Author: Genny

This was a good idea and we should repeat it in future Forum years … maybe even at ALA. The program proposal submission and acceptance timeline is so long, this is the only way to get some of the late-breaking news from people who are doing interesting projects. Next time, though, let’s do this in a room with Internet access! Meebo widget at University of Utah Meebo widget added to their user instruction web site redesign — why Meebo? It integrates with blog software like WP, plus, is a standalone widget that goes in your web page, which means it doesn’t require any specific client to be installed on the user’s computer. “We can dismiss these as fads, or we can incorporate them into our site. We deal with incoming freshmen, and this is what they’re using.” That’s why they decided to incorporate them. Widget is embedded on ALL pages…

David Lee King, Digital Branch & Services Manager at Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library, gave this second keynote, subtitled Change, Library 2.0, and Emerging Trends. He started off with “If you hate being on Flickr, duck” — the second time someone has said this at a session. Is photographing the audience the new fad? Change “We are the lucky ones” being the computer geeks, yet much of the audience raised hands when asked if they felt pulled in multiple directions being in IT work. Transformations Shared comments as conversation is “new” (at least in terms of public conversation with patrons and community) — e.g., AADL director’s blog and comments Friending on the web – Flickr/MySpace/Facebook, IM buddy lists – you now have friends for life (do you? is this really web-dependent? As the technology changes and Facebook gets bought out by Yahoo and requires a Yahoo login, will your…

Jeffrey Kiehl is a senior scientist in the Climate Change Research section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The Forum committee tries to include a speaker from a local organization at Forum; this year that speaker happens to be talking about a topic that’s been much in the news lately. History of climate change science Joseph Fourier (the same mathematician who gave us the Fourier transform) asked: What determines the temperature of Earth? In papers published in the 1820s, he hypothesized that the atmosphere must be blocking the escape of some of the reflected heat from the Sun; otherwise the earth’s surface temperature would calculate as near freezing. In the 1860s, John Tyndall built on Fourier’s work with experiments to determine which gases absorb heat rather than letting the heat out of the atmosphere. One of these gases was carbon dioxide. Svante Arrhenius noted that the…

Today’s the due date to send in your proposal for a program for the 2007 LITA Forum to be held next October 4 – 7 in Denver, Colorado. Submit proposals (in ASCII, PDF, or RTF) to Mary Taylor: mtaylor@ala.org

Sadly, I only had an hour between meetings, so I didn’t get to every poster session, but here at last are the notes I do have. A PDF of the session descriptions is available on the LITA web site. There was a good range of topics and library types represented. Instructional Media and Library Online Tutorials Li Zhang – Mississippi State University Online tutorials require far more than just duplicating print materials to the web. They currently have a large project to develop tutorials for both distance students and on-campus students. They’re trying to develop a single set of online tutorials that works for all of their audiences. Too many bells and whistles distract rather than inform. Their web committee found that including audio or video for too many pieces of a tutorial makes it unusable for people using older computers or dialup Internet access. Integrating Library Services: An application…

Eric Delozier of Penn State presented Many Users, One Computer, and Access to Web Services: Information Technology Risk Management in Libraries. I arrived a bit late, so I’m starting where I came in: Liability issues: without adequate protection, patrons’ personal files and information might be lost or stolen; systems can be damaged. Causes for loss: Hardware failure such as CPU or disk drives Environmental causes such as fire Software causes, either malware or software flaws Losses caused by user behavior: can be intentional or unintentional, by patrons or staff After identifying risks, identify the potential consequences and the likelihood or frequency of occurrence. See Jacobson, Robert V., “Risk Assessment and Risk Management” in Computer Security Handbook, 2002, Wiley & Sons. Risk mitigation: try to prevent losses, but also plan for recovery. Hardware prevention & control measures include locks and alarms; software measures used at Eric’s institution include disk wiping (DBAN),…

Slides are available here for Evolutions in Subject Searching: the Use of Topic Maps in Libraries with Steve Newcomb, co-founder of topicmaps.org and a co-author of a topic maps standard, and Patrick Durusau, on the board of TEI as well as involved in other markup standards organizations (didn’t catch them all). I had assumed this session would be about things like AquaBrowser, but in fact, it was about an approach to representing knowledge in an expandable, shareable data structure. Apparently topic maps and XML-based topic maps are big in a whole other context outside the library world, wherever people are managing industrial quantities of knowledge or documents. Basically, this talk addressed the structural underpinnings of one way to do a semantic map of a domain, and be able to construct a crosswalk to another domain using the same map. Sounds very labor-intensive. One thing I learned is that in the…

Since we’re in Nashville, of course our first keynote is Saving America’s Treasures: Preservation of Rare Acetate and Vinyl Recording Transcriptions, featuring speakers from the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum. John Rumble spoke, with Alan Stoker and Steve Maer to answer content and technical questions. The Hall of Fame is run by the non-profit Country Music Foundation. Originally it just had a few costumes and instruments; a library was started in 1972. A record company and a collector donated the initial archive holdings, including never-played discs and rare recordings. Through judicious trading and selling of duplicates, the archive has been able to expand its collection on a shoestring. Now they have records, CDs, tapes, and many old and rare metal-based acetate discs, even glass-based discs and cylinder recordings. Some of the oldest discs are chipped, peeling, cracked, even moldy. Some were never intended to last — they were…

Registration is now open for the 2006 LITA Forum.

I was supposed to blog the danah boyd keynote [note: she has now posted it here], but it’s now difficult to view it outside the context of the subsequent Michael Gorman luncheon speech. When I dutifully met with the other members of the LITA Forum 2005 committee on Sunday morning, they remarked that attendees had found boyd "provocative", and at least anecdotally it sounds like you all enjoyed the juxtaposition of the two speakers. We think of them as on opposite sides of the spectrum. Are they? Both addressed the failings of tools like Google to capture and use important metadata, as follows: Gorman: Google lacks both precision and recall — it retrieves too many results, that are not the best results for the question at hand. [I would argue here that Google lacks access to the best results (buried as they are in proprietary and/or password-protected OPAC and vendor…