In the 1990’s most of the Charlotte & Mecklenburg County branch libraries hired Automated Support Coordinators to handle public computer problems so the rest of the library staff did not have to answer those types of questions. The Coordinators were hired by and reported to the branch libraries, not central IT. A new director came on board and wanted to centralize computing support, reduce the number of IT staff, increase the technical skills of all library staff, standardize procedures, and improve communication between IT and the rest of the library. The solution, create a mobile front line support team. Instead of having Coordinators in each library, Level 1 support was responsible for several branches and would go where needed at the time of need. They created Level 2 support teams which were more specialized and had little public interaction. Level 2’s specialized in one of the following areas: network, servers and workstations, ILS, and special projects. An online helpdesk system was implemented to help track requests and projects.

Now that there was no longer a Coordinator in each library it was also decided to create a list of core technical competencies that each staff member should have. Some of those skills included: what is in your library, basic hardware knowledge, basic printer troubleshooting, OS system knowledge, browser familiarity, etc. On the Intranet a core competencies checklist was created for each staff member. That checklist was also monitored by the supervisor. (A screen shot of some of the competencies was projected but I could not catch them because the type was small. Kevin said he would post his presentation along with a more detailed list of the competencies on the LITA Web site. As of this posting they still aren’t there yet.) The competencies were tied to performance evaluations. To get staff excited prizes were given to branches and individuals.

Results included empowering staff, reduced calls to help desk, increased up time, and it reduced the technology gap among staff.

Michelle Robertson, Systems and Web Librarian, Anne Arundel Community College

Michelle’s talk focused more on what type of skills/competencies a Systems Librarian should have or what she called “Survival skills for the lone systems librarian.” Some of the tips she listed included: learn about your patrons, work a desk so you can see the problem in action, hang out and walk around the public areas because you will see problems that no one has reported, and make time for usability testing. She also mentioned some of the staff challenges you may face including: some staff are technically challenged, change averse, the self-taught expert who does too much on their own, mother’s helper, afraid to bother you because you are too busy, etc. Important skills of the lone systems librarian include: good negotiating skills, agitate for change but pick your battles wisely, provide the staff with the tools they need to do their job, communicate across all levels and at the appropriate level for each audience, LISTEN, continue learning, act as a mediator between the Library and IT, keep IT informed and include them when possible on what’s going on.

Richard Wayne, Assistant Director, Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas

Their library created a computer staff training program. The program started 8 years ago and it is on its 4th iteration. In order to provide the training they leveraged existing staff within the library to create a tech team. This team provides the training. When creating the program and when they re-evaluate the program they ask themselves the following questions: what are the basic skills needed, what are the biggest problem areas, what do staff think is important. They also did what he called the iterative method meaning they could change it is they went. Most of the instructors were from the library but they also did bring in people from other parts of the campus. Richard gave examples of what was covered in some of the sessions. There were 5 sessions and each lasted approx. 1 ½ hours. Part 1 covered: unit mission, responsibilities chart/customers responsibilities, their methodology, how to use the helpdesk, interpreting the on call schedule, overview of the technical liaison team, terminology, Q&A, and computer room tour. Part 2 covered: opening up a pc, introduction to the LAN (both library, student and campus), Internet and Internet 2, Windows OS tour, Q&A. Part 3 “the meat and potatoes section” included: how to add and remove a printer, adding shortcuts, network drive uses, accessing reference manager, Microsoft updates, loading software, etc. Part 4 focused on maintenance and troubleshooting including help and PDA’s. (It included more but the slide went by too quickly for me to write the rest down. Richard also said he would post his presentation on the LITA Web site. It was not up when I posted this entry.) Part 5 was devoted to special issues including VPN, burning CDs and DVDs etc. Items have been added and removed as the program evolved. Public computer issues, information security, SP2 have been added as the program evolved. With the newest iteration a new section has been added that focuses on technology issues specific to a department. They have done surveys to determine users needs and after each session they hand out evaluation forms. Each session is videotaped so staff who have missed a session can still see it.

The last part of Richard’s presentation was spent talking about creating the Technical Team. The team was created because sometimes the IT department needs a little help i.e. security emergencies, special projects, etc. The team needs to have a clear purpose. Priorities and responsibilities must be clear especially how this team fits into their “real” job responsibilities.

A panel of experts discussed the forces and interests on the national and international scene that are shaping the new terms libraries, publishers, aggregators and search engines are negotiating in contracts and licenses today. 

Sybil Boutilier, Manager of Contract Administration for San Francisco Public Library, the program coordinater and moderater welcomed the participants and introduced the session.

Table of Contents: 5 Speakers

1. Ann Okerson
2. Helen L. Wilbur
3. David Ferriero
4. Miriam McIntire Nisbet
5. Brian Green

Ann Okerson

First speaker: Ann Okerson, Assoc. Univ. Lib. for Collections and International Programs at Yale Univ. and primary force behind the LIBLICENSE web site (http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/) and moderator of the LIBLICENSE-L Mailing List (http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/mailing-list.shtml). 

In preparing this talk, she’s been thinking of taglines from the 60’s, because maybe those were the days of misremembered youth. “You’ve come a long way, baby.” “What a strange trip it’s been,” a line from the Grateful Dead song, “Truckin” 

Ready to look ahead. There are many tools to work with, model licenses, workshops, etc. So what do we worry about today? Here’s a short list of 5 topics on her library and consortium’s plate: 

1. Long term preservation and access 
2. The future of the “big deal” especially for journals 
3. What to do when the tables turn and libraries team up with vendors 
4. Bringing Asimov to the library: What happens when the reader is a robot? 
5. Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, what possibilities does Open Access offer us?

Preservation

Urgent action to preserve scholarly journals document released this year.

Getting to a more confident space than we are now is important.

LOCKSS distributes the task thru local caching.
PORTICO provides it thru a 3rd party vendor.

Licensing language runs well ahead of technological solutions.

Have added language to the model license to handle preservation (PORTICO and LOCKSS)..

The model license is a fluid entity.

The Big Deal

The big deal: is it an offer we can or can’t refuse?

You pay what you’ve been paying all along and you get more, or all of a publisher’s content. One transaction, no haggling over individual titles, etc.

Caution: if publishers like it, there must be something wrong with it.

Management of individual titles is reduced or eroded.

At Yale did case study of an STM publisher. List price = $750K but price for just the titles the library really wants is $500K; Yale’s cost has only been $350K because of price caps they’ve negotiated. Were surprised that they were actually saving money on this “big deal.”

That doesn’t mean it works the same for other libraries or schools.

Turning the Tables

We have met the enemy and is he us? Or are we him?

Amazon is approaching libraries with invitations to become publishers and suppliers to Amazon. Amazon is very willing to be the print on demand supplier if we have things to digitize.

Cornell and Michigan have deals of this sort with Amazon and other libraries may also.

We (libraries) become publishers, because we are selling information, and may want to get a good price.

Peter Kaufman: “Marketing culture in the digital age”  (http://www.intelligenttelevision.com/MarketingCultureinDigitalAge.pdf) did a study of this emerging market.

We need licenses/contracts for this side of the business. Some will think we ought to provide these services for free, and not charge for them.

Robot: Put down that book!

Cost of most digital content is at least indirectly correlated to size of population served or use, or both.

What happens when a researcher decides to put a robot or spider to work reading material. How do we deal with text or data mining of materials?

Okerson referred to a recent discussion on Liblicense-L.
Yes, this will complicate licensing.
The load on servers could be considerable.

Cliff Lynch has noted that this kind of machine reading may cause the ultimate melt-down of copyright as we know it today.

Data mining looks like data stealing from the vendors’ point of view. Is it fair use? Probably not.

The Age of Aquarius: Open Access

The question as she sees it: How can we make the fruits of scholarly research as free and widely distributed as possible? There are no agreements on how to achieve this goal. Here is a taxonomy of 4 models for open access:

1 Self-archiving solution; done by a local institution. Costs of doing it.

2 New business approach; new business models; reallocating costs; ask authors to pay with special deals, reduced authors fees if your library subscribes. There will be winners and losers. Small institutions might do better than large ones.

3 Government agencies require all government funded research to be made available freely through some method or other.

4 From each according to his abilities model; large community of publishers is working to make journals free or for minimal costs to developing countries.

Will we be licensing open access materials? She suspects we will since at her institution they are starting to do so already.

Someone asked what’s the difference between licensing for our digital content and the previous massive microfilming projects of previous decades? Simple answer: it’s similar but in other ways it’s different.

Regarding shrink wrap: at Yale, they have a standard form letter they send back to those vendors, stating a counter set of terms posted at a URL which states the terms under which they intend to use it. Never get a response from any of these.

Helen Wilbur

The second speaker was Helen Wilbur, Vice President of Consortia and Major Accounts, Thomson Gale.

Her job involves negotiating Thomson Gale’s largest contracts. She took the Harvard negotiating seminar which helped her a lot.

The most important thing is understanding your negotiating partner’s position, even if you don’t like it. But you MUST understand it.

First Topic: Challenges:

•  Everyone’s an author 
•  Everyone’s a publisher
•  Add and prove value in a commoditized world
•  No permanent friends, no permanent enemies

Second topic: What are our goals?

How are the goals of publishers similar and dissimilar from libraries?

Some are similar to those of libraries:

•  Create products and services that our customers want
•  Provide as much full text as possible
•  Meet subject needs of customers
•  Add and prove value in a commoditized world

Others are dissimilar: 

•  Maintain protection for intellectual property
•  Control distribution channels
•  Make money

Thomson Gale does not support exclusive relationships with periodical publishers, because the excessive costs trickle down to the customers and requires customers to purchase duplicative databases. Goal: maximize active titles with no embargoes.

Digital collections and archives require a different model, which does include exclusives. They look carefully at what other vendors are doing, and avoid what others are already doing. Also, you’re purchasing the content, so a contract is required.

What does Ken Lay have to do with libraries?

•  Sarbanes Oxley law (from Congress after Enron)
•  New accounting regulations that Gale has to deal with.
•  Protects consumers
•  Makes contracting more rigorous for publicly traded companies

For example when Gale sells a product, by law they have to ship you something, something physical; a lot of sites don’t want to accept it.

When looking at vendor contracts/licenses, here’s Wilbur’s list of things that are standard provisions, and not worth worrying about, followed by the list of things you should take a good hard look at.

No heartburn list:

•  Withdrawal of content
•  Warranties
•  Governing law
•  Indemnification

Can retain right to cancel within 30 days notice if content becomes less valuable because of withdrawal of material.

Governing law: they HAVE to use Michigan law. If this is a problem, they generally just take the clause out all together, and let the courts decide, if it comes to that.

Think twice list: the things you should really care about:

•  Authorized users
1.  Alumni
2.  Virtual reference
•  Perpetual Access
1.  License for use vs. contract
2.  Dark archives
•  Use restrictions
1.  Coursepacks
2.  Fair use and copyright
3.  Public domain and contract law
•  Managing the license
1.  Deliverables

If it’s NOT in the contract, it doesn’t exist. Are you getting the deliverables you want? You asked for x days of training. Did you get that many?

Why does content get withdrawn? They have what they call “evergreen” contracts that renew automatically unless someone actively stops it.

Virtual reference is a very complicated issue; if you’re contracting with another entity to provide their online reference, use of a database for that purpose may not be covered by your license.

Simple Rules for Getting the Most out of Negotiating

• Clarify your objectives
1.  Understand the offer at hand
2.  Set your priorities
3.  What can you trade, where can you compromise?
•  Understand what the other party wants
1.  It’s not always about the money
•  Focus on the issues
1.  Compromise and creativity
•  Niceness counts
1.  Even hostage negotiators are pleasant

What you can do

•  Transparent process
•  Be clear about your goals
•  Professional courtesy and respect
•  No deal, no harm, no foul
•  Contract maintenance and compliance

GET IT IN WRITING

David Ferriero

The third speaker was David Ferriero, the Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of the Research Libraries at the New York Public Library reported on NYPL’s deal with Google, and on the Google book scanning project in general.

NYPL has an agreement with Google to digitize carefully selected public domain materials. NYPL trustees are very conservative; getting them to agree was tricky, and that’s why they are ONLY doing public domain materials. All the major publishers in the US have their headquarters located within a few blocks of the main branch. These are their neighbors, their patrons; they can’t afford to alienate them.

NYPL had already been involved in digitization, including the Schomberg “In Motion” collection http://www.inmotionaame.org/.

Being at the table was a big part of the decision to participate; they wanted to be able to influence the project. They meet as a group with Google staff and the other partners twice a year.

There are three cultures at Google: 1) the techies: creative, bright, not socially savvy, like the ones he worked with for 30 years at MIT; 2) the marketing PR folks; 3) the lawyers.

Google has learned a lot along the way from the librarians: long term sustainability, preservation; metadata.

The one that frosted me, said Ferriero, was their “ownership” of the search algorithm, as though libraries had never done that!

Ferriero summarized the number of volumes from each institution that are slated for digitization.

The publisher lawsuits, we know about.

NYPL thinks that they have enough public domain material to keep Google busy until the legal battles are completed. The lawsuits were filed in NY not CA because the courts are much more favorable to publishers in NY.

A transcript of the “Google smackdown” was included in the preconference packets. Actually, this was a “Live from the NYPL” program, co-presented with Wired Magazine, titled “THE BATTLE OVER BOOKS: Authors & Publishers Take on the Google Print Library Project.” Participants included Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine, as moderator; Allan Adler, Association of American Publishers; David Drummond, Google; Paul LeClerc & David Ferriero, The New York Public Library; Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School; Nick Taylor, The Authors Guild

A PDF version of the transcript is available here: http://www.nypl.org/research/calendar/imagesprog/google111705.pdf and you can actually view the original event as a QuickTime file on the NYPL web site: http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/pep/pepdesc.cfm?id=1661.

Also included in the packets was the University of Michigan contract with Google, made available via a public information request. The agreement is available here: http://www.lib.umich.edu/mdp/umgooglecooperativeagreement.html.

Said Ferriero, “I can’t tell you this is the standard agreement for private institutions, but . . . “ and he strongly implied that it is just that.

Google is very private about their scanning operations; we’re not allowed to take pictures; they developed their own equipment, their own software for the OCR, etc.

There are preservation/conservation folks at the libraries who have developed guidelines to educate the Google folks about brittle paper, similar issues; how stuff is handled physically.

Everyone seems to think there is a lot of money involved for the participating libraries; this is simply NOT TRUE. Google pays limited costs for retrieving items, reshelving, etc.

According to the terms of the agreement, the data cannot be crawled or harvested by any other search engine; no downloading or redistribution is allowed. The partners and a wider community of research libraries can share the content.

Microsoft is now getting into this space; scanning 100,000 volumes at the British Library; MSN’s terms are much more open, allowing wider use of the content; maybe limited access for a limited period of 5-6 years, but after that, wide open. This is good, because it’s forcing Google to consider the competition.

Question: Is Google including just published materials? Answer: yes, for now. No manuscripts or music scores, etc.

Someone raised the issue of ad revenues. Ferriero stated that there is no advertising revenue stream back to the libraries.

Looking at a Google Book Search item, it’s hard to even tell where the material came from unless you’re good at reading library property stamps.

Libraries have been able to improve the quality of the product, i.e. the scanning, by working with Google.

Miriam McIntire Nisbet

By this time in the day, I was tiring, and my handheld was running low on battery power, so my notes from the last two speakers are severely limited.

Miriam McIntire Nesbit, ALA Legislative Counsel, works on copyright and intellectual property issues raised by the digital information environment. According to her bio as printed in the preconference packet, she also provides advice on law and policy concerning access to government information and privacy and works closely with ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy.

Miriam Nesbit spoke about the convergence of law and copyright in the digital context.

She provided copies of promotional materials which were included in the packets. These included a “Stop Before You Click” bookmark and a brochure which lists “12 Principles for Fair Commerce in Software and Other Digital Products.”

She also provided a copy of ALA’s “2006 Copyright Agenda,” a copy of which can always be found on the front page of the ALA copyright web site: www.ala.org/copyright.

Lending books is based on the “first sale” provisions of copyright law. Although she stated she wouldn’t be covering copyright basics today, they are important to understand.

Be wary of terms in contracts that override or reduce your rights under copyright law. UCITA was especially egregious.

The moderator, Sybil Boutilier, mentioned that San Francisco Public dealt with particularly difficult vendor, for which the license took a long time to negotiate, then later, the vendor put up a click through license for individual patrons to accept before they could access the product. The library actually took the product down until this issue was resolved.

Brian Green

The final speaker was Brian Green, director of EDItEUR in the UK (http://www.editeur.org/) who provided an overview of EDItEUR activities particularly as they relate to libraries. He mentioned, among other things, the Report of the Digital Library Federation’s Electronic Resource Management Initiative, available online at http://www.diglib.org/pubs/dlfermi0408/.

His presentation slides (along with others) are supposed to be made available later, but there is no sign of them on the LITA site, as yet.

The presenters were Jason Griffey, Karen Coombs, and Steven Bell. Jason talked about BIGWIG’s selection process for the blogging software we ultimately ended up with, Karen talked about useful add-ons, and Steven provided the “marketing and strategies” angles.

Jason began by explaining the major differences between hosted and installed software, pointing out that LITA selected the installation route because we’re LITA and we wanted the geekier approach, but that an organization’s “technology comfort zone” might point to another solution. He emphasized the need to figure out your requirements in advance. LITA’s needs included support for multiple contributors (including workflow), low purchase price, easy administration, compliance with Web standards, and a good development base. For LITA’s needs, that clearly pointed to WordPress.

Some other factors to consider include how well the blog handles images, audio, and video; and whether the blog’s URL is branded appropriately–in other words, if your library’s URL is http://realgoodlibrary.org, you may not want a blog URL that is http://blogsoftware.com/whatever.

Karen Coombs demonstrated how to prettify and extend an RSS feed with Feedburner, which at minimum can replace that ugly XML page with a humanly-readable page; how to install a Creative Commons license; adding tagging functionality; and tweaking stylesheets. The tagging example used the XYZ plugin. [Note: Movable Type also has a separate tagging plugin that reportedly works better than the MT keywords for tagging.]

Steven Bell began by saying that the library needed to decide “why we are doing this activity” and why that particular blog is compelling, particularly in a field crowded with thousands of blogs. He observed that library blogs are “all over the place in terms of content.” Steven underscored that the blog “needs to be where the users are,” reporting that a survey his library conducted revealed that only 5% of their student body would voluntarily subscribe to a library blog–and that led to Gutman Library integrating its RSS feed into his university’s courseware. His handout, below, provides tips for going that route; coordination is important. In the end, they found that only 15% of the students surveyed had taken action based on the library feed–but exposure and awareness was important, and as one person said later in the Q and A, 15% would be huge for direct mail.

During Q and A, one attendee pointed to Ann Arbor District Library as an example of innovation with blogging and RSS. Take a look and see for yourself!

Handouts and links…

Karen Coombs:

http://www.librarywebchic.net/presentations/ala2006/enhance_blog.swf
http://
www.librarywebchic.net/wordpress/2006/06/22/enhancing-and-extending-
your-weblog/

Jason Griffey:

http://www.jasongriffey.net/talks/litablog/

Steven Bell:

http://litablog.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/libraryblogpresenthandout.pdf

Report from the ALA Executive Board Liaison, Jim Rettig
Topics covered included how money from the dues increase will be used and conference attendance. Jim is ending his board liaison term; next year’s liaison will be Terry Kirk. WAC thanked Jim for his support and service to WAC.

Sherri Vanyek and Rob Carlson from ALA ITTS reviewed their web activities for the past six month, as well as sharing their action plan for the next six months. Here are some of the highlights:

ALA is in negotiations with a company for a comprehensive usability assessment of the ALA web site. The assessment will include: a user survey, an end-user task analysis, focus groups, heuristic analysis, and evaluation of feedback gathered through the web site (logs) and via email. Other web changes include a move to a new Content Management System. The conversion is currently on schedule. The LITA web site will be one of the first sites to migrate to the new system.

There are several blogs currently running on ALA’s b2evolution blog system including: AASL, ACRL, ALA Editions, ALA Membership, ALCTS, Green Kangaroo (Mary Ghikas), Hectic Pace (Andrew Pace), Horning In (ALSC President), ITTS Monthly Update (coming soon), OLOS, RUSA, and YALSA. They have also installed WIKI software at ALA. LITA is the first site on the WIKI. The new CMS will support syndication so the number of RSS feeds should increase once sites are migrated to the new CMS. A link to ALA Wiki’s, Blogs and RSS can be found on the ALA home page under the news section.

ALA ITTS has new staff. Jenny Levine, “The Shifted Librarian” and former Internet Development Specialist and Strategy Guide with the Metropolitan Library System (Chicago) will join the staff of ALA on July 31, 2006, with a half-time appointment in Publishing and a half-time appointment in ITTS. Louise Gruenberg is the new instructional designer for ALA. She started this winter.

Other topics that were covered include: Online Communities, WebCT, Library 2.0 bootcamp, JobLIST, mailing list software transition, Knowledge Management System, update on ALA Web Editorial Board activities, website statistics, committee appointment application, file upload application, bandwidth issues, and TrackIT. A detailed account of all these items will be posted to the WAC web site in the next couple of weeks.

WAC created its action plan for next 6 months. Items included in the action plan are: event planner memo, writing memo asking committees to develop policies for challenged content, create documentation on how to handle blogs, test the Joblist site, figure out how steps necessary to retire archive.ala.org

The meeting concluded at 12:16pm. This is the first time in the fours years I have been attending these meetings that we have finished early! I have enjoyed my time serving on WAC and have mixed feelings about not serving on the committee anymore. Good luck to the incoming chair, Stephanie Schmitt. I also want to thank all the members of WAC for all of their hard work over the last two years. I have enjoyed working with you.

Karen G. Schneider points out that this "was basically hearing a mashup of the last four big OCLC reports" and I totally agree. There was a remix of Pew Internet and American Life reports as well.

Topics and presenters are as follows: Copyright Advisory Network, Maryam Fakouri, Columbia College Chicago and Tom Phelps, National Endowment of the Humanities; Fair Use, Dwayne Buttler, University of Louisville and Marc Gartler, Harrington College of Design; Legislation and Litigation, Carrie Russell, ALA Washington Office; International Copyright, Janice Pilch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Copyright Duration and Public Domain, Barbara Oakley, University of Connecticut and Patrick Newell, University of California-Davis; Reserves (Print and Media) Brice Austin, University of Colorado-Boulder and Claire Stewart, Northwestern University Library; Authors’ Rights, Trisha Davis, Ohio State Universities Libraries.

The Copyright Advisory Network was developed to provide Librarians with a way to learn about Copyright and a way to get information concerning Copyright questions when needed.

Topics were on target and poster presenters and experts were on hand to answer various questions concerning Copyright. For more information and copies of posters access the library copyright network . There are Copyright Scholars available to answer all your copyright questions.

RUSA_RSS “Catalog Use Committee”Co-sponsored by RUSA-MARS “User Access to Services Committee”

Sunday June 25, 2006 4:00-5:30PM

Morial Convention Center Rooms 295-296

This is a continuation of my previous post which focused on Andrew Pace’s presentation (see his new blog here: http://blogs.ala.org/pace.php). To get an idea of the crowd you check out the following photos:

From photographer jessamyn

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamthebestartist/175864344/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamthebestartist/175864643/

Photos I took: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amerk/sets/72157594188529420/

Cindy Levine is the Director at Large of RUSA Public Services Quarterly editorial board and a North Carolina State University Reference Librarian.

She started out her presentation by saying how difficult it was to overemphasize how refreshing she found trying a new approach to the online catalog. Her tenure as a librarian began when the online catalog was first coming into being.

Cindy mentioned questioning the time and effort that was expended to make sure that subfields and fixed fields were perfectly coded. She deduced that all the time and effort was an act of faith that advances in technology would be able to fully utilize all the carefully coded information.

After the initial development of the catalog she felt that the best minds were working elsewhere and that vendors have allowed catalog products to stagnate.

Her voice rose with enthusiasm when she mentioned how heated the debate became once they actually felt empowered to make decisions about what kind of catalog NCSU wanted, how they wanted it to look.

As they put effort into transforming their catalog they, in effect, differentiated the catalog from the rest of the collection. It was acknowledged that the catalog is “far from our only collection or information source.” Cindy brought back shades of Andrew’s presentation as she described how they tried to “see the meaningful seams between the systems.”

Andrew assisted by pulling up their NCSU catalog as Cindy went on to describe the guided navigation technology that was used. Guided navigation is able to take advantage of all that data that was put in as an act of faith. It is able to pull and show patterns that have always existed in catalogs, but have never been adequately presented.

Guided navigation was described as different from the Google-approach where you have to rely on Google’s algorithm to bring needed results to the top. The guided navigation offered several ways to view the results. Right at the top of the screen you could see how many hits came into which call number area. In a search for the word ‘Islam’ guided navigation makes it quick and easy to distinguish between the Language & Literature (P) titles and Philosophy, Psychology Religion (B) titles.

Try this yourself in the NCSU catalog http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/searchcollection/

Other breakdowns (or refinements) are to the left:

• Subject: Topic
• Subject: Genre
• Format
• Library
• Subject: Region
• Subject: Era
• Language
• Author

You could also sort by:

• Relevance (default search)
• Publication Date
• Title A-Z
• Author A-Z
• Call Number
• Most Popular (Most checked out)

The most popular option was added after a debate about whether or not to point searchers to popular items, taking into account the appeal of Googlization.

Cindy noted that there has been steady use of all the search refinements since the system was implemented.

It appears that NCSU is well on their way to their goal of having a very intuitive interface that nearly eliminates the need for instruction. In Cindy’s experience it is still very worthwhile to point out the search refinements (Call number, Topic, Genre, etc.) to students. She also hopes to see more genre refinement to clear up confusion created by breaking apart LC subject headings. An example of an instituted refinement was that they changed “Sources” to the wording “Primary Sources” making the meaning much clearer for students.

It is interesting to note that when John Blyberg took an informal poll later in the session, to find out who was happy with their current OPAC, only people from NCSU raised their hands. 2-3 hands out of a very large group. We have a long way to go.

Present were:

Kyle Felker (your humble correspondent)
Tim Donahue: New Intern
Michelle Frisque: Outgoing chair
Aaron Dobbs
Nick Baker
Gail Herrera: IG coordinator, rotating off
Steve Turner
Rafal Kaprowski

Online communications/community space:

This has been implemented for a while now-how do we proceed from here/promote use? We already placed a link on frontpage of LITA site, what else? Make a larger graphical link to call more attention?

Question on access-how do/can non-members of committees/IGs gain access to committee/IG materials in community space? People outside a group can access by clicking a button if the group is not marked as “private.” Most of the material is accessible to everyone.

Maybe make a navigation button or link to community space? We can also (we think) make direct links to particular communities (EG Bigwig or Publications Committee community space). Maybe put links on committee/IG pages?

Are there RSS feeds for community content? So people can have material from community space delivered? We think each element or piece of functionality can potentially have RSS feeds, but they have to be enabled by someone with admin rights.

We agreed to set up RSS feeds on the WCC forum so we can play with them. Then try to write some FAQs and documents so others can use the functionality better. We can send it out to IG Chairs/Comm Chairs listserv. LITA is offering two hour sessions on using community software for admins and one hour sessions for non-admin users-we think new ALA Instructional Designer is responsible for setting this up.

There is a LITA Wiki- it hasn’t been announced yet, but will be, possibly on LITA Blog.

Tim will put a link to all community spaces from IG and Committee web pages. To promote use, we will do some email messages, send someone to the IG and Comm chairs general meeting, try to stress advantages of interaction, such as using space to preserve records of groups activities.

Same person should be point of contact for using community software as for website stuff. We want to make getting help as simple as possible.

Should Comm/IG chairs have direct admin access to manage community spaces? Currently, some do, some don’t. We are not sure, Comm Chairs don’t always do the web work, and IG chairs are hard to track down. If the group seems to ahve t’s act together enough to handle it, it would be great.

Some groups still need to have community space turned on.

David and Kyle agreed to do some back and forth trying to explore the issues and create some documentation.

Progress of Web Documents

Michele has sent out some workflow documentation the group has been working on for a while. This documentation will eventually become part of the LITA Manual.

We talked about using the community spaces as “official” means of communicating meeting reports/minutes. Not sure, ALA bylaws may prohibit this, but we like the idea.

Questions about documents elucidating responsibilities for web pages-does this need to go in manual? It does, it’s there to clarify situations that have been confusing in the past.

New CMS System

The new CMS system is now called Vignette, or Serenas Collage (they keep changing the name).

ALA is past proof-of-concept phase and now looking to implement. They are currently converting division sites over, August 1st is the target date for beginning conversion of LITA site. We look forward to shorter URLs! More info on this is coming, they will probably need our help to convert and troubleshoot.

Web Coordinator for IGs and Commitees

We need new bodies for this as the current person is rotating off.

This person works with IG and Committee chairs to put up and maintain content on IG and committee websites. There is a general IG and committee coordinator who can serve as a contact and resource.

Tim asked to work with IGs, Aaron said he would work with Committees.

Review of IG and Committee Websites

Been a while since we went through these to see how they are being kept up. We would like to review currency of all content.

Comms/IGs are posting meeting minutes and information to the blog now, we need to look for these and post links from webpages. We also need to ask Bylaws if any IGs need to be removed. Tim will do this. Yay for the eager intern!

BigWig Liason

This group has big ideas and is doing lots of stuff that could impact us. For example, they just got a Wiki. We need a liason to their group. The liasion would: Lurk on their listserv, pipe in if needed, attend meetings, report back to WCC anything we need to know about. Steven will do this.

Getting Email Addresses in Online Member Directory

The recently-disbanded Web task force recommended member emails show in member directory. The Member directory is produced by software,so this is programming thing, not something WCC can do directly. The address would appear when persons name is clicked. The directory already displays business address and phone number. Implenting this have ben controversial in the past, so we would need approval from the board.

Introductions: Attending: Laura Cohen, Chair; Holly Yu, Vice-Chair; Joe Fisher, incoming Vice-Chair; and Mike Sainsbury, Greater Victoria Public Library. This was one of our smaller meetings in a few years, but membership numbers are less of a key to the success of this interest group than the activities of the core officers who continue to put out strong programs.

Annual Conference Program: The members were very pleased about the success of its program at the Annual Conference this year, “The Ultimate Debate: Who Controls the Future of Search?”

After the session, a number of people asked if the session had been recorded. The offer to make a recording has not been made to the IRIG by the LITA office since its Orlando program. When we meet with the Program Planning Commitee (PPC) on Monday, we will ask the group if the means to make recordings will be available again in the future. If so, we could then reformat the recording into a podcast.

Although no recording of the session was made, Chris Strauber posted a transcript-like program summary to the LITA blog. The IG expresses its appreciation to Chris for this major effort. The posting is available at http://litablog.org/2006/06/24/the-ultimate-debate-who-controls-the-future-of-search/. This URL has been added to the IRIG’s page that lists Programs and Presentation Documents.

We have one correction: Chris estimated an audience size of approximately 170. When we counted chairs and rows, and included people sitting on the floor, we estimate an attendance of about 300.

An overview of the program evaluation forms revealed that the session got high marks from the audience. A few comments:

- “Run the same session again.”

- “Very inspiring.”

- “Fascinating.”

- “I’m grateful to be here to see it in person.”

- “It reminded me of why I became a librarian and how much I love being one.”

Name change: A decision was made at the Midwinter Meeting to change our name to the “Internet Resources and Services Interest Group” (IRSIG). The Bylaws and Organization Committee gave us a form to use for submitting our name change request. We will submit this form for a decision by the B&O Committee on Monday.

In conjunction with this change, we will add “and services” to our mission statement so that it will read: “To serve as a forum for sharing information on the development, use, presentation, and integration of resources and services on the Internet.

Next year’s program: The group came up with a tentative program topic for 2007. Draft title: “Draw Them In or Meet Them There: The Future of the Library Web Presence.” This will be presented to the PPC on Monday.

Post-meeting addendum: The PPC approved the topic.

RUSA_RSS “Catalog Use Committee”Co-sponsored by RUSA-MARS “User Access to Services Committee”

Sunday June 25, 2006 4:00-5:30PM

Morial Convention Center Rooms 295-296

I was impressed by the size of the room and the attendance. There was an air of expectation and excitement bubbling quietly though the room as people filed in from their previous sessions, or perhaps the exhibit floor. Certainly many people had made the trek from the Questioning Authorities session further along the river in the Hilton Riverside.

This was a very good program and full of rich information. As such, I’m breaking it up by speaker. So you know what to look forward to the speakers, in order, were:

• Andrew K. Pace Head of Systems, North Carolina Ste University, Columnist, “Technically Speaking,” American Libraries.
• Cindy Levine Reference Librarian for the Humanities, North Carolina State University
• John Blyberg Network Administrator and Lead Developer, Ann Arbor District Library
• Jina Wakimoto Head of Cataloging, University of Colorado Boulder.

All materials will be made available on RUSA-RSS page http://www.ala.org/RSSmainTemplate.cfm?Section=RSS. They will be setting up a blog. As of today’s writing, I do not see it available.

Andrew Pace http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/apace/ was the first speaker, and seemed eager to start. (You can see many of the slides included in his presentation, “Dis-Integrated Library Systems and the Future of Searching,” Amigos Annual Meeting, 2006, Dallas, TX.

He outlined his slides describing the classic and disintegrated library systems. Andrew stated that the classic system does a decent job of inventory control and known item searching. He was quick to point out that “Google is good at known item searching; it sucks like the OPAC in this respect.”

Classic ILS systems do a poor job of searching anything other than known items or anything other than books. They lack logical groupings of results (FRBR), faceted browsing (if you like this…), robust relevance ranking, and what he terms sideways searching (expansion of searches and search topics).

The dis-integrated library system is envisioned to include ILL, ERMS, Collection Management, Websites, e-books, e-journals and databases. Andrew was quick to point out that it isn’t so much the electronicness of an item that makes it a challenge as its seriality. These items just aren’t widely or easily available in the current ILS systems.

These problems are well represented by the library puzzle. The four pieces include Serials, the Catalog, the Web, Abstracts/Indexes/Databases. What is needed is a way to bring all these pieces together to form a coherent whole.

In working to put together the library puzzle, one of his favorite metaphors, NCSU created their e-matrix (a proposed marketecture/ system architecture) http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/ematrix/ as a way to leverage the data as defined by DLF-ERMI. http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlf-erm02.htm

Andrew then asked, “What hath disintegration wrought?” Pointing at a slide with myriad of vendor trademarks and logos he pointed out the vast choices available in today’s library marketplace. Then he pointed out that our confusion in this world is minimal compared to our users day to day dealings with vendors and other services. We have library specific sites to deal with; they have everything that the great wide digital world can come up with.

He then quoted Roy Tennent (California Digital Library), “Most integrated library systems, as they are currently configured should be removed from public view.” A light bulb went off in my mind when we were all reminded that MARC was created so we could move data around from place to place with creating catalog cards the end goal. (There seemed to be general crowd consensus on this point.)

This general lay-of-the-land regarding ILSs is what lead NCSU to its decision to pursue Endeca as the way to present their library holdings. (I hesitate to use the world OPAC, it looks so very different). NCSU went out of the normal library space and into the rest of the digital world and chose the solution that is used by Walmart, John Deere & Circuit City, among many others.

He brought out an interesting conundrum at this point, how can you justify a slow library catalog search to a student when they are used to google running through millions of records in seconds.

Endeca brought several longed for features to the table:

• Speed
• Relevance Ranking
• Faceted Searching
  You type in laser printer, it asks, do you want to search by manufacturer HP, Lexmark or do you want to search by price? under $100, over $100.
• Suggested Searches

To see the NCSU catalog please go here: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/searchcollection/

More information is available here: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/

All of the search and suggestions to the left and at the top are selected by the library. Andrew mentioned 10 dimensions by which search results were refined. LC Classification, Subject Headings (split up into component parts), Topic, Genre, Time Period, and Geographic Location. One of the things that impressed me the most is that they’ve been able to mine the fixed fields to their advantage.

This is just one of many “Next Generation” library catalogs. Others included on the slide were:

• Redlight Green
• OCLC FictionFinder
• Vivisimo clustered search
• Aquabrowser visual context
• Endeca Guided Nagication/Information Access Platform
• Innovative Interfaces OPAC Pro and Encore
• ExLibris Primo
• Polaris AJAC-Enabled OPAC
• SirsiDynix EPS, FAST and something “top secret”
• OCLC Custom WorldCat (This generated an amusing comment, “The OPAC is dead, buy our new OPAC.”)
• Georgia Pines Oubesm Koha and the Library 2.0 Bandwagon

NGC4LIB was promoted as a lively listserv to discuss the future of the catalog. Having joined the listserv as soon as I saw it announced, I agree.

Andrew then brought us back to the library puzzled and stated that Endeca has been misrepresented as a short term solution. He posited that it is part of a long term solution to get the pieces of the puzzle back together. At NCSU they’re talking about exposing Endeca to other technologies like Ex-Libris and Vivisimo to get them into the results.

His future plans for Endeca include:

• Continued usability testing and more bling! (Table of Contents, Cover Art, Reviews…)
• Relevance ranking algorithims and a spell correction threshold
• Additional browsing options.
• Endeca 2.0 FRBRized display
• Natural language entry options
• Patron generated refinements of folksonomies. (This is in a maybe, maybe not state)
• Death of authority searching (not authority work.)
• More integration with quicksearch and other data repositores.

To top it all off he also gloated (slightly) that re-indexing Endeca only takes 3 hours. Amazement and envy washed over the crowd and everyone mentally ticked off how long their last re-indexing project took.

On that note he handed over the podium to his colleague Cindy Levine. Check back for the post detailing her presentation later.

Introductions – Attending: Pat Ensor, Mike Bolam, Kate Montgomery, Richard Kim, James Longwell-Stevens, Jennifer Weintraub, Kari Swanson, Howard Spivak, Christina Biles, Bonnie Postlethwaite. Howard Spivak was the only member present who was outgoing, so pat gave him his certificate of recognition for his service to the committee and thanked him.

Approval of minutes – see http://tinyurl.com/n3vpf; minutes were approved. Membership Report: 2006 membership is 4056, down 3.05% from 2005 (at Midwinter, it was down 7.21% year over year)

Items of interest from ALA Membership Committee (pat attended part of their Saturday meeting) – They and BARC are going to be occupied with following a Council directive to project the resources that would be needed to do a study of changing to a graduated dues structure based on salary. Then there will be a decision on whether or not to do the actual study. Keith Fiels mentioned that he is talking with people about the idea of focusing on library school students in the next membership push, and people seemed receptive to this idea. An ongoing representative is needed to ALA Membership, which has a couple of meetings – not sure if they’re always the same times, but this time they were Saturday and Monday mornings. Mike Bolam volunteered for this.

The Open House went well – there were many experienced LITA participants as well as many “newbies” and prospects. The current format seems to achieve its objectives to be informal and allow people to talk with others who can help them get more involved or tell them about LITA. Kate Montgomery will coordinate the Open Houses for Midwinter and Annual – this consists primarily of publicity – providing copy for a flyer, spreading the word to LITA members who can represent committees and IGs, and spreading word to potential and new LITA members. Pat will make sure the Open House is already in the programming schedule and request a room.

Happy Hour also seemed lively; it helped that it was near the Open House in location and time, although some complaints were received because it was opposite the big opening session with Madeline Albright. There was some discussion of putting the Happy Hour back on Friday night. However, many points seem to be in favor of keeping it on Saturday:

• People may not come to conference till Saturday, or they may experience travel delays that mean they can’t make a Friday evening thing.
• At Midwinter the Friday time conflicts with the opening conference reception, something which provides food. It would be confusing to keep switching the Happy Hour back and forth.
• Having it on Saturday and near the Open House means that potential and new LITA members who might not be tuned in to the usual LITA happenings can have time to hear about the Happy Hour and plan to attend. This seems to have happened this time.
• There are potential ways to deal better with the Saturday conflict – the Happy Hour could start a little later, or have a “declared” time that goes later, so that people would know they could go to the conference session then come to Happy Hour. Also, there’s nothing to stop us from having a get-together on Friday, too, for people who want to gather where they know other LITA members are.

Conclusion: Stick with Saturday for now, but consider posting the hours as 5:30 to 8, or 6 to 8 (we need to be careful we don’t lose the connection with the Open House, though.) Richard Kim will organize the Happy Hours for Midwinter and Annual. We have to see where the Open Houses will be first.

Pat thanked Jennifer for scheduling the LITA Booth. It was noted that in future, it would be good for all the MDC members to do at least an hour. We had lots of nice things to give away at the booth this year; the only drawback was that all the division booths were located at the very end of the convention center, where not that many people needed to go. Mary was going to talk with Conference Services about this, and undoubtedly other divisions will say something, too.

NMRT – pat attending NMRT’s student recruitment reception and has been appointed NMRT/LITA MDC liaison by NMRT. Another recruiting opportunity was the Spectrum Scholars Leadership Development Institute Professional Options Fair, attended by pat. This went very well.

Follow-up on other items from MW 2006 – pat and Christina are meeting with the 2006 Forum Committee to talk about having more of a LITA membership “presence” at Forum. As noted in the notes of the Board membership discussion, Bonnie is working to connect with EDUCAUSE. A public library IG (which should give a clearly stated incentive for public library people to join) is being organized by Paul Keith; the petition is being brought forth this conference.

It was concluded that this committee’s meetings should stay at the same time, 8am to 10am, Sunday morning, at both Midwinter and Annual. Other “committee functioning” business – after Annual, members will be subscribed to an MDC listserv. We are being encouraged to use the new online community function ALA has provided; pat will take the administrator training, then we will see what is necessary for the other committee members. LITA now has a section of an ALA-provided Wiki function, so we should see if there is anything that would be suitable for us to do using that.

The Board discussion on Saturday about member recruitment yielded two target groups for special emphasis in the near future: library/information science school students, and non-MLS IT professionals working in library settings. The group agreed that this was a good direction to go.

Putting the student recruitment focus into action: it was pointed out that there are many online-only students who may be great candidates for LITA membership. We need a consistent electronic “package” of links and information that can be sent to students. Howard agreed to find the previous draft of the membership “kit,” and send it to pat who will update/repurpose it. The group agreed that the personal approach by a LITA member to a library school would be a great thing to try. James, a current Rutgers online student, will see what can be done with their program to send out LITA information and find out about face-to-face contact opportunities. Kari will contact Southern Connecticut State, Mike will contact Pitt, and also try to get list of schools with online programs. Bonnie will work with Emporia and University of Missouri, pat with UNT and TWU in Houston. Pat will also put the word out to find more LITA members who would be willing to do this.

IT Professionals: we are unclear what would be involved with contacting all directors, with the concept of urging them to send their appropriate staff to Forum and have them join LITA. Pat will talk with the LITA office about this. Pat will also work on ways of identifying more people in LITA who are already in this category and find out what they like about LITA.

What about the “development” part of our function? – It is within the purview of this committee to do activities that help develop leadership within LITA. Discussion will go forward online and at Midwinter.

The following is a summary of the Opening General Session, with selected excerpts of remarks by New Orleans mayor C. Ray  Nagin, and keynote speaker Madeleine Allbright.

Welcome from President Michael Gorman: “We’re proud of our diversity, united by our common values.”

Next came a video presentation of @your library, focusing to a large degree on library spokespersons featured on national newsmedia and on Katrina recovery efforts..

Recognition and applause for Gulf Coast librarians in attendance. We all stood for a moment of silence for those who lost their lives, or lost loved ones. The significance of ALA’s decision to hold the conference in New Orleans cannot be overstimated, said Gorman who thanked everyone who attended. You’ve literally put your money where your mouth is, Gorman said.

Over 900 members signed up for the volunteer efforts. Those present were asked to stand and received applause. Relief checks were presented..

Gorman introduced ALA officers and the conference chair and announced a $1 million relief fund from Dollar General for school libraries in states where they do business. Corporate conference sponsors were acknowledged.. 

A video welcome from Wynton Marsalis was viewed. Marsalis asked us to eat a bowl of gumbo for him..

Tania Tetlow, local arrangements chair and her committee were recognized. She then introduced the New Orleans mayor, C. Ray Nagin who began by stating that “They always give me a script, but I never follow it. I promise I won’t get in trouble today.” He saw a T-shirt once that read “Librarians do it by the book” but when he saw what the librarians down on Bourbon Street “had in the cup in their hand, I don’t think they were doing it by the book!” (laughter). 

“You’re in New Orleans. Consider this your home away from home. Loosen up your belt buckles–don’t worry about your diets right now. Spend plenty of money while you’re here. You’re sending a signal to the world that says “New Orleans is OK” (applause) Librarians not only do it by the book, you guys rock! Thank you for being here.”

The mayor mentioned that this was the largest convention in New Orleans since Katrina. Most important, said Nagin, since we’re a little cash strapped, don’t forget to pay your taxes at Harrah’s Casino! (laughter). 

Tetlow introduced Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu who began: “Hello everybody! I can’t tell you how fabulous it is to see all of you sitting there in the audience. That would have been true a year ago. It’s a hundred times more true today. Today you’re participating in the rebirth of a great American city.”

A $17 million grant from the Gates Foundation, Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund and IMLS for New Orleans libraries was announced and 2.5 million books from First Book. Next came a couple of awards.

Keith Fiels introduced Madeleine Korbel Allbright as having become the highest ranking woman in US government. Her new book is titled The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs.

Allbright began by saying that speaking to such a large audience she felt like she should have brought either a football or a guitar. She congratulated us on keeping faith with New Orleans.

When she began using libraries, phones still had cords, mail had stamps, and you found the web when dusting in the corner. Sometimes she shocks her students by requiring them to dig up information in books. Every student should be introduced at least once to the Dewey Decimal System. Libraries are fun, educational and the biggest bargain on the face of the earth, and the laboratory of freedom. The lending of books is the transferring of information.

She cited ALA resolutions regarding Cuba–after 45 years of embargo, it’s time to try something new. We denounce the notion that to open an independent library is a crime, and what we denounce abroad, we should also support at home.

She spoke about privacy and said those who disagree with policies should be allowed to speak out without having their patriotism questioned.

I’m delighted to be here, said Allbright, because I’ve written a book (laughter) in which I hope you’ll be interested. Her memoir was easier to explain than her current book, she said. It is from the perspective of knowledge of public affairs that she writes. She never expected to write this book. She has been in the habit of keeping religion separate from politics. But we have to find a way to make religion a force for reconciliation rather than division.

She doesn’t offer a 3-point plan to save the world, but . . .

1. We cannot allow Al Qaeda to divide the world along religious lines. We must live up to our own ideals in treating prisoners and standing up for human rights. To indict the Muslim religion is wrong. We must not condemn the many based on the actions of the few.
2. None of us have full knowledge of the truth, especially in religion. We’re all part of humanity. “I was raised Catholic, married an Episcopalian, and found out I was Jewish.” Knowledge of the absolute may be something we long for, but it is something we never obtain. If we admit our lack of perfect knowledge . . .
3. Morality should be at or near the center of US foreign policy. This should be obvious but it’s not. She cited George Kennan. Neither realism nor idealism is sufficient. We need both. No apparent truth is undiluted by doubt. Respect for the dignity of every human being challenges the tyranny of the dictator and demands that we do battle with poverty and disease, and live up to our highest ideals.

Allbright received a standing ovation and a big bouquet of flowers. SRRT members handed out anti-Allbright materials prior to the event.

BIGWIG is the blogging, interactive media, wiki, and social software interest group of LITA. We have our program Monday at 10:30, Next Stop Blogging. (added later: which went grrreeeat!)

Agenda
Consider program for 2007
Hosting
Publishing policy
Flickr account is linked to a Yahoo ID and Yahoo does not have a great privacy policy – do we need to talk about this?
Health of the blog
In between meetings
Standards category
Officers category
Wiki

During the intros, Karen Schneider gets beignet powder on her laptop and there is much hilarity. Chris Strauber gets a picture, so it is out there somewhere.

There is a LITA Wiki! The LITA education committee has content for the wiki and was wondering if this group would take on the structure of things. Who is moderating the wiki?

We should try to figure out guidelines for when LITA people blog, wiki, or something else. We need to educate the membership on some guidelines for what content is appropriate for which format.

Action Item: Christina Piles, Karen Coombs, Jason Griffey volunteer to help the education committee with moving stuff and creating policy for the new wiki.

There is a web searching toolkit and this content could be added into the wiki. Someone comments that we are making the W in BIGWIG happen.

We have nominations. Michelle Boule and Karen Coombs volunteer themselves and they are elected as co-chairs for the next year. We discuss other positions we need. Jason Griffey is put into the position of Chair Elect for the next year. Kevin Clarke is nominated at the Technical Coordinator. Action Item: Open position is the Volunteer Coordinator. If you would like to do this, please email Michelle Boule.

Do we want to do a program in 07? Yes we do. Action Item: Karen C. and Michelle will fill out the paperwork for this program.

BIGWIG has its own listserv

Blogging between conferences:
Diane would like to use LITA blog for Standards. The group thinks this is fine and a category will be added to the blog for Standards. We also decide to have a category for officers to post the goings on of their repective groups. Michelle wants to have a core group of bloggers. Pat Ensor does not think we should go out looking for them but let them come to us. It is like columns in the newsletter. It is already open to everyone but, we are not like the other ALA blogs. We want the LITA blog to be its own animal. It will be busier during conferences, but we want to increase our in between postings. We do not want it to be a listserv but we want some meaty things about what the different committees are doing. Interviews. Making it easier for people to contribute. More of the local and state stuff getting blogged. More from other places in LITA.

What are we posting? Things that are original to LITA, content from our meetings and conferences. We could also post supplements to topics. We need to break out of the conference only groove. Synthesis of discussions going on elsewhere and adding value to the conversation. Recognizing the work of LITA people. Aaron Dobbs is going to write a post on just what people can find on the LITA Blog.

Tutorials should go on the wiki and not the blog.

Screen casting and podcasting could be used for variety.

Action Items: Karen C. will coordinate posts for elections. Mark Beatty is going to pass on the word to the LITA Nominating Committee to talk to Karen C.

A question about moderating policies, etc.
This is different than a personal blog; it is an official blog and we have to have controls and policies. Though asking new bloggers about their experience when they receive an account is a good idea, it may not work because we would still have verify that what they are telling us is true. We need to reword our policy to be more explicit about our moderation policy. We should also consider giving everyone some sort of limit so that if they have not posted for a year then they will be dropped to “subscriber.” After conference, the Volunteer Chair, currently Michelle Boule, will go through and reduce the needed people to subscriber.

Action Item: Michelle will be looking at policy, rewrite/add, and send to BIGWIG list for approval.

We decide to talk about the Flickr/Yahoo privacy thing because we are running out of time.

LISHost:
Concerns about backup not being done nightly.
The blog is an archive of divisional activity. Staffing issues of LISHost: are there any?
BIGWIG needs to look at hosting issues. We need to have more support. We need to decide what we need from a host and then look at our options. We should choose rigorously. We want permanent archiving. We are going to continue discussion of support, maintenance, and ongoing archive online. Archival issues might be a different set of questions, but we need to resolve that. How much stuff can we put on the server of our host? Adding different files, media files, is going to take up space and might cost more. Action Item: Kevin will launch discussion online.

Meeting time at Midwinter.
Can the bloggers’ room be sponsored by LITA instead of closing it to others? We could have a sign in o see who is coming and going. Action Item: Mark Beatty will take to the LITA Board and float idea of having a sponsored room. Mary Taylor is the person to talk to to get the room set up.

We thank Karen Schneider (and Clara Ruttenberg, who is not here) for being fabulous co-chairs.

John Horrigan
Pew Internet & American Life Project

[My comments are in brackets. I might have to change batteries halfway through the program. Just a warning.]

Where are the connections and disconnections between us and our users?

Cathy goes first:
It is easy to miss the things that are all around us. [We are immune to them because we see them each day.] Cathy spends some time showing us some of the things that have come from the OCLC environmental scan. Only about 1% of users start on our web pages when looking for something. In 1950, a similar study of library use showed that only 1% of the people said they would ask a librarian about a topic. Not much has changed in 50 years.

For real change, there has to be behavioral change, technology infrastructure, and economics to support the change. The behavioral change is the most important for librarians. Users are using technology to do things differently, for modifying things that they own.

Reference transactions are dropping drastically in all ARL libraries. However, people still want to use our institutions and they want to borrow our books.

OCLC asked college students: What are you doing less? 40% said they watched television less and 39% said the use the library less. They do not want to do passive things. Libraries are still about books. [and books are a passive form of information.]

What makes information worthwhile? How do they decide it is worthwhile? 86% of respondents said they just “know.”

Our users serve themselves, they self publish, they are smart, and they are sharing. [They are smart and we need to start listening to our users. They already know what they want. How can we give it to them?]

[I change batteries and we change speakers.]

John speaks:
High speed internet use is up and has a direct impact with how much time people spend online.

Digital information helps people by reducing uncertainty in people’s lives. People are more informed about their health, about their healthcare, and use the internet for information that can help them make better decisions about things in their lives.

Digital information empowers people. People who are more informed are also more likely to vote and be engaged.

Digital information also helps people to be creative. [As Cathy said, people do not want to be passive with their information anymore. Anyone can be an artist, a singer, a writer, or a director online. We have created entire worlds online that allow us to achieve a level of creativity which the “real world” has never offered us.]

The internet supplants traditional media. Does the Long Tail thicken the leading edge? Will there be a greater demand for research skills and the network speed to access it? [Great question! Where can libraries step in? What services can we offer that capitalizes on this? As I said before, we need to leverage our virtual presence to BE A PRESENCE on the web.]

Information delivery is now faster and the cost is going down. The internet is imbedded into people’s lives and the things they use. Network and broadband speed will grow.

What does this mean for libraries? The new demands are still within the traditional role of libraries. Libraries should build on our strengths to adapt.

A discussion ensued about podcasting and how it can be seen as a narrowly focused term. Eric Ipsen, outgoing chair of the SIG discussed a need to discuss “push” technologies which get library information into the hands of users without having them come to us in physical libraries. He remarked that we need to use a term like “pod learning” to truly describe all of the possibilities of podcasting. Since kids communicate in bursts, Eric says, through IM’s and cell phone text messages, they have an ongoing knowledge of what others are doing in a way that is not simply “pinging” each other just to say “hi.” The group agreed that this has important implications for learning in libraries.

Maurice (“Morris”) York from Emory University discussed podcasting at ALA Annual 2007, as a possible preconference program or concurrent program in Washington DC. If you would like to help him plan and/or present a podcasting session, email him at mcyork@emory.edu — and tell him you’re from AASL! There are many possibilities for partering with other ALA Divisions or groups on educating librarians about technologies for learning.

Joe Ford, incoming SIG chair, discussed the updated charge of the SIG, which is to identify technologies with automation and information and user services and their impact on library services; if you have any ideas on what needs the ALA membership may have, all are welcome. Podcasts as e-reserves, RSS delivery to cell phone, wi-max and broadband metropolitan wireless, patron book purchase request tracking and real-time delivery of video were items mentioned to start in the short time the group had together, and more discussions will occur online.

If you know of a library that is doing wonderful things with emerging technologies, let us know!

It’s All About User Services: A Summary and Commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting

A summary and commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting. What I tried to do is collate comments from the panel members and add my own commentary (marked off from the rest of the summary) where I thought I had something useful to add. The summary is broken down into “Evolution and Interim Solutions,” “Faceted Browsing,” “Findability as a Service,” “Actionability as a Service,” “Publishing Platform as a Service,” and a catch-all “Network Services.” Read more…

“Identifiers Roundup” — LITA Standards Interest Group in conjunction with NISO

This is a report of the presentations from the LITA Standards Interest Group. Pat Stevens, interim director of NISO, moderated the panel discussion talking about ISSNs, ISBNs, and the role of CrossRef. Read more…

Electronic Resource Management Systems in Consortial Environments

This is a summary of the discussion of the LITA Library Consortia / Automated Systems Interest Group meeting on Monday morning. The meeting consisted of a managed discussion of the use of Electronic Resource Management (ERM) systems in consortial environments. Read more…

Minutes of the ALA/LITA JPEG2000 for Libraries and Archives interest group meeting

The heading above pretty much says it all. Read more…

Q: What kinds of libraries do audience members work at?
(About half and half public and academic libraries, with a few school and special)

Q to panel: How do you make your money? The service? The device?

Potash: We’re a solutions provider. Libraries came to us and said this is what we want–as much popular stuff as possible. We want to control presentation and use. Two revenue models: system fees for integration with ILS and Marc records; partnerships with publishers to resell material (digital costs are lower than print); can also provide a digital repository with no content. Like a digital vending machine you can set up exactly how you want. 9000 audio books from many publishers, many in foreign languages.

Celeste: We make things and sell them. Licensing content and reselling it in a new form. Or working with the publisher to distribute their content. Business model uncomplicated, too. Tech support on the product gets done by Playaway, not the library.

Harrison: OCLC is a membership, non-profit org. Subscriptions by libraries. And licensing agreements with publishers. Access is part of what is provided.

Q to Potash: Relationship with Creative (what kind of players). How are people listening to your content? A: We’ll offer the whole Creative line, including a high end video player and low-end 256 mb zen nano pluses. A: Usage. A million audiobook downloads so far, many thousands per month. Design based on libraries saying over and over that patrons want to listen in cars. Easiest solution: download and burn a standard CD (not all suppliers were willing to do this). 1/3 listen on PCs or notebooks, 1/3 on portable player, 1/3 burning to CD. Publisher sets permissions and libraries select what to buy.

Q: What would you have to do to get that on an iPod? Potash: Apple needs to license FairPlay DRM. (I am unable to represent how artfully he expressed the idea that it is technically very feasible to create iPod content employing a standard CD…without in any way endorsing it or associating his company with it).

Q: From a consumer perspective it’s Publisher Rights Management. Consumers who want to will evade the DRM. This sets up a leapfrog effect. Do you see any way around this? (Panel clears its collective throat).

Harrison: Subscription DRM model is content goes out and “comes back”, i.e., expires–which is the library model. The trick is to get users, publishers, and libraries comfortable with a solution.

Potash: There are industry standards efforts to make it possible to interoperate DRM schemes. (Mention of French DRM legislation, which would have required open DRM). There is some consumer pressure now. This is not a unique problem: see Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD formats. Any CD plays anywhere. With audiobooks you have to check and see. Industry standards may fix this. Not there yet.

Q: On devices. Where are the publishers on this? Are publishers unhappy with Playaway? Celeste: It’s similar to a book: you have bought one object which also is better branded than a digital file. On DRM: ours is plastic. Apple is the leader because the customer needed the content and a way to play it: a closed solution. Without iTunes the iPod would not be as popular. You need content and player, a simple solution. “The content is the hero.” The player is nothing without content.

Q: On Playaway. What’s it’s battery life? It runs on a AAA battery and has a headphone jack. It’s a flash-based player. Re-usable by vendor. Pretty durable.

Q: From Ipsen: On batteries. Have you had request for a rechargable battery? Celeste: It’s simpler this way. And nobody has complained that it needs a battery.

Q: For Potash, on partnership with Creative. Doesn’t that acknowledge that you need a device? No. A million downloads without a device tied to it–people have devices that can play this stuff.

Q: What about video? Are you positioning yourself to do video in the future?

Potash: The most important personal device to work with is the cell phone. Newer phones with screens will work with the download service. This is the platform for multimedia. Dial into the library and resume listening to where you were via an 800 number.

Harrison: Agrees. You have to expand the media options. OCLC wants to work on the content libraries have in their collections and bring that into netLibrary. Speech transcripts, historical photographs, anything. Bring it all into a single unified experience.

Celeste: Patents pending on audio and video. How to make it simple. Working with Texas Instruments, the producer of 60% of cellphone chips. My fifteen year old son lives in a different world than I do. But physical books are not going away. The physical experience of a book is part of the experience: and likewise with other kinds of content. Make it simple and immediately accessible.

Q: For Celeste. What kinds of partnerships and how will it affect us? Many kinds of relationships. Whatever works for you–we won’t force you to work with us in a particular way.

Q: What about netflix model for Playaway? Celeste: Sure. We’re learning about how things circulate from our library partners.

Q from Ipsen: Demographics. 44 and older. Are there urban vs. rural differences, large vs. small libraries? Potash: Very popular. The #1 county in Ohio was Holmes County, which is mostly Amish. You can’t stereotype. Adoption is broad-based rural and urban. In Hawaii ILL is by boat–immediacy is important to service. Folks in Cincinnati drove to Cleveland to get library cards so they could download this stuff–it’s 250 miles. Harrison: Agreed. Very broad-based. Not segmentable.

Q: on non-fiction, will breakdown into units continue?

Potash: possible to download only one chapter, or to flip through a table of contents. Popular for Bibles and foreign language learning materials. Working with publishers to make audio searchable. Harrison: Audio full text searching will be available in future. Average time in an ebook is 5-8 minutes; we don’t know for audio.

Q: In rural areas, lots of customers on dialup. How do you serve these folks? Harrison: Two different encoding rates for smaller file sizes. Also caching to let download managers work. Potash: 11-12 hours is 200 megabytes. This makes being able to download a 10-15 mb piece.

Q: Have you thought about Bittorrent or P2P? Potash: We’re not having speed problems.

Q: Are there any studies on audiobooks and accident rate? (laughter). Potash: You may accidentally learn something. Cellphones are probably more dangerous.

Ipsen: Devices are very personal and many people have specific devices for specific purposes. One unified device may not be a solution: some people may not want audio on their cellphones. Libraries may need to be flexible about means and methods.

Intro by Eric Ipsen, ETIG (Emerging Technology Interest Group) chair

(about 50 people at start, growing to capacity as the session went on)

Background: Ebook 3.0 was the former title of this session. Sony was very interested in coming and didn’t want to upset ALA, but are very concerned to get the rollout of their new ebook reader right for an important audience. Each of the presenters here does both ebooks and audio books.

Goal: a conversation, not a vendor forum. Encouragement to ask tough questions (and for panelists not to be defensive)

Steve Potash, Overdrive CEO (Cleveland OH)

Digital book publishing for twenty years. Downloadable audio books.
Software company. Originally diskettes, then CD-ROMs. Some evolution since then.
Digital warehousing service for 500 publishers.
Ebooks in multi formats, much foreign lang, from 500 publishers. Ebook, audio, music, etc.
NY Public Library has a link to eCollection catalog. Music, audio books, ebooks (PDF

We had an overflow crowd interested in the how and why of setting up library blogs come to the LITA sponsored program Next Stop Blogging.

Large room, full-ish but not packed at the beginning. As usual with this IG, this is a long, intense program with quite varied presentations, so I will break into two entries.

First three presentations on the agenda deal with

These topics show some of the wide range of perspectives that the area of authorities and controlled vocabularies can take – from new insights into psychology, community and language, to ideas for new services or changes and expansion of existing ones, spawned by new technologies, to the mindbendingly complex details of how our current strategies for applying controlled vocabulary get pushed out of whack when changes to rules or features such as parallel encodings are brought into the process – sometimes a topic only an authority control librarian could love.

Susan Chun from the Metropolitan Museum of Art couldn’t give her presentation on the Art Museum Social Tagging project – her notes will be on the ACIG website a “couple of weeks” after the presentation.

Louise Spiteri observed limitations of OPACS (one of the themes at this convention) to allow users to customize the organization of saved search results. She then reviewed the landscape of tagging (attaching keywords and other descriptive elements to online bookmarks) and folksonomies (the vocabularies developed collaboratively by communities, using bookmark manager applications) and the study of them she’s undertaking under an OCLC/ALISE grant. Applications like del.icio.us, Furl, and Technorati allow users to contribute tags, re-use the tags provided by others, and search for material using the tags contributed by others.

Large numbers of people are using these services, and they incorporate new terms more nimbly, include a much wider vocabulary, and reflect the language people use to describe and search for things better than a controlled vocabulary like LC Subject Headings can do.

If public library catalogs allowed collaborative tagging by users, it could supplement the existing controlled vocabularies, involve people in communities of interest through the catalog, and help librarians create recommended lists and portals. Her studies will include the behavioral aspects of tagging as well as the structure of tags in and comparison with LCSH and NISO thesaurus standards.

Ross Singer talked about ideas and some plans for plugging the harvested vocabulary from metadata and clusters of terms from tags into a recommender service Georgia Tech is looking into, attached to their OpenURL link resolver. He discussed the features and limitations of some existing tagging applications used with libraries or scholarly literature (CiteULike, Yale Links, PennTags, Connotea, LibraryThing, Amazon Tags). Relatively small academic communities may not be the best basis for building a useful service – if you build it, will they tag? So they are looking at harvesting tags from other places that point to URLs for items in their collections (inhcluding articles) and finding patterns of association with controlled vocabularies from available metadata to populate the service. Sharp points: URLs are weak identifiers. Less used material may also be less likely get tagged.

Interesting Q/A at the end of the program with Singer and Spiteri responding, about “socially unacceptable language” in tags, catalogers’ traditional intent to be “objective” in applying headings, and the reflection of cultural values in controlled vocabularies (e.g. terms for “same sex union” etc.) – controlled and otherwise. I’m wondering, if complete objectivity seems to be impossible, what should we aim for?

Manon Theroux, Authority Control Librarian at Yale, gave a thorough and deliberate presentation on the vernacular field authority control issue which was a bit of a relief to this note taker after trying to keep up with the fast-talking Mr. Singer. The issue involves changes made to headings (indexed access points) in records sent from an institution (in this case, Yale) to an authority control vendor (in this case, MARS from Backstage Library Works, whose Authority Control Product Manager John Reese followed Manon’s presentation with the vendor’s eye view) and the complexity introduced by parallel “romanized” and “vernacular” encoded fields for non-roman alphabet language controlled access points such as names, series and subjects.

When the record contains “vernacular coding” so that languages in non-roman alphabets can be displayed, and in some cases indexed in a catalog alongside the romanized version, the vernacular version of a heading is not updated when the romanized heading is – because updates are based on authority records (from the National Authority File) which currently only contain romanized forms of headings. Catalogers must find out about these changes and manually update the vernacular form if readers of that language have correct information. Corrections cannot be applied in the same way to indicators (a field which describes the size of initial articles to allow them to be ignored in browsing) because the vernacular article may differ in size from its roman counterpart. When a series heading must change, (from a 440 to 490 _1 / 830 split, for you catalogers) so that the statement of what’s on the work differs from the authorized form, the tag numbers of the romanized headings change, and the vernacular fields (880 tags) and subfields in both tags describing their linkage, need to change so that the link is maintained. The vendor has made numerous changes to its processing due to problems reported by the customer (Yale) and is looking at how to extend services in this area.

I have to note that series authority updates, which dominated the examples here, are one of the toughest and most labor-intensive parts of authority control as practiced in most library systems — not to indicate approval for the LC decision discussed in the next presentation, but that’s how it is. But, is this difficulty the fault of the pesky series themselves and their publishers’ propensity to vary/change title or use common titles that need to be “disambiguated”? Should we blame the MARC format and its application that requires a tag number change in order to keep straight the published form and the controlled form of a series when those start to differ (automated tag changes based on authority changes aren’t handled well or at all by most ILS systems)? Or is an authority control strategy that’s based on string matching rather than, say, linking with identifiers, really the problem?

Beecher Wiggins (Director, Acquisitions & Bibliographic Access, Library of Congress) arrived just in time to go on before the question/answer session was starting. His presentation had the formality of a government official giving a briefing or annoucement. The Library of Congress has a lot of new initiatives and changes in the works, beyond the series decision mentioned in the agenda. Points mentioned:

Whew! Did I miss anything?

A good crowd appeared for the LITA President’s Program: Internet Culture: What Do We Know About User Behavior? despite some location confusion. The conference program guide correctly identified the location as the Sheraton New Orleans on page 34 but misdirected readers to the Marriott across the street on page 136. I discovered this by going to the Marriott first.

LITA President Patrick J. Mullen introduced Cathy De Rosa from the OCLC Online Computer Library Center and John B. Horrigan of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Both discussed results from demographic research conducted by their organizations.

De Rosa’s Powerpoint presentation was much like the good new/bad news routine on the old Hee Haw television program (LITA is going to Nashville this fall).

De Rosa’s good news: People still value libraries. 55 per cent say they checked out a book in the study year.

De Rosa’s bad news: When people search for information on the Internet, 84 per cent start with search engines. One per cent start with library web sites.

De Rosa’s good news: One per cent is holding steady. In a study from the 1940s, one per cent of respondents said they went to the library for medical information. A newer study indicates that Internet users go to library web sites two per cent of the time.

De Rosa’s bad news: Statistics for reference transactions at academic libraries are falling. She showed a graphic that could have come from a comedy routine about a business that is failing.

De Rosa’s good news: Libraries are not the biggest losers in the shift toward an online lifestyle. Television is the biggest loser.

De Rosa’s bad news: Libraries are losing nearly as much as television.

De Rosa’s good news: People still value time spent with family and friends.

De Rosa’s bad news: People do not question the information that they find on the Internet. They report that they trust it based on their common sense or their ability to just know what is right.

More of De Rosa’s data can be found by going to the report Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005).

Horrigan’s presentation was less about libraries, but more encouraging in terms of the people. A study from March 2006 shows 73 per cent of adults and 87 per cent of teens are using the Internet. With a trend toward more high-speed access in homes, Americans are benefitting more from the information they gather from the web.

People are using the web to reduce the uncertainity in their lives. They are asking better questions of their health providers. They are using government web sites to get services. More people are gathering information before making economic decisions, such as buying cars and investing.

Digital information is empowering. Internet users are more informed about politics and more likely to vote.

High-speed Internet access is fostering creativity. 48 million people have created or posted content on the Internet. Social networks are growing rapidly.

Much more data is available at the Pew Internet & American Life Project web site.

In the question and answer period, the speakers said that there is still a role for libraries in our society, as people trust libraries. They still want books and a place to gather.

The portions are too large. This can be said when your red beans and rice comes with two fried pork chops and a big pile of onion rings. It can also be said of the presentation Your Library’s Intranet: The Hidden Tool, Not So Sexy, But Oh So Satisfying. Everything was good, but there was too much of it. The three speakers covered a lot of the same ground. By the time I left I was thoroughly convinced of the usefulness of Intranets. I was also ready to flee.

To their credit the speakers gave us views of different approaches to building Intranets. Alvaro Meythaler of the Phoenix Public Library showed a model that emphasizes supporting the library staff. Its objectives are 1) that it be easy to use, 2) that it function as a content management system, and 3) that it be account based. He explained how it was fairly easy to design, as 1) the staff is a captive audience that can be polled for usability and 2) the designers know what hardware and software the staff uses. There are fewer variables to consider compared to designing public Internet web sites.

Andy Peters of the Pioneer Library System in Oklahoma presented his organization’s model two ways: 1) as a paperless office and 2) as a digitized office. The two ideas are very similar. Much of the paper that has been produced in the past is replaced with digitized documents that are readily available to all staff through a limited-access Intranet. The reasons for digitizing are 1) saving environmental resources and space, 2) improving workflow efficiency, and 3) securely archiving documents. The difficulties are 1) people resist change and 2) there are aesthetic pleasures tied to using paper documents.

Building the digitized office takes planning, according to Peters. 1) A structure for files has to be designed. 2) The staff has to be surveyed to learned what documents should be digitized. 3) A method for conversion must be adopted. 4) All the documents must be stored in standardized formats. All of this takes much staff training and communication.

Communication is the point of an Intranet, according to Denise Siers of the King County Library System in Washington. King County established its Intranet in 1999. From the year to 2000 to the year 2005, use of the Intranet by staff rose 284 percent. It will be accessed over 600,000 times in 2006. On average every employee in the system uses the Intranet at least twice a day. Siers emphasized that the Intranet has to be updated continually during every day. If it is not timely, it is pointless.

The three presenters identified many documents, databases, and services that can be on a staff Intranet:

administrative information
policy manuals
procedures manuals
staff reports
committee minutes
accounting spreadsheets
staff news
RSS viewers
links to staff email
links to databases
staff developed knowledge bases
links to public Internet sites used by staff
links to training modules
forms used by staff
staff directories
calendars
time clocks to count employee hours
links to software for managing the public library website

The list is endless. Meythaler also said that the Phoenix staff get personal pages to use as they like.

Paper persists. Peters said that his organization is held back by the reluctance to accept electronic signatures. Siers reported that King County designs its Intranet pages to be print friendly.

All three speakers came from large organizations. Small institutions without IT departments will have pick and choice from the menu above according to their budgets and needs.

Speakers (in order):
Ranti Junus, Michigan State
Teria Curry, Johns Hopkins
Kirsten Allen, American University
Mary Evangeline, Univ. of Arizona
George Harmon, Florida State

(note: editorial parentheticals are by the scribe. Otherwise this is a loose paraphrase)

(About 100 chairs. Two-thirds full at start of session).

(A festive mood on the panel; much good-natured laughter. Remarkable for 8:30am).

Intro by Gwendolyn Reece, chair of OSSIG

Definition of open source software: freely available computer programs. Usually monetarily free also, but not necessarily. The freedom is the freedom to make copies and to make changes to improve the program or make it do exactly what you want. Open source programs are collaboratively developed and tested in a process very much like peer review for academics. However, it can require an investment in staff time and learning to get it working.

Invitation to OSSIG meeting, Monday at 1:30 at the Loews in the Beauregard room.

iVia

iVia, an open source software package for building virtual libraries. Developed by the University of California’s INFOMINE project and available for download at http://ivia.ucr.edu

The result as it appears to be in use at INFOMINE and at Michigan State University, is an almost infinitely configurable database of resources of all types. It could be an e-journal portal, but it could also integrate librarian-generated electronic materials like course/subject guides with content automatically generated by a web crawler which is part of the package.
System requirements: Linux/Unix (best with Debian, but also SUSE and Redhat). Apache and MySQL.

Installation scripts make the install process relatively painless.

Records can be manually created, or automatically generated by crawler. The crawler can also add metadata as it goes. Possible to have an expert point the crawler at a web resource and crawl that specifically.

Search and browse features very customizable. Allows for a great deal of precision. Appears to allow a wide variety of content (maps, grey lit, datasets, journals, other)
Can handle OAI and MARC content.

Extensive documentation at http://ivia.ucr.edu/manuals/. This is required reading!

LibX Firefox extension

Created by Virginia Tech libraries. Available at http://www.libx.org.
(An extension is an add-on to the Firefox web browser, which is also free and open source and available at http://www.mozilla.com)
The hosting necessary to make the extension work can be done locally, or can be hosted on the LibX server–which has the advantage of automatically handling updates and such.
The extension itself is a program which students will have to download and install on their computers. (In response to a question it appears that many libraries offer Firefox on their public PCs already; the extension could be pre-installed there)
What it does: creates a toolbar which can include direct searching of the library catalog, and a means to connect to the library’s OpenURL resolver. With a look and feel customized for your library.

Google Scholar (and presumably Microsoft Academic Live) can be included pretty readily.
What this does is to push the library’s services out to where students are already, in their web browser. A downside is that that web browser has to be Firefox. (though it would probably also work in SeaMonkey and Camino, which are also browsers using Mozilla’s code)
It adds a right-click menu which allows a one-click catalog search for whatever is highlighted on whatever web page the student is using (the example was a book title on Amazon).
An “embedded cue” feature puts your library’s icon next to, for example, the title of a book the student is looking at which your library owns. That is, the program is constantly checking to see if it can match what students are looking at with library content.

Advantages: great for digital natives–makes library and “The Internet” the same place. The toolbar is infinitely customizable to suit your particular patrons.
Disadvantages: may be confusing for non digital natives (i.e., old people). Only usable with Firefox at this time, which limits patron choice.

Jabber IM and Gaim

Jabber (htttp://www.jabber.org) is an actual chat protocol which uses streaming XML and other Internet communications standards. Can be run on Windows, Mac, or Linux/Unix.

Used by Google Talk, but can communicate with other commercial services like Yahoo and AIM.
You can set up your own server–talk to your IT folks first, as this is not necessarily easy and has some security ramifications! A simpler option is to sign up with a remote provider, of which there are many who provide free accounts.
There are many clients (that is, software you can install on your desktop), of which Exodus is probably the best for Windows.
Possible to have multiple chats going on multiple networks at once.

Gaim is similar to the commercial product Trillian. Both provide one client program which can communicate with all the major IM formats. You can then access all of them at once from one clean, uncluttered, non-commercial interface.
Easy to install. Available from Sourceforge. (there is also a portable version which can be installed on a USB key…or on a desktop where you don’t have permission to install software. http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/chat/portable_gaim)
There are plugins which provide almost all of the features of the major IM clients.
There are some bugs, but patches for open source programs often happen almost as quickly as they are discovered.

MediaWiki

The wiki software used by Wikipedia. Whatever one’s feelings about Wikipedia, the tools are powerful and useful.

Used at UA to provide training for the complex environment at UA’s Information Commons–24/7, 250 computers, 50+ software programs, 400 databases, 20 students, 15 staff–and constant training needs. The current solution is a static webpage which only one person can work update. This limits how interactive and current it can be.

Wiki software allows updates to be done anywhere or anywhen there’s a web browser. It can be secured to prevent loss of important data by careless editing. As social software it has the potential of allowing students to post their photos and thoughts to share with each other, and to associate the library with that. It could also be used to deliver constantly updated information on events and student life.

Cons: Requires some forethought to set up the right categories, as new pages are harder to create. There is also a real possiblity of information overload if you’re trying to do a wiki and a blog and podcasting (and the rest of your job)…so decide what this can REPLACE.

JabRef

JabRef is an open source citation manager, similar in concept but not in polish to Refworks–not a replacement yet. But in a year it might be.
Requires Java, which has pros and cons. Can be slow, can be tricky to use. (but ARTstor needs it, too).

Documentation is at Sourceforge, and designed to be used on the web rather than printed.
Uses BibTeX–pronounced “Bib-tech”–a venerable format familiar to folks in the sciences, but also used as an export format by Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic.
No restrictions on how many desktops you can install it on (the beauty of open source is never having to say you’re sorry for making copies)

Recognizes several database export formats: ISI, CSA, INSPEC, JSTOR, MEDLINE, and others.
Recognizes Endnote and RIS formats, so you can move data around.
Doesn’t recognize MARC. Limited Z39.50 support. So far.

Doesn’t print references, but will export them to your clipboard so you can copy and paste into your favorite word processor as RTF or CSV. Works with OpenOffice.org, a free/open source suite designed to replicate Microsoft Office (available at htttp://www.openoffice.org in Windows, Linux, and Mac format)–it will natively export to an OOo database.

Questions

Q: What kinds of things are you adding manually to iVia? A: Little. Primarily use crawler, with human direction. Software can be used to integrate, say, subject guides with subscription electronic content.

Q: Does iVia handle Dublin Core metadata? A: Probably.

The presentations will be posted either by LITA’s Online Software Systems Interest Group, or hosted by American University. There may be a brief delay….

Sources on the handout

General Sites
http://www.opensource.org
http://sourceforge.net (all programs mentioned here are there)
http://www.oss4lib.org (open source software specifically useful for librarians)

Programs mentioned in sessions
iVia: http://ivia.ucr.edu
LibX: http://libx.org
Jabber: http://www.jabber.org
Gaim: http://gaim.sourceforge.net
MediaWiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
JabRef: http://jabref.sourceforge.net

The session led off with a surprisingly moving video of ALA and New Orleans, outlining the recovery efforts of the past year. They showed some amazing footage of the devastation, and the fixes being attempted.

Mayor Ray Nagin, talking about the importance that libraries have played here, Nagin says that “libraries have been the centerpoint of the diaspora.”

Mitch Landrieu regaled the audience with the world’s longest joke.

Madeleine Albright gave a powerful speach. Some highlights:

• “Libraries are the laboratories of freedom.”
• Talking about freedom, she said “what we preach abroad, we also need to practise at home.”
• The axis of evil is actually “poverty, ignorance, and disease.”

[This is always a great session. This year, the format was a little different and allowed for more time and discussion between the panel members and the audience. I liked the new set up, but I wished the panel members would have gotten a couple more minutes each. They were limited to five and Walt Crawford, as moderator, did a good job of keeping them within their limits. My comments are in brackets.]

Marshall Breeding
Clifford Lynch
Eric Lease Morgan
Andrew Pace
Karen Schneider
Roy Tennant
Tom Wilson
Walt Crawford, moderator

Andrew Pace

Marshall Breeding

[It is very dark in this room. You can see from the pictures that the lighting is bad. There is also no wifi available at all. It is really a shame that the division concerned technology can not have their meeting in a place with wifi.]

Clifford Lynch

Karen Schneider

Eric Lease Morgan

Tom Wilson
55 years ago today CBS broadcast the first color show ever. How far we have come.

Roy Tennant

The Bash

Originally uploaded by pix4lita.

Leslie Burger threw a great party last night. Everyone had a blast and there was lots of mingling. It was nice to have the Gulf Coast Librarians there and they told us to stop having book drives for them, but we can donate particular things they need by going to www.deweydonationsytem.org

Had a grand time, tik-takking away on the sidelines trying to dump everything I heard about the gulf coast libraries into a text file so I could copy & paste it into my blog “later” (read: when I could get free wifi again). Saw & spoke with several fine upstandnig library folken from the gulf coast, and caught up with the lib-bloggers present, including (apologies for forgetting those of you whom I’ve not listed, I’m sure you’ll tease me unmercifully for years to come – especially those of you I’ve linked to the “wrong” blog or heckled when you introduced yourself [really only heckled Karen Schneider: “Who?!”)

So, look for likely posts from at least:

Aaron the Librarian

Free Range Librarian

Library Web Chic

Pattern Recognition

PLA Blog

Thoughts from a Library Administrator

A Wandering Eyre

and many more, I’m sure. We just agreed on a tags for the event — ALA2006, BloggerBash2006

Pat told a story about attending an ISO meeting in Asia where one topic was the international trade in ring tones. She pointed out that public identifiers are critical to link heterogeneous services, they require support—technical and social infrastructure. The presenters were asked to talk about what went on behind the scenes to support identifiers.

Regina Reynolds, US ISSN Center, Library of Congress

“The ‘Business’ of ISSN: What Does it Take?”

The center has been around since the early ‘70s. The ISSN is undergoing a major revision, has 80 centers all over the world, the International center in Paris. Governed by a board and has a User Group which had its first meeting in 2005. New centers need training and documentation. A unique key title and metadata record backs up every ISSN assignment.

Decisions are made at the annual meeting. One example was a recent decision not to assign personal blogs ISSNs (for which Regina was soundly vilified by at least one blogger). ISSN assignment is free, but there is an enormous cost to maintain the system, including for title changes and various versions. Budget is 1.5 million euros/year (55-60% is salaries). Revenue comes from country member dues.

ISSN database now has 1,252,191 records as of June 18, growing at the rate of over 50-60,000/year and experiences many maintenance transactions. Access to these records is via the ISSN portal.

Assignments in the US are about 6000/year—is low because many publishers don’t know that various versions/formats need separate ISSNs. Regina hopes to put effort into publisher education to make that clearer. Other challenges: costs/staffing, globalization (ISSN is country-based), “vanity” ISSN seekers, new formats and new technology (hand-held devices are an issue coming up).

Future directions: new products and distribution services, broader coverage, increased interoperability with other standards & services, and increased automation.

Brian Green, International ISBN Agency

“More than you probably want to know about ISBN and other identifiers”

ISBN system devised in the late 1960s, ISO ISBN standard (ISO 2108) first published in 1972, last revised in 1992, then most recently May 2005. UPC introduced a year later. Universally adopted as the key identifier for books. In 1980 the EAN-13 barcode system, based on country prefixes, began to take off. To accommodate books, a new country, Bookland, was created, with its own country prefix. The ISBN community is now discussing incorporation of ISBN into RFID tags.

The ISBN effort was run by the Berlin State Library with no formal agency or governance from 1972-2006. The International ISBN Agency, Ltd. was formed in 2005: not for profit, members are all national agencies, each has one vote (160 of them). Unlike the ISSN is very decentralized—it assigns a group identifier, variable based on the size of the publishing industry in a particular country. A local agency then assigns publisher identifiers, based on number of books anticipated, and the publisher assigns the product portion.

Agencies and publishers in a database available on the ISBN website. There is now an ISBN metadata set, based on a simple ONIX compliant minimum set: ISBN, product form, title, contributors, series, edition, language, publisher, imprint, country, date. Agencies may charge “reasonable” fees for for assignments of ISBN, but some argument about whether the fees are really reasonable. From 2005 national agencies pay membership fees based on GNP and publishing turnover. These funds are used for training, software, and other management tasks.

ISBN is only for books, and manifestations thereof. May be an electronic publication on physical carriers or online (ebooks). A separate identifier is required for each electronic version separately traded. As with ISSN is a “supply chain identifier.” ISBNs can be assigned to parts of books if traded separately (an increasing issue).

The move to 13 digits coming up is very complicated. Standard management tools are now under development, though at present each country has their own system and software. Green seems to be sanguine about the ISBN is meeting and will continue to meet the needs of both libraries and the book trade, including in the digital environment and with increasing issues of granularity. There is an urgent need for interoperability, both horizontal and vertical—accommodating different media, fuller metadata for different purposes, etc.

Green is chair of ISO TC46 SC9, which is the body managing the development of many of the relevant identifier, and the agencies for many of these identifiers are increasingly working together to address issues of interoperability. They are working on use cases and looking at “hub and spoke” metadata mappings to a generic indecs-like generic data dictionary. The use cases are on the ISBN website and Green showed an example of one. The committee has an Identifiers Interoperability Group, which is looking at areas where new identifiers may be needed. One example is the proposed work towards an ISPI (International Standard Party Identifer), an image identifier and license identifiers. Green suggested two websites: http://www.isbn-international.org and http://www.lac-bac.gc.ca/iso/te46sc9/ and cites also Norman Paskin’s article in DLIB (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june03/paskin/06paskin.html) as a good resource.

Chuck Kosher, CrossRef

CrossRef is more a consumer of standards than a standards agency, and talked about what it takes to keep an actionable identifier alive. He began by talking about the DOI and how it’s used. In this world a publisher registers a DOI with CrossRef, and they use assigned prefixes. Someone else who knows about this object comes to CrossRef to find out where it lives. They can then build a link on their page and rely on it to be actionable by users.

Kosher showed a complex diagram (barely readable in my back-of-the-room location), that it would have been nice to see up close, but it did give a flavor of the task. The community that makes this happen was also described (bottom-up):

CNRI: develops and maintains the hardware to run the Handle system.
DOI: maintains the standard, and works with the community of users
CrossRef: provides the linking services and metadata lookup services to support it. maintains the integrity of the services (metadata and link quality)

A lot of this effort is underwritten by the large commercial publishers. Between 10-13 million people a month are finding articles using this service, according to Kosher (no stats on people who don’t find what they’re looking for).

Support structures needed for:
Data construction
Technical issues and education around them
Metadata issues (“semantics are MUCH harder than syntax”)

Also needed:
Staff to keep the systems running
Creative people to move things forward, add new features, maintain service quality

Question: Since personal publishing is getting more prevalent, and these models are run on national agency models, will they scale enough for these new “publishers?”
Answer (Green): Agencies are often free to deviate from the norm, and some are willing to venture into this area especially if these small people are willing to pay. In smaller countries particularly the agencies are not set up to accommodate this. (Reynolds) These people are a problem in a “free” system. (Kosher) CrossRef relies on annual membership fee, then charges a dollar for a DOI. They use “managing agents” where larger publishers stand in for smaller ones, for a fee. (Didn’t really answer the question).

Question: What’s the difference between the DOI and the Handle System? (Kosher) Not much difference, but DOI is more of a community, with more support and social structure. Handle System is more the technology. If you see a “ten-dot” prefix, it’s DOI; if not is probably just Handle.

Question: What happens when a publisher decides to take something down? (Kosher) There’s been very little of that, in most cases a purchaser of assets takes over the responsibility, but they watch out for dead stuff.

Question: What was ESPN and what happened to it? (Green and Reynolds) This was an entrepreneur who seemed to be confusing people, and he was persuaded to change his M.O. and revise his site. (Reynolds) “I wanted to send the bloggers over there!”

Posted by Diane Hillmann (LITA Standards Coordinator)

Saturday June 24, Convention Center

Moderator:
Roy Tennant, California Digital Library

Disputants:
Stephen Abram, Sirsi/Dynix (also president-elect of SLA)
Joe Janes, Univ. of Washington

Be it resolved that the future of search will occur without library influence.

A series of sample questions, paraphrased as:
Will large commercial search services like Google replace libraries?
Should libraries cooperate with large commercial services by sharing metadata?
What would Google Scholar or similar need to have before libraries abandon their own metasearch? Or are they there now?
Will libraries incorporate the better search tools into their own catalogs?
Will user familiarity with the new tools make library catalogs obsolete?
What is your worst nightmare and finest vision for the future of library search services. How likely do you think either is?

*NB by Jason: the “more” is a near-transcript of the session…Chris did an amazing job of capturing the content. Be warned that a massive amount of text follows…Thanks Chris!

170 chairs, about 2/3 full as session began. Maybe more.

Intro by Laura Cohen, chair of interest group. Open meeting 10:30-12 at Marriott NO. Fleur de Lys room.
Holly Yu vice-chair

Panel needs no intro (repeat of brochure material)

Format

Presidential debate format. Opinions do not nec reflect those of the speaker or his organization. Six topics for discussion.
Moderator to intro issues and ask questions in alternating fashion.
3 minutes to respond, 2 minutes for rebuttal. Flexible. Governed by tin bell.
Audience invited to produce questions.

Tennant

Thanks for making the five-mile walk.
Big companies are challenging us in disturbing ways. This is intended to discuss and provoke.
Microphone issues.

By coin flip Janes to answer first.

Will Google replace libraries?

Janes

Market decision. If libraries let it happen, yes. If Google satisfies and is available and is tailored to what people want, yes. Libraries couldn’t handle Google’s volume. At all. We can’t do all of what Google does. Adult Services is not a good Google search. Possible growth opportunity. Users will vote with their feet. This isn’t necessarily all bad.

Abram

Who cares? Libraries weren’t ever about search. They were about community and learning. The top websites aren’t about search either. Networking stuff like MySpace is the new big thing, much more like what we do. FB & MS have 90% of college students. 40% of Internet traffic is MySpace. Search is not the issue. Are we creating that for our users? MySpace is less than a year old–it’s an experience.

Janes

Search is powerful. Community is a good point. Yahoo bought Delicious and Flickr, so a big deal. “Algorithmic search” is not everything. Question answering services acknowledge our point about what users need, but no large market for this. Search was A reason people came to libraries, a tool. But rarely the point. People for whom search is the point become librarians (mild para).

Abram

Search services write algorithms to meet marketing needs, not users needs. Lots of folks think sponsored links are higher quality. Localization of Google Maps is a market driven phenomenon. GS and MSLive are driven by the prime demographic, 18-34. Ads to them are previous.

Janes

Janes
Popularity doesn’t really equate to quality. Page Rank in the early days was an ingenious solution to not knowing how to do quality. Google results make sense; we haven’t made the case that quality info is worth the extr effort. Google Scholar and Google Book are attempts to index the parts of the web they previously couldn’t see.

Abram

Google does what. Libraries do how and why. Commercial services may not be able to. But we are not scalable on what questions. Book search is NOW. 50% of all books in Chinese.

What does GS or MSLive need?

Abram

We know boolean logic isn’t teachable. Toilets have electric eyes, even for intelligent conference goers. The interface needs to be smarter. (much laughter). Facts have a half-life of eight years. Water boils at varying temperatures at varying altitudes and pressures and water purities. The comml services are not collaborative. Our important problems will be solved by teams.

Janes

Flushing is a good thing. No fund disagreement. Comml services are working on the social network (blogs, Flickr, MySpace, etc). For the young this stuff is very powerful. Microsoft invited a whole bunch of librarians over to explain why their search sucked. Fish in a barrel. People in their teens and twenties live online–tagging and sharing are really important. These tools could be used to do business, also. The world is ahead of us and comml services.

Should libraries abandon their metasearch tools?

Abram

The comml services are like old TV and are desperately trying to break out of the single user orientation. People solve problems in small groups, not demographics. Libraries can work with groups of 4-6. Like gardening books for folks in Toronto–that’s what we do. Information isn’t learning.

Janes

Yeah.

Tennant

Comml services have our users eyes. Libraries can have their bodies. You can have a meeting at the library.

Should libraries cooperate by sharing metadata/other content?

Abram

Who cares? let people discover us. They’re not in our market. Our competitor is ignorance (mild para). “I want their hearts, minds and aspirations…Google gives you an article to read.”

Janes

We’ve done this. Own vs. license for journal content. How do you explain WorldCat? What if it were open source? (ref to the Fortress of Metadata in Dublin). The Internet community could add a lot to what we’ve built over 40 years, an “unimaginable amount”–nothing, or everything. Google is planning to make stuff available and see what happens. Our goal, too. We have been contrained as to how much we could make available; this is beyond what we thought was possible. Google per se doesn’t change lives–what you find might. Google can connect the dots much more quickly.

Abram

River vs. rock. The river always wins. See Grand Canyon. OpenWorldcat now has everything, with links to local content. People don’t want to find things through metadata, they do through pattern matching. They expect it to work like Google. Librarians and users have no boolean overlap in values. We are arrogantly deciding that users want perfect privacy, rather than the kind of services Amazon provides. Why can’t we let them decide for themselves. Our value system is in the way of a modern search experience. Where is the middle ground?

Janes

How do we manage privacy so that we have nothing to turn over to Homeland Security? Because of those concerns we don’t have the data we need about our patrons. Search logs, circ records, other things we could data mine (in a good way). This data has never existed.

Abrams

What about LibraryThing, which has the 79th largest library in the country? Users have decided to share this. Why are we not letting users decide this?

Janes

Younger people more likely to do this. He agrees, but to be contrary: A century of fighting for privacy of circulation records to ensure reading anything. The Attorney General is probably listening. It’s a legacy of how we have done things, for good reasons. But things are changing and we have automated what we are currently doing. The first online card catalogs had little dots where the pole would go. If we’re assuming that the phone company and Microsoft and everybody is going to give us up do libraries need to? Maybe, but there is a cost.

Abram

Praise for Library Connection folk in terms of Patriot Act. We need to have a conversation about this, but not in an environment where if you say “terrorist” anything is possible. Searched how to make an atom bomb?

Janes

Searches for Islamic beheading websites. Three clicks. Very easy to find. Horrifying. But will having done it cause me problems?

Will libraries add new features?

Abram

Aquabrowser, Endeca at NCSU. It’s already happening. How do we teach people how to use it? Users think a list is the epitome of search results. Visual interfaces work best for users–but librarians tend to hate them. We think we’re the alpha user. Tag clouds are a good bridging tool, but librarians don’t like them either. Engineers love it, because that’s how they learn. Providing visual context is great–and Google doesn’t do that. We can. Do you want Mercury the god or mercury the element? Google doesn’t do that. Search engines can’t figure out how to place ads on visual results. We don’t need to do that. Mention of Clusty as doing some of this.

Janes

Not soon enough. Summary of blogosphere: What the hell gives? No intent to summarize. The Apologist (Abram: we owe users one): Nothing pathological about the library business. Well, cats. Sensible shoes and bags with cats on them. People who loved searching became librarians. DIALOG is impenetrable (I wrote that stupid book), but it’s librarian porn: power and control over information–precision. Professional knowledge that we have an no one else does. Catalogs were designed from the beginning to represent that. Algorithmic ranked search looks easy–but to experts it really “fries our cheese”. Our skill set appears to be less relevant–people needs us less than we think they do now (which is a load of crap).

Abram

No debate yet on how librarians killed Dialog, a monument to obsessive compulsiveness that eventually no one could ever use. At the end of dialog searching you could squeeze a diamond out of your ass. (Janes and how satisfying was that?). The opac is an inventory system. KGS is right: libraries are broken. OPACs are not the problem. Focus on the user and what experience they want. Stop popping out diamonds and ask what experience they want. Put the results in the context the users wants.

Janes

I count five diamonds on the floor. Agrees with KGS. The OPAC can’t change because MARC won’t change. There’s only so much you can do: there’s so little there. No text. Very cryptic precoordinated headings. in 1966 it was beautiful. As was OCLC. In their time they were brilliant. Algorithmic search can’t work on them: no text, no hyperlinks, totally different structure.

Abram

The point is to tie it to full text somewhere. That’s what the user wants. Users don’t care about MARC records.

Janes

Violent agreement. A failure of imagination. We’re stuck in our traditions, and conservative. We have the human record at stake, and we’re trying to be careful–what are the problems? Will JSTOR be around a hundred years.

Abram

Studying something to death is not a good idea because death is not our goal.

Tennant

What is worst nightmare and finest vision, and do you think likely?

Janes

Will answer a different question. Vote for me, he’s a jerk. Worked the last two times.
What would perfect search look like? (lousy question). Answer: no search at all. Lightest possible search. Web searching tools are easier. ROI is an interesting calculus, but compare with OPAC.
Worst nightmare: nothing changes. We wither and die. Likelier than he’d like. There may be a lack of will to make scary changes.
Finest vision: put Google out of business. what we do is good enough to make people forget about it. they return in droves of thousands and millions. Confidence: Eh.

Abram

Worst nightmare: the profession keeps saying: your side of the boat is sinking. Librarians need to stop blaming each other and their vendors. More people are going to college than ever did before. 30% vs. 12%. A generation that’s very different from what we’re used to.

Finest vision: Better advocacy. If you cut libraries, this is what will happen. If we let trustees fire librarians for collecting in Spanish in our country we should be livid as a profession. Tired of collecting statistics. The very tall guy flew in on an airline designed for the average person by an MBA based on stats. Back to the sixties, when programming and service was the priority. Technology can now be a tool again. Confidence: we’re really smart people. we can stop being so control-oriented. we can let the boomers do what they came for. we can empower the next gen of librarians. Don’t knock library school students–they know what they need to.

Google is not the competor.

Open to the floor for questions

Q: Libraries tied to the publishing industry. Much more being created that isn’t like that.
Abram: Prepare to allow tagging on everything, post-its all over the website, radical trust for users. We need to do more of this. Web 2.0 is about when the user becomes predominant. We manage the ecology that allows this to happen. Let the users decide where to go.
Janes: Look at human history. Cave paintings. Blogs and wikis. Everything in between. People standing up and saying I matter. Helping people do that is our business; helping people find other people’s stories is what we do. Publishing used to be a barrier (barring vacation slides). It is now much easier to speak and be heard. The publishing industry used to be the only game. The internet is what the vertical file used to be. We used to be describable as people of the book; not as much now.

Q:(Rep of Xrefer) With all the Google stuff coming out, what does this mean? Does this increase the demand for online reference? Google may not be able to help users make sense of things.
Abram: supply and demand are not relevant. things in demand become larger on the web; sense-making is not possible as you get more stuff.

Q: Comment on book slips, which used to have names on them; maybe it’s time for them to come back–privacy is recent. Relevance can be done with OCLC holdings symbols. What is a quality result for a typical search and how do we program our systems to do it? Typical example question: Why do adults play?
Abram: what makes a quality result? Ask the user. In corporate libraries the end user makes the judgment. On OCLC popularity: the top 1000 OCLC titles and then top 100 sellers and the top 100 borrowed there is NO overlap. Some overlap between buy and borrow. We don’t buy what users do. User purchases circ seven times more often. Elephan in the room. Walmart analyzes this stuff.
Janes: think of the size of diamond an elephant could produce. Ref librarians answer questions, and pummel people until they give you a question you can answer. The guantanomo theory of reference. IPL experience: either very complicated questions with no answer or questions they were always wondering about. Lots of that goes to Google. The really hard questions you can’t answer, but you can move them forward–here’s another step on your path. Wikipedia is for how and why questions (leaving aside questions about it). Don’t worry about answering the question. Here are the lives we changed, the vacations we planned, the experiences we created.
Abram: any ref librarian will admit that the questions are getting harder. the information cowboys: bring them on, I can answer them alone. how does answering those questions fit into the larger context of the chain of info our users are using. Desk stats are OUR experience, not the users.

Q: Consumer orientation of librarians. We feature what we buy and what we think is cool. We make information overload worse.
Abram: We are focused on the tools we provide. a builder asks how you want to feel in your new addition, doesn’t tell you what hammers he’s using. Libraries should be able to tell a story about how you will feel better when you come. Latch-key moms who dump their kids at story time may be working on a BA and have a great view of us while we sneer. “Here’s our stuff” is not an experience.
Janes: the experience has to be personal. Librarians are frequently nameless: people don’t trust that.
Abram: virtual users don’t allow us to offer the context. A ten year old asking about divorce is writing an essay; a forty year old has a different interest. We always ask.
Janes: understanding is the key to that. it doesn’t automate. Google doesn’t understand. Ref libs understand that people don’t know what they’re looking for; Google can’t help, we can. A ref interview can really create possibilities that a Google search can’t.

Q: What about users who are not physically present? How can you build a web space that works like the physical version?
Abram: On the privacy side, the library card gives you a lot of useful information. IP identification is dead–we need individual users in order to build meaningful tools. If you’re a sophomore bio major I shouldn’t send you the Shakespeare librarian. Mixture of parts of Sakai and Shibboleth and athens. The people in the library and outside it are not the same people. Virtual users can handle tech. Use the data we have, safely and respectfully.
Janes: I don’t know. Look at Ann Arbor district library aadl.org as a thought provocation. The website is about what the library offers. You can’t provide the same services online as in person–forget it. Use the strengths of each and be clear what goes where.
Abram: stop being afraid of success. we can’t tell patrons about ILL they might use it. aadl postings get 500 comments. deal with it.

Janes (closing)
We can’t do everything. One size fits all fifty years ago worked. We had a niche we served well. We can’t do that anymore. We have competitors who will do things better than us. Ready Reference, which we loved to do and were great at, just doesn’t make that much sense anymore. Better ways to do it. Perhaps libraries have niches that are not as broad. Pick the areas where we can do best. Rethink what we are for. What do we not do? How do we use those resources? That’s hard. We want to be everything to everybody, but we can’t.

Abram(closing)
Why: improve people’s lives. We need to build a capacity for change based on respect. Get rid of 18th c. models of org. Bring the back room out front. Bring the cowboys at the ref desk into teams. look at what the next gen of librarians can do and need (and don’t smother it). Don’t be afraid of play–we learn more from it. Kids get 50 minutes at a time; only we’re foolish enough to think we can concentrate from 8 to midnight. Take 15 minutes a day and do 43 things at 43 folders. It will help us adapt to change, and in six months we’ll know much much more. You’ll be more fun at parties.

Tennant

Ilaughed, I cried, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend two hours.

Cohen

Well, at least we have a definitive answer to who controls the future of search.

Mostly fyi, since I’m sure tired of the whole membership dues issue, Council tasked the ALA Membership Committee to study what should be covered in a study about the possibility of a graduated dues structure. Dizzying resolution, imho.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, the details of the preliminary discussion can be found at Annual 2006 – ALA Membership Committee I

Discussion was focused around these issues:

Who do we want to recruit?

How do we attract members of other ALA divisions?

How do we target the different audiences we want?

Andrew Pace raised the issue of library school students: ALA is interested in this as a potential focus, and LITA is definitely accepting of “non-l-word” people, something that library school students have expressed concerns about. Library schools are giving grants to attend conferences and join organizations. Mary Taylor reminded the group that LITA gives free membership to Spectrum Scholarship and LITA Scholarship winners.

Another group LITA has talked about targeting is non-MLS IT people who work in library environments. Bonnie Postlethwaite and Susan Logue have been having conversations with EDUCAUSE about having collaborative educational opportunities. EDUCAUSE is institutionally based, so we are not competing for individual dollars.

Making connections through other associations: SLA – we had one of our preconferences and promoted LITA there. MLA might be harder because you have to offer continuing education credits for them to be interested in your programming.

Other ideas: retirees – maybe retirement is a good time for them to get more involved. Vendors – what is their incentive to be in LITA, and how do we convey that to them? It was noted they get the opportunity to know their users better. We could make more connections with other divisions’ technology programming.

Barbra Higginbotham suggested we might try to get directors to send their non-librarians to ALA/LITA things, and pay their memberships. We need to market programming that might appeal to non-librarians explicitly that way. Should we have focus groups with these people about what appeals to them? It was noted that LITA would not be a substitute for EDUCAUSE, because it meets needs that we don’t in subjects and vendors. A promising way to expand our appeal might be in starting interest groups that focus around what we’re missing. An example happening right now is the petition to create a public library interest group.

Definite action items (primarily for Membership Development):
Reach out to directors to encourage their support of non-librarian IT professionals’ participation in ALA/LITA, and do some research to find out what they like, those who are already participating. One idea might be having programming on “Libraries 101.” One way to identify people with this background who are already in LITA might be to get the registration list for Code4lib and match with it.

Focus on student recruitment – work with ALA, and institutionalize follow up with scholarship members so that they get some special attention. Get LITA members to go to local library schools to talk about the association when the library schools have opportunities for this.

This is where you come in. Feel free to post comments answering these questions and ones I didn’t even ask.

Do you have ideas about recruiting special populations, especially non-MLS IT professionals and library school students?

Are you a library school faculty member, or a LITA member who lives near a library school who might be willing to help recruit?

Are you a LITA member who is a non-MLS IT professional who might be willing to tell us what about LITA appeals to you, and what could be done to make it more appealing?

* IG Renewals – Mary Ellen Tyckoson, Bylaws & Organization Committee, discussed items missing from renewal forms and IG’s not heard from re: their renewals. Suggestion was made to change wording so IG only has to attach reports from the last 3 meetings if they haven’t been posted to the web. Reminder given that renewals are every 3 years and Chairs should talk to the group at Midwinter re: function statement or name changes (and get Chair, Vice Chair signatures on renewal form).
* Program Planning Committee – Rachel Cheng handed out proposal form, checklist, and diagram for interacting with PPC (guide also on web). Chairs should talk to PPC at conference (meet Sunday & Monday at 10:30). Even managed discussions should talk to them to get scheduled and help get the meeting advertised.
* Matt reminded everyone that more info for IG Chairs is available on the LITA site.
*Web issues – Laura Cohen, IG Web Coordinator, let everyone know she acts as secretary for the IG Coordinator and helps individual IGs by posting minutes after she sees them on the list, posting ppts and documents related to presentations, etc. She will be rolling off and doesn’t yet know the name of her replacement but a message will go out on COMCHAIR-L. Meanwhile send info and Qs to David Altenhof as the new Web Manager. Contact the LITA office if you want to be able to edit your IG website yourself (will need training in the new Content Management Systesm). And remember to use the web for program announcements.

Q/A
* If you want to be able to blog, contact Michelle Boule (mboule [at] gmail [dot] com) or request an account online.

Q/A
* When will the online community training be offered? Probably Mondays or Fridays in July with first session set up for Friday, July 21, around 11-2 Eastern Time (others will probably 3:30-5:30 Central time, so best for East Coast folks to sign up for July 21 session). Reason for 3-hour training is variety of choices available in new system vs. difficulty using. Features include: chat, forum, calendar, survey, announce, file share, messaging, and membership search.

The speakers, Craig Gibson and Jamie Coniglio of George Mason University, kept things moving with lots of case studies. At one point our individual tables had to craft a liaison program from scratch with just a year to do it, which turned out to be a complicated process. There was a lot of talk of freeing up librarians to do their liaison work. One sticking point, of course, is the amount of time liaison librarians typically spend on the reference desk. It’s tough to pry us from that service point, as Gibson said it’s the “holy icon of librarianship”.

Play was also emphasized as a way to innovate. (Hard to do for many librarians who are already working at 150+% capacity!) But it’s necessary if you want to keep your faculty and students engaged. Made me feel a little better for sinking untold time gathering rss feeds for business journals in order to build an comprehensive OPML file that may or may not be used. Who knows, they might actually use it.

There was a lot of talk about the disruptions that have been occurring as a result of the current trends online. What do we do when 90+% of our students begin their research with Google or Yahoo!, without even thinking of the library’s website? Several examples were given: weblogs, wiki’s, podcasts, etc. (I’ll append links to those when the speakers update their weblog after ALA.) What wasn’t discussed was the emergence of social websites and their potential impacts. As long as we’re talking about disruption, why not let the users build our bibliographies for us? Why not our subject guides?

Our pre-conference homework [!] which we had to read before the seminar is highly recommended, and I’ve listed them below. Some great ideas here, especially if you’re interested in innovation, moving new ideas within your organization, and digital solutions to the problems above:

• Kezar, Adrianna and Peter D. Eckel. “The Effect of Institutional Culture on Change Strategies in Higher Education.” The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 73, No. 4, July/August 2002, pp. 435-460.
• Deiss, Kathryn J. “Innovation and Strategy: Risk and Choice in Shaping User-Centered Libraries.” Library Trends, Vol. 53, Number 1, Summer 2004, pp. 17-32.
• Hazen, Dan. “Twilight of the Gods? Bibliographers in the Electronic Age.” Library Trends, Vol. 47, No. 4, Spring 2000, pp. 821-841.

Sunday, June 25th, 2006 8-10am
Hilton New Orleans Riverside – Burgundy (Street Level Floor, next to the Grand Ballroom)

Partial agenda:

Membership Report: 2006 membership is 4056, down 3.05% from 2005 (at Midwinter, it was down 7.21% year over year)

Reports on Open House, Happy Hour, LITA Booth, Board discussion

NMRT – pat attending NMRT’s student recruitment reception and has been appointed NMRT/LITA MDC liaison by NMRT. Another recruiting opportunity was the Spectrum Scholars Leadership Development Institute Professional Options Fair, attended by pat.

Follow-up on other items from MW 2006 – Forum (Biles); EDUCAUSE (Hollar); public library IG (Postlethwaite)

MDC at Midwinter 2007 – Seattle, January 19-24, 2007: Happy Hour? Managed Discussion? Our meeting? Other?

Increasing LITA membership/Marketing LITA (discussion), including virtual member involvement and participation

What about the “development” part of our function?

MDC at Annual 2007 – Washington DC, June 21-27, 2007: Happy Hour? Open House? Our meeting? Other?

LITA committee chairs orientation tip sheet is now online:
http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litacommittees/tipsheet.htm (embedded URLs)
http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litacommittees/tipsheetdoc.htm (printable w/ URLs displayed)

Q&A
* New members should have all been appointed by this point. Valerie Edmonds has distributed new membership rosters. Contact her if you need one.
* We should encourage new chairs to attend committee chair meetings on Saturday mornings. One question is whether it’s possible to have new chairs added to the comchair list before Annual? Someone (Scott?) will investigate.
* In his new role as incoming Vice-President, Mark Beatty is now responsible for appointing new committee members (totaling about 200 people). Mark asks that we think about our current committee rosters, who’s new to LITA, who’s new to conferences, etc. for potential appointments.
* Mark Beatty is putting together a committee to appoint committee members. Watch for a catchy name.
* Reminder: LITA open house is a good way to meet potential new committee members.
* Virtual members: up to the committee chair as to whether they want to have virtual members. Some have decided not to.
* Get minutes out as quickly as possible after the meeting. If using the blog to post minutes, tell the web liaison so they can point to the correct spot for minutes.
* Pat Ensor mentioned that the committee chair responsibilities, while true, is somewhat out of date. Scott Muir will look into this. He also mentioned that the By-Laws committee is looking at revising the LITA manual.

Meeting adjourned: Saturday, June 24 at 9:23am

Contents:
OITP Macro Issues
OITP Finances
OITP Pressures/Observed Trends
Other discussions
*Possible net neutrality resolution
*Copyright
*Strategic Planning

For details see: Annual 06 – OITP Advisory Committee Meeting

-Aaron
’

(again, apologies if this is a faux pas)

Put on by ALA OTLD with a very nice buffet. Not very many new ALA committee chairs were able to make it, which is too bad as the food was good and the ideas shared were good (some common sense, others insightful). The ALA Parliamentarian, Eli Mena, presented tips on meeting process and conflict avoidance/deflection/resolution. A lot of common sense, all really good to remember, and great soundbytes – including: “Committee work should be like a canoe…”

For details see: Annual 06 – Incoming ALA Committee Chair Orientation

Not sure about the potential faux pas I’m possibly committing (self-link love); but double posting the content seems silly.

Once again, BIGWIG meets:

Sunday, 10:30 – 12:00, at the Morial Convention Center, Room 274

That’s the blogging room; if you’re in there for some other reason, be careful-we might volunteer you for something!

We have at least four agenda items. I would put these on the blog but… and this is related to an agenda item…the blog is down right now, at least from my end. Blake Carver had IM’d me earlier today to say he was having trouble with lishost.org …

* We were asked to consider a program for 2007-this was for ALA but we should add LITA Forum to this list

* Hosting and the LITA blog

* Laura Cohen shared some concerns about the blog publishing policy, which I offered to present to the group since she is at another meeting at the same time

* LITA and Flickr and Yahoo: Maurice York brought up the issue of Yahoo’s privacy policy and Flickr. (Since August, new Flickr accounts require Yahoo logins, and Yahoo’s privacy policy has come under fire.) If you all so chose to, LITA could take action in a variety of ways. (For example, LITA could submit a resolution to Council asking Yahoo to change its privacy policy.)

* The State of the Blog: how it’s doing, where you want it to go

* Clara and I are both ready to step aside for new leadership (Clara started a new job and I’ve got some change issues too), so we’ll have an election of chair or co-chairs. That said, this is a very fun IG… I really can’t think of any other ALA project or unit I’ve worked with that has been quite this fun since the early days of the Internet Room, and that was another LITA-bee
activity!

I’ve only done one “conference” thing so far, but I want to share my excitement about it. Right before every Annual Conference, there is a Spectrum Scholars’ Leadership Institute. I was fortunate enough to be involved in planning it a couple of years ago, so I was glad to participate in their Professional Options Fair last evening. I got to represent LITA as well as discuss academic librarianship, with the eager, new Spectrum Scholarship recipients.

Talking with them excited me anew about the thrilling world of librarianship we are moving into. Several of the scholars are interested in LITA and hope to be able to make it to the LITA Open House Saturday (4pm-5:30pm, MCC 260). I hope enthusiastic LITA evangelizers will join me to talk with them and convey how LITA as changed our professional lives.

I’ve been mentioning the existence of the room to folks at programs and meetings already, watchout, we may see some Martians (RUSA-MARS) and NMRT folks or maybe more, since Michelle said she was Word-of-Mouthing the room as well.

Anywho, drop a note when you get here – or leave a question, Enquiring minds want to know!

-Aaron
’

I’d quote from Buffalo Springfield–”Something’s happening here/What it is ain’t exactly clear”–except whenever I get to the part where “there’s a man with a gun over there,” my practical librarian mind kicks in and begins worrying about guns in libraries, evacuating the premises, ducking for cover, etc.

So let me force myself to disgorge a few more random blips that might begin to frame some of my discussion this Sunday.

* An intentionally naive observation: the Web continues to increase in importance for people’s lives. (Alternatively, I think I can finally, irrevocably refute the librarian in the late 1990s who said he was just waiting for this Internet thing to blow over.) Following a small discussion list, I observed many librarians in the post-Katrina diaspora talk about using the Web to find one another, file FEMA applications, observe and analyse their environments, locate jobs, etc. Access to the Web is a life assumption. This may not seem like such a trend over a short period, but think back to 1996 and if you can, 1986.

* Another naive statement: social software environments are becoming places where people–a lot of them–hang out, and not just teen geeks. Places such as Second Life have hundreds of thousands of users. There’s even activity afoot to establish a Second Life Library. Flickr is another place where people hang out with a huge community of people with whom they have loose and strong ties. A cousin recently established a Google list for what used to be a paper letter chain; soon our entire clan was exchanging Flickr account information and swapping pet pictures. This, though most of my family members are very non-technical.

* Most new social software environments are born with social engagement features built-in, such as tagging, sharing, and the ability to create affinity groups, even the ability to refine affinity groups (family/friend/contact). Someone commented today that LibraryThing is a far more appealing environment than RefWorks. I use both, and I agree. LibraryThing is easy, friendly, and socially engaging. However more precise RefWorks may be (and there is no CitationThing alternative for organizing links to articles), the gulf between the two products to me feels exactly like the gulf between your typical library catalog and any currently popular social software.

* Attitudes toward privacy continue to soften. People seem willing to hand over a lot of personal information in order to use a service. On the other hand, some of the recent en masse thefts, such as the scandal with veteran’s data, point up how vulnerable we are becoming. For libraries that are offering online payment: how secure is your patron data?

* Recently the public intellectual/academic Juan Cole didn’t get a new job. Who cares, I hear you thinking. What is significant is that many people were shocked that his popular blog, Informed Comment, was apparently held in low esteem by the committee evaluating him for this new position. Quite a few people argued that his blog should have been weighed heavily–and favorably–in determining his fitness for this new position. This is not just an observation about blogging; it’s an observation about academia repositioning itself for public engagement through social software.

* People keep tinkering with the ebook concept; it reminds me of watching the early days of flight. Watch for Sophie, an ebook initiative from the uber-groovy Institute for the Future of the Book. Sophie 1.0 is due to be delivered at the end of August. Rather than literally translating the book to the screen, Sophie will offer engagement for the reader, so that the book is more of a conversation. If it works, Sophie could help usher in a new genre–something, like a heresy trial, that only happens every few hundred years. That’s fun! If it doesn’t work, I’ll still keep my eye on the Wright Brothers as they tinker in their shed.

* Speaking of brothers, one irritating trend is that so many of the digital pundits continue to be male. I’m not pointing fingers; I’m describing a concern about a trend that is hardly new. How we get more women to visibly engage in these debates, to be the faces on the panels, to be the voices in the aggregator–to be shameless hussies, as I’ve said in other contexts–is something that needs frank, and probably ongoing discussion in our profession.

Returning Power Over Content to Those with the Knowledge
Eric Lease Morgan touched on this in his second trend about blogs and wiki websites becoming the norm rather than the exception. My twist is this: people who have the knowledge will once again be in control of the content. Until recently, most websites (library and otherwise) have fallen victim to the camel through the eye of a needle problem: only the webmasters can post the content, and sometimes such insufficient and incoherent content is given to them, that they end up creating much of the content themselves. Library staff, largely librarians, are responsible for the collections, programming, and services in our libraries–the content. The same should be true with websites. With WYSIWYG interfaces with blogs and wikis, those knowledgeable people can once again be in control of the information their users see. Webmasters can re-focus on how they see and find it, instead of the content itself.

OCLC ILS
I’m not sure if this is a trend, but it’s a prediction–and one worth watching. With their recent (and not without controversy or concern) merger with RLG, OCLC is positioning itself to tap some of the excellent resources RLG offers, including RedLightGreen–one of the ILS interfaces people point to again and again as an example of “what could be” in a greener more beautiful library world. Fully FRBR-ized and simply-keyword-search-oriented, an OCLC-ized RedLightGreen could potentially solve the wealth of ILS-dissatisfaction we all seem to be feeling right now.

Online Outreach
This will be the subject of a presentation I give at a conference later this year, but let’s touch on it now. Libraries have long been bad at publicizing ourselves, but I’ve seen us slowly getting better at it in recent years–in the physical world, that is. We still stink at outreach and PR in the virtual world. A few libraries are doing it well, and I think more will begin to as they start to think of their web presence as a true branch. Let’s rent some adspace on community websites, put ourselves in Wikipedia, make our libraries findable on the Web in places our users already are, put stuff on Craigslist, etc.

Please join the LITA Emerging Technology Interest Group for a product presentations, a panel discussion and an interactive question and answer session. The session title.

Audio Book 3.0 – The convergence of the mobile media lifestyle platform.

( Please note this title on the program differs slightly, being named Ebook 3.0… While there will be a number of issues raised in the session regarding the way audio books and ebooks are also converging my original focus on ebooks 3.0 appears to be “bleeding edge” at this point and not just yet fully emerging. After extensive discussions with Sony, Apple, iRex and many others the newest push for eInk based ebooks is just not quite ready for prime time. This will likely be a good focus for the upcoming midwinter. With so many failures in the past the vendors are not willing to put there “word” on the line in front of an ALA audience just yet as they CANNOT get it wrong this time.)

This session will be focused on the aBook or Audio Book/Content delivery models and services that are nowmerging and being both taken-up and vigorously tested and implemented by libraries of all types.

The program will have three parts. First, an overview from the speakers on their products/services as of today. Second, a moderated panel conversation on modes of delivery, key challenges, copyright, pricing models, user profiles and user interfaces.

The speakers will be:

1. Christopher Celeste, CEO and Founder of Findaway World. Playaway, the company’s flagship product is a standalone mobile device that is purchased with content already loaded. The Playaway device requires no downloading or copying and is being embraced by many retailers and libraries as an alternative to downloading content. URL: http://www.playawaydigital.com

2. Gillian Harrison, Global Product Manager, NetLibrary NetLibrary, an OCLC company, provides downloadable audio and ebooks. Most will be familiar with the name but the services have been expanded. URL: http://www.netlibrary.com

3. Steve Potash, President and CEO of OverDrive, Inc., OverDrive is a provider of eBook technologies and Digital Rights Management solutions for publishers, retailers and libraries. URL: http://www.overdrive.com.

4. While they had committed to attend Audible.com has just pulled out of the discussion as they will not have a speaker available and will not already be exhibiting at the conference.

The goal of this session is to have a serious conversation with leaders of some of the key companies evolving within libraries in the specific area of audio delivery of books and other content. We will crossover into eBooks and possibly eVideo and how these mediums are being delivered together more and more.

The audience will have an opportunity to gain context in the different approaches of delivery and the service models being offered. The speakers have been asked assist attendees in seeing the pluses and minuses of their model and have already agreed that there is not only “one” approach. Attendees will be encouraged to press the speakers and a each other for clarity and understanding.

Everyone should come away wiser about the possibilities and the difficulties in deploying audiobooks and audio content. They will also be able to meet and establish relationships with the speakers’ companies and with others in attendance who have a common interest in the evolving and rapidly morphing world of audio and crossover content delivery on the mobile device – that thing with wires going into our ears

Please come enjoy and participate while your coffee revs up your engine on Monday morning.

Regards,

Eric Ipsen
ETIG Chair
eipsen@mac.com
Lafayette, CA
925.324.5241

NOTE: The ETIG Interest Group Planning meeting will follow in room MCC Room 275 immediately following this program. 11 AM to 12 No

Be it resolved that the future of search will occur without library influence. Will libraries continue their vital role in the evolution of search, or will we be left in the dust by Google and their ilk? You won’t want to miss this provocative debate on the future of library influence on search technology. Come and be a part of this Ultimate Debate, sponsored by the LITA Internet Resources Interest Group.

Moderator: Roy Tennant. The debaters: Stephen Abram and Joe Janes.

The debate will be guided by several questions, including:

• Will search services offered by large commercial companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! replace the need for libraries?
• Should libraries cooperate with commercial companies by giving them our metadata and/or content (Open WorldCat, Google Scholar, Google Book Search, etc.)?
• What qualities would Google Scholar, Microsoft Live Academic, or similar free commercial search services need to have before libraries abandon the creation of their own metasearch services? Or has that point already been reached?
• Will libraries incorporate some of the better dot-com search technologies into their own search products, such as their catalogs? For example: better interface design, relevance ranking, alternate spelling suggestions, faceted browsing, etc.
• Will our users’ increasing familiarity and comfort with large central search services like Google and Open WorldCat render local library catalogs obsolete?
• What is your worst nightmare and your finest vision for the future of library search services, and what is your level of confidence in achieving either?

In addition, audience members will be invited to pose their own debate questions.

We will now be meeting in room 274 (the LITA Bloggers’ room) of the Morial Convention Center at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday morning. All are welcome. We hope to see you there.

We are looking for someone to give us some local color, so if you know New Orleans and want to share, we have a venue for you! No experience required for bloggers, though we would love to see some of our experienced volunteers back again.

If you would like to volunteer, please email Michelle Boule, and I will answer your questions, put you on the official schedule, or bring about world peace. You choose.