Info Newsletter Index

SIS INFO
Vol. 14, No. 3
May 2000

Editor’s Corner

Future Meetings

If you would like to host a future meeting, or if you have a suggestion for a future program, contact Ray Eydmann, SIS Vice-President, with your ideas. Ray can be reached by email at eydmanr@juno.com or by phone at TECO 813-228-1207.

News to Share

The SIS Newsletter is a great way to share news, conference announcements, achievements, and items of interest with all organization members. Please send your news to the Editor, Nancy Becker, so we can include it in our next newsletter.

LOOKING for a FEW GOOD OFFICERS

SIS votes in new officers in October 2000, for the calendar year 2001. If you have any interest in the positions, let one of the current officers know. We would rather members volunteer their services, so we don't have to beg later on this summer! Your participation insures that the organization continues for all of us. Plus you get two free dinners with the officers' meetings!

Some Items of Interest

Pamela Burdett, Stetson Law Librarian, was asked to be on the West Group Scholarship Advisory Board for a two-year term. Anne Ellis, Director of Librarian Relations (formerly library director at Carlton, Fields) asked Pamela to join the board. There are two academic librarians, (Pamela is one), two private firm librarians and two county/court librarians on the board. Four students were awarded scholarships but the names have not been announced yet. Here some information on the board: http://www.westgroup.com/librarians/welcome.html

John Robert Davies, Director of Library Services, Florida School of Professional Psychology/University of Sarasota-Tampa Campus contributed the following:

1. I'm completing a web page for the Florida School of Professional Psychology (http://www.tblc.org/fspp/library.html). An interesting part of it is the bibliographic database listing. We do subscribe to PsycInfo, but all of the other databases listed I found for free. So, this could be an excellent source for Psychology and Social Science materials.
2. The Diversity Committee of the USF Library has just announced an international newspapers page. I think this is found at http://www.lib.usf.edu/diversity/newsmain.html.
3. There is an interesting web site called BOBBY at http://www.cast.org/bobby/ . You can go there for free and type in your web address. Bobby then gives you a report and lets you know if your web code is friendly to viewers with disabilities. My report gave me some pointers on items I hadn't even thought about before.

A reminder from CD McLean:

The FLA 2000 conference session on Special Librarians and the Internet is now available from http://www.mcleanworks.com/fla2000/. Some of the PowerPoint files are rather large, so take that into account when choosing to download at work or at home!

Shirl Kennedy contributed this write-up (excerpted) for Information Today about the Computers in Libraries conference in March.

Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes? The 15th Annual Computers in Libraries took place March 15-17 in Washington D.C. More than 100 vendors were on hand to show off the latest and greatest in library–oriented technology. And there were plenty “how to do it” sessions and workshops to enlighten and inspire.

But something distinctly different was in the air this year. In addition to the traditional emphasis on hardware, software, data sources and the almighty Internet, there seemed to be lots of attention devoted to the critical importance of the information professional.

Ulla de Stricker, de Sticker and Associates, summed it up pretty well in one of the closing sessions, What’s Hot: Technology and Information Industry Trends, when she suggested that “Libraries in Computers” might be a better name for the conference. “Computers are the library,” she said. “Now it’s all about librarians focusing on the right things…eliminating non-strategic tasks.”

Those who are acquainted with de Stricker know that she’s a longstanding advocate of the information professional as a proactive rather than reactive member of an organization’s team. Variations on this theme were echoed by a number of other presenters at this year’s conference -- among them, Herb Elish, the Harvard-educated attorney who brought a wealth of private industry experience to his role as director of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library System. Said Elish, who has no library background himself, “If we continue to think about libraries as places people have to come to, we’re lost. The real resource of libraries is not the books. It’s the librarians. It’s what the librarians and professionals do.”

In a session on The Library of the Future and the World Network, Elish said that it was reasonable to analyze the situation of libraries “from a business prospective” because technological changes have had a huge impact on the business world as well. The bottom line is something we’ve all probably heard repeatedly: Change or die. “Libraries used to have a monopoly on information,” Elish explained. Basically, there was no place else to go. Alas, he said, “The monopoly has been broken. Information is no longer available in a place.” But as the importance of the library as a physical structure may be in decline (except as a “community center”), the role of the information professional is in ascendance. “Librarians help you navigate through the great sea of information that has become available,” said Elish.

The ubiquity of the Internet means that pointing users to vetted, screened and organized information is more important than ever. “People are having trouble finding their way through the Internet,” Elish said. He described the misadventures of a student using the Web for research on Asian cultures, who discovered that “The Taj Mahal was completed in 1982 and it’s in Atlantic City, New Jersey.”

And, said Elish, “I am convinced that the situation is only going to get worse.” Ten new Web addresses are created every minute, he said. “Anybody can put anything on this marvelous thing called the Internet,” but it’s up to librarians to put the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” on information because they are regarded as a reliable source, Elish said. “Libraries always rank high in public trust in the community because they are perceived to work in the public interest…unbiased.”

CIL Poetry Corner IBM’s Richard Hull, sharing a verse by Robert M. Nutt from the March 13 issue of the New York Times Metropolitan Diary:

Online
Going online is perfectly fine
When you have to search for stuff.
But have a care, for hackers are there,
And surfing is sometimes rough.
Perhaps your fate is discovering too late
An occasional crash is the norm,
"Yahoo!" you say, and maybe "eBay!"
It’s the dot-com before the storm.

Links to Web sites, PowerPoint slides, and other electronic resources used in support of presentations at Computers in Libraries 2000 can be found at the Information Today/Computers in Libraries Web site: http://www.infotoday.com/cil2000/presentations/default.htm

Some Sites of Interest?

• http://www.libraryspot.com/ - vertical information portal of the best library & reference resources on the Web
• http://www.libraryhq.com/ - resources for the wired librarian (including jobs)
• http://www.librarycard.com/LibCardIndex.html - a virtual library (including jobs)

from: Mary Kaye Raddatz, Instructor-in-Charge, Information Commons, St. Petersburg Jr. College - Seminole Campus

Shirl Kennedy posted to the SIS-L list, for those of you who may have missed it:

I've uploaded a couple of the handouts (with live links) from Ann Scheffer's Bibliotherapy session at last week's FLA Annual Conference to our Web server:

• http://www.clearwater-fl.com/intra/shirlk/weblio.html
  Webliotherapy: Web Site for Bibliotherapy (by Shirl Kennedy)
• http://www.clearwater-fl.com/intra/shirlk/roth.html
  Bibliotherapy: Web Sites for Medical Information (by Karen Roth, Morton Plant Mease)

If anyone else prepared any handouts that they would like to share, please forward electronic copies to me and I'll put them on the server.
"Shirl Kennedy" <sdk@tampabay.rr.com>

June 2000 Meeting

Our June meeting will be held at Heritage Village, 11909 125th Street in Largo, at 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, June 7. Lunch will be at the Sweet Tomatoes in the Largo Mall, which is located on the corner of Ulmerton Road and Seminole Blvd. in Largo. Please arrive for lunch at 11:45. We will depart Sweet Tomatoes at 12:45 to head for Heritage Village. There will will be able to take self-guided tours and some of the homes have docents who will provide historical perspectives.

RSVP to Ray Eydmann - eydmanr@juno.com  or 813-228-1207, by June 5th so we can have a count.

Driving directions to Sweet Tomatoes from Tampa:

• Take I-275 South from Tampa, across Howard Frankland bridge. Take the Largo exit to SR 590 (Ulmerton Road). Follow Ulmerton to the Largo Mall at the corner of Ulmerton and Seminole Blvd. in Largo. Sweet Tomatoes is located next to the Seminole Blvd. entrance to the Mall. You can enter the Mall parking area from either the light on Ulmerton or the light on Seminole.

Driving directions from Sweet Tomatoes to Heritage Village:

• Continue west on Ulmerton Road past Seminole Blvd. and as the road curves, 125th Street runs south off Ulmerton. Several Pinellas County buildings will be on the left side of the road on 125th Street. Continue south on 125th Street. Heritage Village is on the left.

April 2000 Meeting

The April meeting was held on Wednesday, April 5, 2000 at the John F. Germany Public Library in downtown Tampa. It was a luncheon meeting and was jointly held with CFALL (Central Florida Association of Law Libraries). Wanda Barrett provided a wonderful deli spread and Bill Raddatz, a certified financial planner and the Vice-President of Provise Management Group, was the speaker.

"Rules to Investing but with a Twist"

Mr. Raddatz began his talk by saying he always prefers talking before a cozy group, "which Webster's dictionary defines as 17 or fewer librarians in one room." Then he began to ask some questions: What is meant by rules to invest but with a twist? What are the common sense investing rules?

Raddatz answered the questions by saying that although the saying "Mankind’s greatest invention is compound interest is wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein, the essence of the saying remains true. (Einstein actually said, "The most powerful force in the universe is exponential notation). Time is relative and when it comes to time and money, time does a number to us. For example:

If you start with $1.00, how many times will it need to double before it reaches $1 million?
Answer: 20 times.

If you let your money sit and you ride out the storms in the market, you can experience some dramatic doublings of your money. Patience is the key. Patience is necessary because after having your $1 double 10 times, you might expect to be halfway to your goal. However at the 10th double, you will have only $1020. Now, some people may look at that and say, "My money isn't doing anything. I'm going to take it out and buy a refrigerator." What they don't realize is that until the 19th double (that's right, the second to last double), that you reach $500,000 and the halfway mark.

There are two different ways to compound your money: Invest in the sure thing (defined as no possible loss of principal) or invest with some risk (maybe make more, but could lose principal). For example, in 1964 a new mustang cost about $2380. If you put that much in a passbook savings account that had a 4% rate of return after 36 years, you would have $9767 (without taxes). Could you buy a new Mustang with that money? NO. The moral of the story is that if you are depending on the safety of a sure thing, you are assuming that you won't have the purchasing power and you don't get it! If you had invested that $2380 in large cap stocks such as the S&P 500 index, which since 1925, have averaged a compounded annualized rate of about 11%, in 36 years you would have $101,906. Now can you buy a mustang with that?
YES.

There are two avenues to take when it comes to investing: High Risk or Low Risk. Low risk is where you risk not having enough purchasing power in the future and high risk is where you risk not sleeping at night because of investment volatility. Economists Brinson, Hood and Beebower studied pension funds (the study, "Determinants of Portfolio Performance," by Gary P. Brinson, L. Randolph Hood, and Gilbert L. Beebower, was published in the July/August 1986 edition of the Financial Analysts Journal) to find out why there is a difference in the rate of return. What did they find?

• 91.5% of the difference in returns is because of asset allocation.
• 1.8% was market timing (buying or selling now or later)
• 4.6% in security selection (should I buy GM or Ford or Microsoft)
• 2.1% was other (highly theoretical economist gobbledegook, which is AKA fudge factor or dumb luck)

So it is not market timing or what you select, as much as it is selecting a variety.

The US has never had the best year in the market when compared to foreign stock markets in the last twenty years. The closest the U.S market came to first was in 1995 when the U.S. market came in second behind Switzerland. It feels like a rollercoaster ride.

However, it is more important to have steady growth than a huge increase followed by stagnation. For example, Fund A has $10,000 and does 20% growth the first year and 0% the second. That gets you $12,000 for the first year plus 0 for the second for a total of $12,000. Now if you have steady growth of 10% a year your total at the end of the first year is $11,000 and then $12,100 for the second. You make more money with steady growth. You want to choose steady growth over high volatility.

But you also need to plan on systematic investment. This example was a big shocker:

Bill's Excellent Investment:

• Requires systematic investment of $1,000 monthly.
• 1st month, $1,000 (cost = $1,000/a share) You buy one share. You have one share.
• 2nd month, $1,000 (cost = $1/a share, market tumbles 99%) You buy 1,000 shares. You have 1,001 shares.
• 3rd month, $1,000 (cost = $5/a share) You buy 200 shares. You have 1,201 shares.

Now your significant other is screaming at you, "What are you doing? Get your money out of there. You bought at $1,000 a share and now you are buying at $5 a share! What are you thinking?" So you bow to the pressure and call Bill and say you want to cash out.

• You invested $3000
• You cashed out for $6005. You doubled your money.

You can't be afraid of the ups and downs. If you have the staying power, know that you need to stay in the game for as many doubles (remember that you don't get halfway to your goal until the 19th double) as you can. You need to accumulate as many shares as you can, then you will make money.

CAUTION: in the above example, if you cashed out when the investment was at $1/share, you would have lost money (Investment = $2,000, share price = $1, total shares sold = 1001, 1001x $1= $1,001. $2000 less $1001 = $999 loss). You need to look at investments like you look at any purchase you are going to make. Get the best value for your money (e.g. a quality stock selling for $100 that is now selling for $50 at a 50% discount). It is better to go for a smooth, steady ride. Remember to smile when the market goes down: It's on sale!

Bill Raddatz can be reached at raddatz@provise.com  or at 727.441.9022 x214.

SIS Business Minutes, April 5, 2000

SIS Officers Oct 1999 - Dec 2000