and held in the Board Room of Reflectone, after which Betsy King gave a presentation with slides. Sandwiches and drinks were provided.

Treasurer Betsy King reported we have 64 members for 1998. The cutoff for the Directory will be in mid-March. We have a balance of $715.28 in the Treasury. Betsy is investigating changing banks to reduce service charges... If anyone knows of a good bank for low minimum balance accounts please let her know.

Diane Solomon, executive director of TBLC, has approved hosting a SIS LISTSERV. Betsy will be the list owner. The general purpose of a LISTSERV is as a useful tool for communication among librarians in the Tampa Bay area. Betsy will be promoting sign ups for the LISTSERV.

The URL for the SIS web site is:

http://snoopy.tblc.lib.fl.us/sis/ .

There will no longer be blanket SIS email.

Shirl Kennedy is publishing her internet Wave News in Information Today. Check out this source for good web sites. Shirl Kennedy’s job at Honeywell is available. It is a part-time library research position. The work is unsupervised.

We need a nominating committee for next year’s officers. Trudie will be working on this between now and the next meeting. Nominations are welcome.

Jordana Bernstein and Trudie Root have been sifting through the Archives finding mainly membership directories, treasurers’ reports, and copies of old newsletters. Current newsletters will be on the Web page. We can keep one copy of our newsletter at the USF library if we’d like. Trudie has a list of all past presidents, which could be put into directory form.

After the business meeting Betsy told us about the history of Reflectone and what it manufactures today:

The company was started by a little known inventor named Luther Simjian whose inventions include the ATM, teleprompter, color xrays, auto focus cameras and flight simulators. He never made much money as he used the proceeds from his inventions to pay for more research. During World War II he invented the flight simulator to train pilots to identify enemy aircraft. That particular device, which saved so many lives, was the invention of which he was most proud.

Reflectone was founded in 1939 and has been at its present location since 1979. In April of 1997 the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of British Aerospace, Ltd. There are approximately 500 employees in Tampa and another 500 throughout the country.

Today the company produces complex flight simulators and provides instruction and training for military as well as commercial pilots. There is a broad range of training devices for aircrew and maintenance training. Training centers are located in Tampa, St. Louis, MO and near Dulles International Airport in Virginia. Facilities are also operated at government bases throughout the United States.

We were taken on a tour of the facilities by Betsy and Liz Ulrey, where we viewed trainers in the process of being built for helicopters and airplanes. The model helicopter and plane cockpits are mounted on motion systems which simulate exactly the motion in flight. They are used to train both the pilots and mechanics of these aircraft.

We then visited Betsy’s new library where we saw some examples of the nearly 50,000 drawings of designs for aircraft. The library has many technical reports, military standards and specs, in addition to a small reference collection and several periodicals dealing with military.

We thank Betsy and Liz Ulrey for the talk and slide presentation, as well as arranging for the Board Room, meal and fascinating tour of the flight simulator area.

ANNOUNCEMENTS
by Betsy King

New SIS ListServ: Thanks to the folks at Tampa Bay Library Consortium, SIS now has its own electronic messaging service, SIS-L. Its mission statement is:

This list is for librarians and information specialists in the Tampa Bay area. It is intended to be the official listserv of the Suncoast Information Specialists (SIS) organization and to enhance communication among librarians and information specialists in the area, providing an electronic medium to promote regional library-related activities and networking.

SIS-L will be used to email the SIS Info, meeting notices, job openings, items of general interest to the local library community, and whatever else its members wish to post.

To subscribe, send an email message to: LISTPROC@SNOOPY.TBLC.LIB.FL.US

Leave the subject line blank (this line will be ignored). In the first line of the text you write:

SUBSCRIBE SIS-L YourName (example: subscribe John Doe)

When your subscription is accepted normally within a few minutes), you will receive back an acknowledgment plus additional information on how to use the listserv. If you need assistance, send an email message to the human list owner at

sis@snoopy.tblc.lib.fl.us)

If you have email access, please sign up for this service. It is open to everyone, so feel free to pass the word to others who might be interested. Then participate! Let’s make SIS-L a real communications tool that works for all of us.

SIS WEB SITE ADDRESS

http://snoopy.tblc.lib.fl.us/sis

SIS OFFICERS, 1997-1998