To our shame, Clara and I completely forgot to ask anyone to blog the BIGWIG meeting, let alone take pictures of your smiling faces. Not only that, we’ve been on rollerskates since then and have had one hurried meeting where we bumped our meeting notes and worked on one small joint task. So this is just a preliminary note to say how excited we were by the turnout (when people have to keep dragging chairs in the room, that’s a good sign) and that we’re proposing a program for ALA Annual on creating and maintaining a professional blog. Not for 2007–2006. All they can say is no. Hey, they said yes! Thanks for all the great ideas, and don’t let time pass before you blog your notes from varied venues. If you’re interested in presenting at the program, call one of us or comment on this post.
Author: K.G. Schneider
Trends from the Littlest Trendster
I wanted to post my Grand Summation before TTT met this morning, but I had launched my questions on my personal blog and people were commenting through yesterday. I was reluctant to draw the line and say, game over! Which brings me to a continuing trend: if you blog it, they will come. This is increasingly a L2, social-software, MySpace, put-our-lives-out-there-for-discussion world–particularly among younger people, as Pew recently emphasized–and I’m so comfortable with Trends as a kind of group project that it would now seem strange to me to not engage in a trends discussion with the wise voices of the biblioblogosphere and beyond. If there is one meta-trend I am seeing right now, it is this: librarians are getting frisky. We’re talking back, questioning authority, and in some cases taking names and kicking booty, as Andrew Pace did recently with the NCSU catalog (Andrew, can we call your OPAC…
LITA Gets It
These aren’t really notes from the Saturday LITA Board meeting (my third meeting today so far). This is just my observation, as an ALA politico, that LITA is a breath of fresh air in ALA. I was just at the ALA Orientation for new ALA Councilors. I was talking with a councilor who is on another division board, and he pointed out that he arrives at ALA with a thick stack of pre-work–as we in LITA governance do–while ALA Councilors arrive at the conference with at most three pieces of paper. This is because LITA gets it: our responsibilities flow reasonably smoothly from our digital to analog workspaces, so the work at our four meetings every year is not at the “what is this” stage but at the much more advanced level of “what needs to happen now with this proposal/resolution/issue.” Yes, face-to-face is invaluable (it’s no fun drinking alone),…
What’s Happening, Midwinter 2006
By popular demand, I have uploaded the marvelous “What’s Happening” preconference update that until Roy Tennant slipped me a box of Godiva chocolates was a strictly hush-hush document shared only within the ALA Chamber of Secrets, otherwise known as Council. It’s a fascinating glance inside ALA and a great cheat sheet for getting the most out of ALA conferences. Thanks to Mary Ghikas et al. for producing this report.
BIGWIG Meeting Sat 1:30
BIGWIG has its IG meeting scheduled for Saturday, 1:30-3:30, RIV Bonham. Do you have agenda items? One perennial favorite, btw, is “why don’t we post between conferences?” I have my own 2 cents on that but I feel committed to placing the item on the agenda since it does come up a lot. Karen G. Schneider BIGWIG co-chair
Great Bloggers’ Soiree
Much fun.
The Bloggers’ Get-Together
Come one come all!
Utilizing the Benefits of Native XML Database Technologies
Alan Cornish walked us through indigenous XML, with an emphasis on digital collections.
Clarification on danah boyd’s comments about Roy’s talk
Just clarifying that danah boyd didn’t attend Roy’s talk; she based her comments on an assessment of the program synopsis on the LITA website. (I couldn’t attend Roy’s talk, either, due to a major site launch. Can’t wait to see Roy’s Remix!)
LITA Councilor’s Report
[Updates underscored] Council 3 wrapped up at 12:15 on June 29, very timely and very congenial. Over our three Council meetings we had several items on the agenda that are very LITA-relevant. I will try to provide links to documents if/when they go online. Special thanks to our charming parliamentarian, Eli Mina, who in his Peter Lorre voice gently keeps us in line, and to ALA ED Keith Fiels for providing a rock-solid wi-fi connection that made many Councilors very happy. The days when 200 librarians could vanish for a week without any connectivity are long behind all of us. Note: we had over 27,000 registrants for this conference–an all-time record, 1,000 registrants higher than the runner-up (San Francisco, the last time we were there) and 7,000 more than Orlando. Council items LITA-worthy: Resolution in support of community broadband, out of Committee on Legislation, with strong encouragement from OITP. Pat…