Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jaci Paige Wilkinson. Librarians are consummate teachers, helpers, and cheerleaders. We might glow at the reference desk when a patron walks away with that perfect article or a new search strategy. Or we fist pump when a student e-mails us at 7pm on a Friday to ask for help identifying the composition date of J.S. Bach’s BWV 433. But when we lead usability testing that urge to be helpful must be resisted for the sake of recording accurate user behavior (Krug, 2000). We won’t be there, after all, to help the user when they’re using our website for their own purposes. What about when a participant gets something wrong or gets stuck? What about a nudge? What about a hint? No matter how much the participant struggles, it’s crucial for both the testing process and the resulting data that we navigate these “pain…
Author: Brianna Marshall
Call for Nominations: LITA Top Tech Trends Panel at ALA Midwinter 2017
It’s that time of year again! We’re asking for you to either nominate yourself or someone you know who would be a great addition to the panel of speakers for the 2017 Midwinter Top Tech Trends program in Atlanta, GA. LITA’s Top Trends Program has traditionally been one of the most popular programs at ALA. Each panelist discusses two trends in technology impacting libraries and engages in a moderated discussion with each other and the audience. Submit a nomination at: http://bit.ly/lita-toptechtrends-mw2017. Deadline is Sunday, August 28th. The LITA Top Tech Trends Committee will review each submission and select panelist based on their proposed trends, experience, and overall balance to the panel. For more information about past programs, please visit http://www.ala.org/lita/ttt.
Reminder/Shameless Plug for LITA President’s Program in Orlando
by Thomas Dowling LITA members–and anyone else–attending ALA Annual in Orlando, please join us for the LITA Awards and President’s Program on Sunday afternoon, 3pm to 4pm, in the Orange County Convention Center, room W109B. Our featured speaker will be Dr. Safiya Noble, who will speak about how the landscape of information is rapidly shifting as new imperatives and demands push to the fore increasing investment in digital technologies, despite the consequences of increased surveillance and lack of privacy, which are changing our information engagements. Dr. Noble’s talk is co-sponsored by ALA’s Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. If you can fit it all in to your schedule, I invite you to binge watch our Sunday Afternoon With LITA event, starting with Top Tech Trends (1pm to 2pm, Convention Center, W109B), continuing with the President’s Program, and concluding with the…
Vote for Us! DH Awards 2015
We’re honored that the LITA blog has been nominated by the Digital Humanities Awards in the category “Best DH Blog Post or Series of Posts“. Though the DH Awards don’t point to any specific posts as the basis for their nomination, we’re guessing it’s because of posts like Grace Thomas’ post on using Omeka in digital library services, Bryan Brown’s post musing on what librarianship means, Lindsay Cronk’s exploration of text mining tools, or Nimisha Bhat’s post on scholarly engagement and Twitter. And that’s hardly scratching the surface of the awesome content we strive to produce for LITA blog readers! We would love to have your vote! But hurry, since voting closes on Saturday, February 26. Vote for LITA blog on the DH Awards form. Thanks, as always, for reading the LITA blog! As a reminder, if you’re looking for a place to share writing on a library technology topic…
An Interview With LITA Emerging Leader Melissa Stoner
Tell us about your library job. What do you love about it? I work at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Lied Library Digital Collections. I am the Workflow Manager for the Nevada Digital Newspaper Project, part of the National Historic Newspaper Project, a joint effort between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I have been a part of the Digital Collections team for a couple of years. Every year I learn something new about the work I am doing. I love my job because of the people I work with. I also love that I have the freedom to observe different aspects of the digitization process for many of our collections. At times I assist with managing the metadata of the different collections. We are currently utilizing TemaTres Controlled Vocabulary server to manage, publish, and share the ontologies and taxonomies we use in our collections….
LITA Bloggers Reflect on LITA Forum 2015
Connections – Michael Rodriguez Several LITA bloggers, including myself, attended our first-ever LITA Forum in November 2015. For me, the Forum was a phenomenal experience. I had a great time presenting on OCLC products, open access integration, and technology triage, with positive, insightful audience questions and feedback. The sessions were excellent, the hotel was amazing, the Minneapolis location was perfect, but best of all, LITA was a superb networking conference. With about 300 attendees, it was small enough for us to meet everyone, but large enough to offer diverse perspectives. I got to meet dozens of people, including LITA bloggers Bill, Jacob, and Whitni, whom I knew via LITA or via Twitter but had never met IRL. I got to reenergize old comradeships with Lindsay and Brianna and finally meet the hard-working LITA staff, Mark Beatty and Jenny Levine. I formed an astonishing number of new connections over breakfast, lunch, dinner, and water coolers. Our connections were warm and revitalizing and will be…
October + November Library Tech Roundup
Each month, the LITA bloggers share selected library tech links, resources, and ideas that resonated with us. Enjoy – and don’t hesitate to tell us what piqued your interest recently in the comments section! Brianna M. I shared my openness story on The Winnower, an open access online scholarly publishing platform. An open letter to PLoS regarding libraries’ role in data curation, compiled by a group of data librarians. Two takes on data management threshold concepts: from Jake Carlson and from Kristin Briney. My superb assistant Cameron created data comics to celebrate Halloween and they’re too good not to share. Cinthya I. I only have one link to share, but it’s pretty awesome. POP (Prototype on Paper) is a program that lets you create a simulated app without having to know how to code. Simply upload an image file and you can create clickable screens to walk through how the…
Editorial Response to “Is Technology Bringing in More Skillful Male Librarians?”
Hi LITA members (and beyond): My name is Brianna Marshall and I am the editor of the LITA blog. Last week, the post “Is Technology Bringing in More Skillful Male Librarians?” by Jorge Perez was published on the blog. The post has understandably sparked considerable discussion on Twitter. Jorge has indicated an interest in writing a follow up post to clarify his viewpoints vs. the viewpoints expressed by the authors he cited, so I won’t speak for him beyond saying that I believe his intentions were to highlight issues around the stereotyping of male librarians. In his communications with me, he indicated that the provocative title and brevity was intended to spark a conversation with blog readers, not to be flippant about the issues. Again, I will let him provide clarification on the content of the post itself. As I looked at the conversation on Twitter, I noticed a number of comments that implied that the viewpoints, quality,…
September Library Tech Roundup
Each month, the LITA bloggers share selected library tech links, resources, and ideas that resonated with us. Enjoy – and don’t hesitate to tell us what piqued your interest recently in the comments section!
Get Involved in the National Digital Platform for Libraries
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Emily Reynolds and Trevor Owens. Recently IMLS has increased its focus on funding digital library projects through the lens of our National Digital Platform strategic priority area. The National Digital Platform is the combination of software applications, social and technical infrastructure, and staff expertise that provides library content and services to all users in the U.S… in other words, it’s the work many LITA members are already doing! As libraries increasingly use digital infrastructure to provide access to digital content and resources, there are more and more opportunities for collaboration around the tools and services that they use to meet their users’ needs. It is possible for each library in the country to leverage and benefit from the work of other libraries in shared digital services, systems, and infrastructure. We’re looking at ways to maximize the impact of our funds by encouraging…