Education

LITA Education Call for Proposals, Special Webinar Series, 2020

lita: empowering libraries through technology

Veteran presenters and publication gurus, we are looking for you! LITA is putting together a special webinar series to disseminate expertise on turning ideas and projects into conference presentations, workshops, publications, and best practices for social media. We are seeking webinars on topics such as where to publish, assessing metrics for potential publication outlets, how to make a strong submission, and creating social media buzz. If you have a formula for achieving these goals, or techniques, tricks, or best practices that have served you well, we’d love to work with you to help you share your expertise with a national audience. We deliberately seek and strongly encourage submissions from underrepresented groups, such as women, people of color, the LGBTQA+ community, and people with disabilities. Submit a proposal by September 1 to teach one of these special webinars in 2020. All topics related to presenting your work to your colleagues are…

General information

Hack to Learn: Two days of data munging in our nation’s capital

In May, I was one of the 50+ fortunate participants in Collections as Data: Hack-to-Learn, a two-day workshop organized by Library of Congress, George Washington University, and George Mason University. Four datasets and five tools to work with the data were provided in advance. On the first day, we met at the Library of Congress and were introduced to all the datasets, as well as three of the tools. The first of the datasets was the Phyllis Diller Gag File. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and Smithsonian Transcription Center have been conducting a crowdsourcing project to transcribe the 52,000 original index cards of the comedian’s jokes; in March of this year the transcriptions were made available. Each card contains a joke, often a date, sometimes an attribution – if someone gave Diller the joke – and are organized by subjects that appear at the top of the cards….

2015

LITA Lightning Rounds at 2015 ALA Annual

Will you be at the American Library Association Conference in San Francisco this June? Do you have a great new technology idea that you’d like to share informally with colleagues? How about a story related to a clever tech project that you just pulled off at your institution, successfully, or less-than-successfully? The LITA Program Planning Committee (PPC) is now accepting proposals for a round of Lightning Talks to be given at ALA. To submit your idea please fill out this form: http://goo.gl/4NbBY2 The lightning rounds will be Saturday June 27, 10:30 – 11:30 All presenters will be given 5 minutes to speak. Proposals are due Monday, May 4 at midnight. Questions? Please contact PPC chair, Debra Shapiro, dsshapiro@wisc.edu Thanks!

General information

Call for Proposals, ALA Annual 2015

Conference programs and preconferences for Annual 2015! The LITA Program Planning Committee (PPC) is now accepting innovative and creative proposals for the 2015 Annual American Library Association Conference.  We’re looking for full day pre-conference ideas as well as 60- and 90-minute conference presentations. The focus should be on technology in libraries, whether that’s use of, new ideas for, trends in, or interesting/innovative projects being explored – it’s all for you to propose. In 2014, we received over 60 proposals, resulting in 20 great LITA programs at the 2014 Annual Conference, all of which came from contributions like yours. We look forward to hearing the great ideas you will share with us this year. When/Where is the Conference? The 2015 Annual ALA Conference will be held  in San Francisco, California, from June 25th through 30th. What kind of topics are we looking for? We’re looking for programs of interest to all…

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LITA is now accepting program proposals for ALA Annual 2014

The LITA Program Planning Committee (PPC) is now accepting innovative and creative proposals for the 2014 Annual American Library Association Conference.  We’re looking for full day pre-conference ideas as well as 90 minute conference presentations. The focus should be on technology in libraries, whether that’s use of, new ideas for, trends in, or interesting/innovative projects being explored – it’s all for you to propose. In 2013, we received roughly 40 proposals, resulting in 20 great LITA programs at the 2013 Annual Conference, all of which came from contributions like yours. We look forward to hearing the great ideas you will share with us this year. New ALA Conference Guidelines [June 2012] All divisions are limited to accepting 20 programs each. All programs will be 90 minutes, located in the convention center, and will be recorded. All proposal submissions will need to choose a Conference Track. Please see Appendix A in…

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Kevin Ford awarded 1st SemTechBiz Spotlight

The SemanticWeb.com Spotlight on Library Innovation Update Thank you for all the nominations we received for the first Semantic Web.com Spotlight on Innovation in Libraries. We are pleased to announce that Kevin Ford, from the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress, was selected for the Semantic Web.com Spotlight on Innovation for his work with the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) and his continuing work on the Library of Congress’s Linked Data Service (loc.id). In addition to being an active contributor, Kevin is responsible for the BIBFRAME website; has devised tools to view MARC records and the resulting BIBFRAME resources side-by-side; authored the first transformation code for MARC data to BIBFRAME resources; and is project manager for The Library of Congress’ Linked Data Service. Kevin also writes and presents frequently to promote BIBFRAME, ID.LOC.GOV, and educate fellow librarians on the possibilities of linked data. Without exception, each…

General information

SemanticWeb.com Spotlight on Library Innovation

Have you been working on a linked data project for your library? Or do you know someone doing great work promoting or demonstrating the benefits of linked data for libraries? If so, consider nominating yourself or that colleague for first the SemanticWeb.com “Spotlight on Library Innovation”! Offered by SemanticWeb.com, supported by OCLC and LITA, the Spotlight will provide a selected individual with the chance to showcase his or her work with linked data and semantic web technologies at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference 2013, June 2 – 5, in San Francisco. If you know of someone working on an interesting project, nominate him or her for the Spotlight. Note that the project can be ongoing, but significant practical work should have been accomplished prior to March 31, 2013. The Spotlight opportunity gives one selected individual space on the conference program to give a short, lightning-style talk about their work….

2005

Google and the University of Michigan Library Digitization Project

Rebecca Dunkle, librarian at University of Michigan (UM), and Ben Bunnell from Google, spoke about UM’s experience working with Google, as they begin what will be roughly a 6-year project to digitize 7 million volumes at UM. (Abigail Potter, a recent grad of the Information School at Michigan, now working at NPR, who worked on the Google Project while still at UM was also on hand to answer questions). The general outlines of the project are familiar to most of us, having been presented previously: Google, as if by magic, since the technology is proprietary and they can’t tell us about it, is non-destructively digitizing the entire bound print collection at UM (and also portions of 4 other research libraries; New York Public Library, Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford) . The scanning is resulting in page images and OCR files, all up to agreed upon digital preservation standards that have been…