• Rebecca Guenther, Library of Congress: Using Metadata Standards in Digital Libraries: Introduction to METS, MODS, PREMIS and MIX
• Morgan Cundiff, Library of Congress: Using and to Create XML Standards-based Digital Library Applications
• Nathan Trail, Library of Congress: How to Build, Display and Find METS Objects
• Brian Tingle, California Digital Library: Use of METS in CDL Digital Special Collections
• Sarah Shreeves, University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign: Creating Rich Shareable Metadata: the DLF Aquifer MODS implementation guidelines
• Tom Habing, University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign: METS, MODS and PREMIS, Oh My!: Integrating Digital Library Standards for Interoperability and Preservation
• Tod Olson, University of Chicago: MODS as Data Hub

The Library of Congress has made the presentations available.

Susan Logue, as LITA board liaison, reported on the board meeting and shared information about the board’s assignments and expectations for the newly merged committee.

Included in the charge for the new committee are these points:

1. Create 3-5 short online events
2. Create liaisons to LITA interest groups for ideas
3. Create an education committee wiki and supply editor for it from the committee members
4. Create and maintain list of tools for educational initiatives
5. Monitor delivery of 2 institutional repositories’ offerings including an evaluation tool
6. Goal for the committee is to have two new courses per year

Discussion by all members present centered on how to fulfill these assignments, whether it was possible to do so by a volunteer committee, and where to begin. The committee agreed on the need to do the educational needs survey first.

Mark Wahrenbrock discussed his sample survey that was previously distributed to committee members. He will collect questions from the committee members and compile them into a survey that can be sent to LITA members using Survey Monkey which is available through the ALA office.

This is the last of the fully-captured sessions from ALA 2007 from LITABlog, but there may still be a few pieces of audio here and there that are unearthed and posted.

As well, we have plans for LITA Forum in October, as well as ALA Midwinter…more audio to come from LITABlog! Stay tuned, and as always if you have feedback or suggestions for us, please feel free to leave a comment here on the blog.

Thanks go out to Joe Fisher for the recording of this program, and dealing with the troubles related to managing an over-a-gigabyte audio file. Thanks, Joe!

And now: The Ultimate Debate.

Koppel’s discussion raised several good questions about Ebooks and ERM. There are several management issues with Ebooks. Who supplies the cataloging/meta data? Does it come from the vendor who sells you the Ebook? How granular should the management be? Should there be restrictions at the chapter level or book level? Does the type of content determine who and what can be accessed? For example, users may only be able to access chapters for a particular text or reference book, but be able to access an entire work of fiction.

What cataloging system do we use to describe the Ebook–dublin core, MARC? Where do Ebook records reside in the Opac or the ERM, or in both systems? How is Ebook content discovered through LC subject headings or a local thesauri? How does the link resolver fit into all of this? Perhaps the link resolver can take a user to a particular paragraph or top of the chapter. How do we determine the level of granularity for accessing content?

Another management issue related to Ebooks and electronic content in general is hosting. Who host this database of content? Is it hosted locally or remotely? Who maintains the servers and performs back ups?

Koppel’s discussion raised more questions than it did answers. Given our experience in managing electronic database content, the transition to ebooks should be much easier. We know about authentication, hosting, maintenance, licensing issues, and making content accessible through OpenURL and A-Z lists. However, I’m also sure there will be unique challenges in trying to make ebook content accessible and searchable along with all the other content.

Ebooks are still in their infancy, but the experience with e-journals makes the move to ebooks much easier. I enjoyed the presentation and it did make me think about how Ebooks are similar and different from other online content, but with such a busy schedule at ALA, I haven’t had a chance to think as much about possible solutions in making Ebooks accessible. I hope to keep my notes from the session handy because I know that in the near future we will grapple more with this issue.

Topics covered included: Copyright, A Limited Statutory Monopoly by Carrie Russell, Interlibrary Loan by Patricia Ball, Electronic Reserves for Text and Media by Claire Stewart and Brice Austin; International Copyright: How Does It Work by Janice Pilch; Fair Use 101 by Marc Gartler and Dwayne Butler; Preservation and Replacement by Michael Brewer; Copyright Advisory Network (www.librarycopyright.net); Copyright Term and the Public Domain by Patrick Newell; Copyright in the Digital Age: Developing Resources for Your Academic Community by Barbara Oakley; Retaining Your Copyright: Authors Rights by Trisha Davis presented by Buckley Barrett.

It was an excellent session that presented basic information on Copyright. For those you interested in exploring Copyright more visit CAN at www.librarycopyright.net.

A supportive director enabled many of the improvements. The library participates in a consortium with other systems such as the Health and Mental Health Hospitals. The library serves as an Internet provider (for pay) for general public. Only dial-up service is provided. WIFI is also offered to the public. There are plans to go to fiber optics in the future. The library’s ILS is Horizons and SAM is used for PC reservations. A discussion followed by attendees who also shared their various experiences and challenges with technology and libraries.

* Rebecca Guenther, Library of Congress: Using Metadata
Standards in Digital Libraries: Introduction to METS, MODS, PREMIS and MIX
* Morgan Cundiff, Library of Congress: Using and to Create XML Standards-based Digital Library Applications
* Nathan Trail, Library of Congress: How to Build, Display and Find METS Objects
* Brian Tingle, California Digital Library: Use of METS in CDL Digital Special Collections
* Sarah Shreeves, University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign: Creating Rich Shareable Metadata: the DLF Aquifer MODS implementation guidelines
* Tom Habing, University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign: METS, MODS and PREMIS, Oh My!: Integrating Digital Library Standards for Interoperability and Preservation
* Tod Olson, University of Chicago: MODS as Data Hub

The Library of Congress has made the presentations available at:
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/presentations/litaprogram-an2007.html

Next week, we’ll begin rolling out more podcasts from ALA Annual 2007, including the audio of the LITA President’s program as well as the Great Debate. Stay tuned!

If you’re enjoying the podcasts, and want to make sure that this sort of thing continues within LITA and the ALA, let us know! Leave comments and suggestions so that we know what everyone wants to see moving forward…let us know who you enjoyed the most, and if you’d like to see something done differently in presenting these to you.

Thanks for listening to the LITA Top Tech Trends podcasts from ALA 2007, and stay tuned next week for the LITA President’s Program as well as the complete audio from the Great Debate!

One of the things I really admire about Morville’s writing is his ability to concatenate a variety of different subjects and show how they’re all related to information management, and he does this just as well in The Land of Powerpoint. The talk covered gadgets like David Rose’s ambient devices, Microsoft Surface, the iPhone, RFID implants, and child-tracking wristwatches; websites including Neighboroo, Where’s Tim, Etsy, and the usual web suspects like Flickr, Amazon, and LibraryThing; as well as more philosophical stuff such as information anxiety, faceted classification, David Brin’s concept of reciprocal transparency in The Transparent Society, pace layering, IA and Web 2.0, search as a system, and Julian Bleecker’s “A Manifesto for Networked Objects”.

If you missed it: check out the presentation, read the books and Morville’s “UFOs: Ubiquitous Findable Objects”, and visit the Semantic Studios website and Morville’s findability blog.

See also: Jennifer Lang’s detailed write-up.

LITA ERM Interest Group did a managed discussion on e-books. Ted Koppel, Verde ERM Product Manager (ExLibris) gave the talk. (Note: Verde just starts working on e-books management system.) His function in this talk was basically asking questions and raising awareness on e-books management.

Koppel suggested that we start thinking about e-books management now. Even though many libraries are just getting used to e-journals management and might still learning the ins and outs of the licensing management stuff, many of these libraries are already delivering e-books.

Start thinking on usage scenarios such as use for e-learning, e-reserve, and e-books as e-textbooks. Other e-books scenario are possible: single use circulation, institutional repositories, archiving and preservation especially in the wake of the digitization projects from Google and other commercial companies.

There are several functional areas that a library needs to consider, ask, or make decisions:
Acquiring e-books commercially

• Does the supplier offer a collection management tool?
• Does the supplier provide metadata or cataloging tool?
• What is the role of licenses and permissions and how do we manage those into the data.
• How does the industry deal with the open access model as well as the so-called free e-books such as government documents?

Acquiring or creating e-books locally

• what departments within the institution that produce the e-books, who manages the collections, who does the collection development
• e-books only or other digital materials as well?
• where is the metadata coming from for the locally created material?
• Granularity: how is the ERM system used to managed the collection?
• Use/copyright restrictions, licensing/contracts for the locally produced e-books.

Description

• What description/identifier should we use (Dublin Core, MARC, etc.)
• What Unified Resource Identification (URI) that is used?
• Shall records added to OPAC or do we need to keep them separately?
• Differences in indexing and access points.
• Use publisher’s search platform or should we develop it locally to our own need?

Discovering e-books

• At the discovery level, are e-books different than their physical version?
• What kind of search mechanism is the one and how the indexes are built? Do we need indexes?
• Which thesauri to use? Should it be LCHS or our own local practices?
• Combining e-book search results with other results, presumably related material?
• Do we need to FRBRized the result?
• Can we embed e-books search in other platform such as a course management system?
• Does it offer relevance ranking result?
• User tagging?
• Rules for use – who tells the users and how? When ERM stops and DRM kicks in?
• ‘Unlimited access’ vs. charge out this copy model?
• Pay per view or other use model?
• Prerequisite requirements for delivery (specific browser, computer OS, etc.)
• Granularity
  • deep links to title/chapter/page within an e-book?
  • Indexing and retrieval depth: chapter? pages? paragraph?
• Resource sharing system, is it possible?

e-books management

• Is e-books management different than e-journals?
• Has the role of Collection Management changed?
• Staff role?
• License, usage, DRM?
• Budget, support, maintenance?

Koppel summarized that:

• e-books are still in their infancy.
• e-books usage will follow, as will users expectations.
• our experience with managing e-journals will make the move to managing e-books easier.
• but there is still much to learn.

There were several questions, discussions, and updates after the talk. A representative from Overdrive talked about their product and mentioned International Digital Publishing Forum, formerly the Open e-book Forum (OeBF). He also mentioned that Adobe just released a free Adobe Digital Edition 1.0 , for Windows and MacOS (linux version coming soon). This is a rich internet application (RIA), Flash-based. The software can also open and read PDF docs.

Several ERM members presented reports from several conferences they went to: NASIG, ACRL, and ER&L. They participated at several focus groups discussing various issues on ERM:

• ERM implementation and workflow planning space for discussion/online community for sharing best practices
• ERM systems that come with some default settings
• staffing for e-resources
• training and appropriate staff levels
• standardized licenses from publisher that they can upload to ERM
• no standards for publishing e-data
• ERM vendors to provide consultation services for ERM implementation

Other tidbits mentioned:

• Blog for ER&L
• Victoria Reich from LOCKSS encourages libraries to use e-books because we can utilize preservation initiatives like LOCKSS to have permanent archive of our e-book collections.
• ONIX standards for holdings data:
  • SOH (Serials Online Holdings) format v.1.1
  • SRN (Serials Release Notification) User Guide is available
• OPLE – open source tool for ONIX for Serials

One attendee wondered if there’s a possiblity for direct communication mechanism between publishers and libraries, as well as communication between publishers and agents, especially in term of licensing. Coincidently, my co-worker just reported that NISO has a working group called SERU (Shared e-Resource Understanding) that just published a draft on common understanding between libraries and publishers. This draft is aimed for publishers and libraries that prefer to simplify (or even remove the need of) journal licenses.

ERM-IG now has a new mailing list.

Next week, we’ll begin rolling out more podcasts from ALA Annual 2007, including the audio of the LITA President’s program as well as the Great Debate. Stay tuned!

Now up: Joan Frye Williams.

Next week, we’ll begin rolling out more podcasts from ALA Annual 2007, including the audio of the LITA President’s program as well as the Great Debate. Stay tuned!

Now up: Walt Crawford.

I’m a student as Syracuse University attending my first ALA and am very excited to be able to blog the Top Technology Trends (TTT) Panel. I see the discussion has already started so I’ll try to keep this short, but there were a lot of ideas discussed. I am also going to break this into two parts- part one will be the presenters trends and part two will be the audience questions and discussion.

Marshall Breeding, the Director of Innovative Technologies and Research at the Vanderbilt University Library:

1. Library Automation

a. The changes in the marketplace especially those related to mergers have caused many libraries to reconsider their choice of provider and to look at open source products

b. New commercial companies are looking at ways of interfacing with open source products and creating new ways of thinking about automation and systems

c. Better front ends are being developed

John Blyberg, the Head of Technology and Digital Initiatives at the Darien (CT) Public Library

1. RFID- Improved front ends that increase circulation are going to require more supportive back ends, privacy concerns are minimal to non-existent

a. Walt countered that privacy is a huge issue, current technology may not be up to it, but future tech could improve datamining in undesirable ways.

b. Joan related a discussion that she had that groups are not worried about RFID in libraries, but are using libraries to have the debate

2. Vendor Interoperability- OPAC’s will be decoupled from the ILS creating a more modular ILS- Democratic approach to systems- pick and choose the best option for the job, however funding is needed for development

Karen Coombs, the Head of Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries:

1. End user as content contributor- Users are creating digital content (photos, video, etc.), but there is no guarantee that the material will be maintained where it is currently stored (Ex. Letters home from the military during earlier wars provide a great source of data about what is going on, but currently e-mail is not being captured)

a. Current capture technology is not suitable

b. Highlighted Picture Australia as an example of one way to solve the issue.

2. Digital as format of choice- Its easier since you don’t have to come to the library, E-books will take off when there is a decent reader

3. Line between desktop and internet is dissolving- Software doesn’t have to live on the computer anymore (Google Apps.)

Roy Tennant, a Senior Program Manager for OCLC:

1. Demise of the catalogue- The ILS will move to the backroom as portals offer access to materials in different formats on multiple resources

2. Software as a service- Servers will no longer have to be run in the library as the provider can host (and update) the software externally while providing customized front ends

3. Intense marketplace uncertainty- more support for open source, disruptive mergers and acquisitions, services need to be more integrated

Walt Crawford, the creator of Cites & Insights:

1. Privacy still matters- before we throw away confidentiality we need to consider if users really want us to be Amazon; federal datamining

2. Slow Library Movement- locality, library is part of the community; mindfulness, think not just do; Open source where open source works

3. Public Library as Publisher- larger libraries are already doing so and tools exist that make this practical

Joan Frye Williams, Independent Consultant:

1. End user focused technology- currently adopting technology as a retrofit rather then utilizing it to its full potential (ex. Cell phone as phone or cell phone as MP3 player, camera, text, etc.); fear of “I’m afraid they won’t love me if it’s too easy” and “Will there still be a library if I do this?”

2. Abdicating development responsibilities

3. The principle of self organizing systems- designing computing environment that can learn from itself; tendency to create something and then never change/update/evolve it

Our current structure is as follows:
We have an incoming chair, two co-chairs, and an outgoing chair. One chair is always in movement up and down. This will give the group continuity needed for projects as there will always be a chair with experience in office. We also have a Technical Coordinator who does back end work on the blog and a Volunteer Coordinator who organizes blogging efforts for conferences.

New positions possibly needed:

Do we want to be a formal committee now that we are doing more committee-like work?
Action: Michelle Boule will post committee requirements to the listserv for discussion

Michelle Boule, Co-Chair, reports
Blog Update

Wiki Update
Aaron Dobbs – Can we web committee pages on the wiki?
Action item Michelle: bump up Aaron’s account
Wiki Co-Coordinators needed: Aaron Dobbs and Michelle Boule agree to take this on

Do we want a checklist for what goes on the blog and what goes on the wiki? Shelved for discussion on the listserv

Social Software Showcase
Was a success!
A managed discussion space is the kind of physical space we want. We need to have a good description for the official ALA program. We will discuss speakers at Midwinter. Maybe we could have aMeebo Room wrangler during the f2f portion of the Showcase?

Do we want to try to do back channels for TTT or other LITA Tracks? Forum? Action: Michelle Boule to post this to listserv for discussion at a later date.

Karen Coombs, Co-Chair, reports
Forum, Midwinter, Annual – plans for stuff
The virtual piece to ALA conferences is missing. Karen would like to see us capturing things at Forum. Slides as a flash and with audio feed, audio, interviews, etc. What would the equipment needs be? If we only have audio then people would have to find the slides. Is it better to have both where people can choose either the audio or visual or both? At a minimum we can do the keynotes. Forum will be pilot for this type of reporting.
Action: Karen Coombs start talk on listserv about logistics at Forum

New Officers
Michelle Boule stepping down to be Outgoing Chair
Jason Griffey will step up to be Co-Chair
Karen Coombs continues as Co-Chair
Jonathan Blackburn was voted in as the new incoming chair and will be stepping down as Volunteer Coordinator.
Tiffany Smith new Volunteer Coordinator
Kevin Clarke will continue Technology Coordinator
David Lee King – Podcast Coordinator (maybe with the podcasts we will need co-wranglers?)

There will be opportunities for volunteering for all the BIGWIG projects as the dates for conferences get closer. If you would like to participate in the discussion or volunteer, join our listserv.

Action: Michelle Boule send Tiffany Google doc for volunteer stuff and work with Jonathan to institutionalize our volunteer wrangling information

If you’re enjoying the podcasts, and want to make sure that this sort of thing continues within LITA and the ALA, let us know! Leave comments and suggestions so that we know what everyone wants to see moving forward…

Now up: Roy Tennant

Now up: Karen Coombs

The session was blogged by the ERIG new chair-elect, Jennifer Lang on her blog: http://jenniferlang.net/archives/67.

Now up: John Blyberg

Change is coming and everyone will be effected.

FaceBook – get your name and face out there. Let them know your name. Stand behind your word. Get libraries to evolve by de-cloaking. Show who they are and what their specialties are.

MySpace merging with Yahoo. Thompson just bought Reuters.

Google Scholar serves your students up to advertisers.

Advertisers pay to be on first page.

Libraries are more complicated than Fed Ex. They only deliver one way. We deliver it out and get it back.

IM and Meebo allow you to have a conversation. IM research increase risk students learning because they are familiar with this technology.

Is it good to know a fact that is wrong or the process that allows you to find the fact.

US is most far behind on technology.

Google does who, what, where and when very well.

Libraries should focus on how and why questions – improve quality of question and user experience.

How does information become knowledge? Learning.

Put it in your own personal skills.

Make learning happen.

People’s learning styles are hard coded in their genes. Ex. Dr is experienced based.

How do they really learn? Ex. Auditory – have streaming, podcasts, etc.

Nursing – visual have videos.

Library – discovery, learning, experience,

Second Life = virtual world

Avatar – way you want to be – he has full head of hair.

See the beginning of things. See the difference.

1. Whole world is moving to phone being dominant device.

Projectors size of sugar cube in every phone.
China every book on e-book. Everything is getting smaller. Library is where you are at not where you go.

2.5 million books on the web.

He questions binding periodicals. With full-text databases, do you need to bind your periodicals??

Format agnostic generation – everyone under 25 years of age.

Federated search. The user makes the choice.

Broad band is moving through electrical system. Wireless for free. Entire cities are wireless for free – his city
Montreal.

De-cloak. Show expertise. Work as a team and tell of others expertise.

Web 2.0 is our way to move forward.

Largest generation in history and possibly the most intelligent.

Look at Learning 2.0 system. 400 libraries already. Make a U2 video.

Don’t study something to death – just do it. Death is not our original goal.

Joe James – Seattle Public Library &
University of Washington

You don’t need a degree to be a good librarian but it doesn’t hurt.

Information Environment – how do we best serve our populations?

It is continually evolving. A market place but more.

America is aging. Non-hispanic whites will be a minority. No majority by the middle of this century. The demography is changing. Everyone thinks everything is on the Internet. Free, easy quick and good enough – Google. What is better than that?

Don’t try to beat them.

Privacy and intellectual freedom – young people care less about their privacy. Young people give themselves up for free ringtones.

Way people think of Libraries – good books, place for children, place to read e-mail.

We bore them.

Biggest enemy of librarianship is INDIFFERENCE. Rather be hated than ignored.

Librarianship evolves to meet these challenges. We have to be worth it, necessary and make a convincing case. Must have all three of them.

We do such a good job in library buildings: sense of community, sense of place, warm feelings. People like libraries.

What do I do?

Anything but do something. Whatever you do must advance one cause. Advance the information needs of your community. We should be the first they think of when they have an information need. We should be on the top of their minds. Central to their information lives. Advance the cause of being central to the information lives of your community.

20 years ago the library came 11th on the list to find information.

Who else stands up for intellectual freedom.

Edit the entry on wikipedia. “We can take them.” Cite your sources. Fight for quality.

Make a video.

MySpace and Facebook – get recognized. Try it. Tell people about it.

Second life – build libraries here. Second Library. “Joe James said it first” Second life is all about creativity. Build creative objects – music, drama, art, history, etc. Will have to be organized and stored – build a library dna so they will be organized

Learn.

Play – ex. Twitter.

Succeed and Fail.

Tell people about it – blogs, conferences, etc. Leadership does not mean success. Can learn when things are going horribly wrong.

Use the tools. Don’t try to beat them at what they do good.

Focus on services to the young. Sets the pattern for their lives.

Take time with people at the reference time.

Reading and Literacy. Reading advocacy.

Serving new members of the community.

Advocate for information freedom and privacy.

Rethink priorities – there is a lot we can do but we may have to give stuff up. Decide what makes sense. We don’t give up easily but might need to let go to embrace the new.

Focus on Quality.

The Library is the staff that makes it work. The values it embodies. It just happens to be housed in that building. The library is always trying to leak out of that building – bookmobiles, ILL, etc. Now we are OUT. There are things on the Internet that we can do more effectively than we could just in that building. The library is the interaction – somewhere and everywhere. The online presence must be better than what you do in person. In person, they have already made the commitment. Online, you must serve them better or they will be gone.

Librarianship takes the human record and saves it. We make humanity more human. Be part of that mission. Be central to their information needs.

iSchool

Q & A

DRM – copyright management – free stuff coming from Amazon and Apple.

Identity management and version control.

First up: Marshall Breeding

Saturday 1:30-3:30

Inaugural Meeting – meeting following this session at 3:30 p.m. to decide speakers and topics for next meeting.

Speaker 1

Don Barlow

Westerville Public Library

Serve 86,000 people

Quality program and services made available so people will use it.

Users expect info to be delivered to them with highly personalized interfaces.

Combine quality, convenience and social computing – drive up window, accessible through multiple devices, MySpace and Flickr accounts, tagging, gaming, RSS feeds, pod casting, hot lines (phones throughout library to ask for assistance), e-commerce, and line buster (handheld device to check out while in line).

Develop a NO list – every time you say no to a customer, write it down. The list is reviewed weekly to see if need to revise policies.

One Card – All resources – All the time: search
Ohio. One card accesses everything in the state.

Handheld Compatible

Access to resources must be easy and fun to use! Connect with people and create own community.

Encore is new discovery integration reviews context-sensitive links faceted search. Add to Outlook calendar when schedule class.

Many development partners exist throughout the country. Based on Google searching – has same look and feel. Uses federated search engine.

Relevancy tagging is similar to Amazon.com.

Search other libraries in the area and have the materials delivered.

Did you mean? For if you misspell a word.

Refined by tag cloud. Community can add the tags. Remember this has no effect on the Marc record. It just helps the next patron to come along.

Search words are highlighted within the found items.

Supplements subject headings with specialized terminology.

Programs for program registration – RSS feed to customer when new ones are available.

It brings content, community and discovery together. It transforms the user experience. It is rich in information yet simple to use. It is easily maintainable.

Discovery Services Platform

Booth 4132 Encore

Booth 3205 Innovative

www.iii.com/encore

Speaker 2

Steve Shadle

University of
Washington

36,000 students

Innovative Interfaces ILS & WebPAC

WorldCat Local – what it is, what it does, etc.

It integrates WorldCat with the local delivery environment. A customized view of WorldCat.org

Functionality: single search box, relevancy ranking, FRBR collocation, faceted browse, and citation formatting. It links to local systems.

It searches PubMed, ERIC, GPO, ArticleFirst and WorldCat.

It is not a federated search product. It knows what is held and presents as local information.

Strategic Plan: to build and integrate new tools and services for information discovery and delivery.

It helps to shape the future of the service. It is designed with the user in mind.

Too many silos: content, 3 catalogs, hundreds of databases, delivery silos

Ranked by holdings. Keeps in mind how quickly available to someone.

250,000 searches were done in the first month.

Requests were up for UW,
Summit and ILL borrowing.

Demonstrated Live.

Search UW Libraries and beyond is the name on the search box. It brought up 67 results with items held by UW listed at the top. He used the facet to limit the search. Shows symbol for book, visual, sound recording, etc. It allows you to request through your own library also. They have needed to adjust staff. It uses drop down menus very effectively. It is an easy to use system.

OCLC wanted to include their digital collections also. They use primarily CONTENTdm. Mapped a crosswalk from CONTENTdm to catalog.

Learning what works and what doesn’t work as it is in beta testing mode.

Speaker 3

Dale Poulter

Automation Coordinator/Systems Librarian

Vanderbilt
University

Dale.Poulter@vanderbilt.edu

Primo

User interface was designed for searching, not finding. They wanted to move the library services to the users. The users wanted to get information from where they were at – facebook, myGoogle, mySpace, etc.

All of their staff is involved. Several teams were created.

Implemented Metalib 4.0 in conjuction with Primo. The interface is much simpler. Searches are very quick.

Primo allows RSS, tagging, faceted browsing, and federated searching.

Administration of Primo is very easy. Quickly generate new interfaces for individual libraries or user groups. They will have different default searching.

Staff response has been positive. Any problems were responded to very quickly.

3^rd node searching is much faster than federated searching.

It will be available soon.

Based on a book that the committee wrote. Available in the store tomorrow (only 20). ALA discount and no shipping because
ALA made a mistake on the count.

Dr. Joan Giesecke
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries
Dean of Libraries

Getting Started – Command and Control does not work. Trust your staff – go to the experts. It is ok to show emotion. You do not always need to defend your staff – you will mess up. Fix it and continue on. You do not always have to be right – take a risk.

New Roles –
Mentor the staff – put them in positions where they will excel. Be a facilitator for managing conflict. Monitor the units performance – do not hide in your office all day. Be a coordinator of projects – meet deadlines. Be a planner. Be a negotiator with the rest of the library and your unit. Be an innovator – manage change well. Look ahead and plan for changes.

Beginning –

Stage 1 Assessment (3-6 months) – design an orientation, listen with an open mind, fix obvious and easy problems.

Stage 2 In Depth Learning – refine your understanding of your unit, learn more abut the organization, identify more subtle problems, and test assumptions.

Stage 3 Implementing Change – introduce new ideas, revise workflow but involve others, change the culture, and work with your unit (do not impose changes).

Stage 4 Consolidation – assess changes, refine changes based on assessment, and assess again.

Understand your style – you are a leader and a manager. Balance concern for tasks with concerns for people. Adjust your style to work effectively with members of the department.

Skills: Planning – long range, annual, strategic and scenario; Personnel – hire, orientation and training, coaching and motivating, assessing strengths of staff, build teams and evaluations; Communication – begin with your message, understand the audience, and pick the communication method; Time Management – stay organized, use technology, set priorities and remember deadlines; Chairing Meetings – types of meetings, have a purpose, prepare for meeting, and conduct the meeting summarizing key points, evaluate and follow up on meeting agenda.

Use checklists as outlines. Read and try new things. Have fun.

Angie Ohler

University of Maryland
Head of Acquisitions

Libraries struggle to find qualified applicants to replace retiring librarians. There is a difference in culture of new entry librarians. GenX and GenY value “organizational fit” and will leave if not satisfied. New librarians are taking on management positions early on.

Pay attention to the workflow. Examine what works and listen to the staff. Examine written procedural documentation. Poor documentation can cost the organization.

Identify staff strengths and weaknesses and training documentation. Identify timeframe and plan to train staff. Become familiar with software, systems, and hardware used by staff. Become familiar with interdependencies between departments that affect implementation/use of technology. Resist implementation or use of technology that does not meet needs or creates impediments to workflow.

Know when to let go. Know staff skills/knowledge. Periodically review the workflow. Accept that mistakes will happen.

Keep and eye on the statistics you are keeping. Are they still relevant? Will you have the statistics that answer the questions administration will ask?

Measure productivity – identify what should be measured and how to do it, why is it important and to whom, who will record the data, how will it measured, and set an implementation time line.

Measure performance – Learn the difference between positive and negative discipline. Do not ambush staff during evaluations with a list of things done wrong with no prior notification. Manage yourself and be aware of your faults. Ask for feedback. Know how you like to be managed and seek that information about those you supervise.

Communication/Networking – Use both formal and informal channels of communication. Facilitate communication with your staff and others. Ensure that you are accurately articulating your department’s work and its importance to others in the organization. Lobby superiors and peers for support and a place at the table for decision making.

Need to know information that will impact your unit.

Become politically savvy. Develop a network of peers and mentors whom you can trust. Know when to say “no” politely and constructively. Learn how to negotiate and resolve conflict.

PowerPoints available at the authority control interest group LITA/ALCTS

Kathryn LaBarre,
Science
University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaignklabarre@uiuc.edu

Concept of bringing search and browsing together. We are in the period of experimentation: metadata standards, web 2.0, folksonomy, leverage, and facets.

Look to interconnections available with authority data. Authority data is a conceptual map. S.R. Ranganthan discussed the dynamic theory of classification. He has a set of normative principles.

Facet – information can be assigned to multiple dimensions. The speaker explained the technique of facet analysis. An example was done with Buildings and some potential facets include location, composition, purpose, style, date constructed, and associated persons. Every subject area has its own possibilities for categories. She listed many examples of prior art. We need to examine assumptions: how to support searching/browsing, user tasks, user behavior, and things vs. subjects. She continued by going through some examples of opacs and the facets to refine searches – authors, series, topics, branches, and titles. An example using the Aquabrowser is Queens Library. They use format, author, subject, language, series, corporation, etc. Western North Carolina Library Network uses classification numbers to refine the searches to see what is near by.

Charley Pennell, NCSU Libraries, Charley.pennell@gmail.com

View the Endeca product at his library. We have been able to do filters for quite some time. We are now using technology that has been used by commercial enterprises. It mines metadata already available via MARC record. It re-indexes over night. This process did demand a cleanup of the 6XX subdivisions. It allows for both pre- and post-coordinate limits. Hierarchical data enables drilling down through call number results. He shared statistics about searches using facets. Things he has learned from the project: a single facet need not represent data from a single field. Author facet is less useful in some types of searches than others. Some users haven’t figured out breadcrumbs.

Endeca and Authority control – to make use of available metadata, subjects were split along subdivisions. Authors were not. Problems include wrong delimiter values, hierarchy, context (one way relationship broken, devoid of geographic context, phrase headings expressed in multiple subdivisions, and scope-match cataloging vs. keyword).

Solutions may include FAST, search behavior education, and Web 2 cross referencing to redirect searches. Future directions include additional hierarchies, use of cross reference structure, massage underlying metadata and accommodation of true browse for all indexes.

Mary Charles Lasater,

Vanderbilt
University Libraries

Primo implementation. I apologize she spoke quickly and I was unable to keep up.

Facets include topic, creator, collection, creation date, resource type, language, genre, and classification LCC. With TV News you only get two facets – creator and creation date.

Primo allows much better access to the patrons. Another search had topic, creator, collection, creation date and resource type as the facets. She demonstrated how some of the searches were not as successful as others. She discussed some of the authority control/maintenance issues. We need to reconsider our NACO practices. Authority control, maintenance and consistency are important.

Casey Bisson, Plymouth State University, http://MaisonBisson.com

Casey is a programmer, not a librarian. Scriblio is an open source product. Development has been easy. He is not doing as much faceting as he is doing clustering. He is taking the information from the MARC record. He demonstrated a number of searches showing the search and browse hits. He showed clusters by subject and author. He did not show but it is built with comments and user tag ability.

Question and Answer Session occurred followed by a interest group meeting.

Part II of the Social Software Showcase. It’s tres cool that the Showcase is via a wiki.

A group of library 2.0 users sat at different tables and discussed and demo-ed different software. It was hard to take it all in. I spent most of my time at the LibraryThing table.

LibraryThing for Libraries uses JavaScript. It grabs ISBN, title and author, and links to an outside page. Pages generated are more accessible than the usual OPAC pages, which suck on so many levels.

There was a table for Meebo which interested me, but no one seemed to be addressing it. Here’s the link about it on the page–looks interesting.

There was also a table about the Facebook developer’s platform, which didn’t interest me much.

The Twitter group got the largest crowd. Twitter with David Free and David Lee King. There were “too many daves” jokes. I did not join the table, but found the videos and web links very interesting afterwards.

Some of the presenters couldn’t be there due to other obligations. The Showcase was set-up in such a way that you did not need to be a “meat attendee”, but could participate virtually, from any distance. I thought it was really great I could watch videos on the site, such as one about LOCKSS by Karen Schneider.

This group of presenters presupposed some experience with Web 2.0 or Library 2.0. There was kind of an “in crowd” feeling, which I didn’t share. All of the attendees I spoke to were from academic libraries, which was rather disappointing to me. The issues around Web 2.0 seem very different at public libraries. I am going to explore some of the links to public libraries more thoroughly.

I think some of the most interesting ideas around Web 2.0 are reaching nontraditional library users in new ways. I like the idea that the physical library provides a third space for its users. I would like to see Web 2.0 create a virtual third space. I think the various interactive social softwares are leading the way. We need to explore all of them, and coopt the best for library uses. I am not at all sure about Twitter feeds for events, but I love the idea of libraries being part of something fun.

Harnessing the Hive: Social Networks and Libraries

Sunday, 6/24 10:30 am-12:00 pm Convention Center Room 144 A-C

A standing room only crowd (300+) greeted what was definitely a hot topic (ubiquitous, too ). The meeting included the RUSA MARS business meeting, which was brief. The Rethinking Reference preconference was sold out, and will be offered again next June. MARS is offering virtual poster sessions via their web site. I tried to find it. The announcement is here: I hope I can find the actual posters some time.

Matthew M. Bejune from Purdue started the program. mbejune@purdue.edu He started with examples of social networking, some very well known (MySpace, Blogger, LiveJournal, AIM), to newer, less well-known such as couch surfing, webkinz (for children). Malene Charlotte Larsen has posted on 25 Perspectives on Social Networking. She has since added another ten perspectives.

Doing research last fall, Matthew found 35 library wikis.. He categorized them in four types:

1. Collaboration between libraries–45% of total
2. Collaboration between library staff–31%
3. Collaboration between staff and patrons–14%
4. Collaboration between library patrons–8%

Most of the “comfort zone” is with the first two categories. Gave examples: St. Joseph County Subject Guides. Librarian created.,; can update quickly and easily. OCLC Worldcat wiki–people can add reviews, cover art, comments, etc. and relate these to bibliographic records. Matthew’s research will be published in Information Technology and Libraries, Sept. 2007. Companion wiki to article. Members of the library community are invited to contribute to by editing or creating new pages. Instructions are on the page.

Meredith Farkas, maintains Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki and her presentation can be accessed on her presentation wiki.

Meredith’s current area of concern is with knowledge management. All organizations want to make the best use of institutional knowledge. All librarians have different areas of expertise. Customers have a lot of knowledge. Information is shared via one-to-one conversations staff meetings, IM, Twitter, email, scraps of paper on the reference desk, blogs–Last In First Out. All of this is not very searchable Different libraries trying different things. Ann Arbor is doing “customers who borrowed…” You need very broad base of data for user-generated tags.

Examples: Ann Arbor District Library Website

Hennepin County Public Library’s Bookspace Readers can create lists, annotate, and comment.

Roc Wiki Non-library–community gathering data to support access for community

Ohio University Biz Wiki. Provides structure and searchability

PennTags. Let’s users create content

Wikis can also serve as an intranet–to share policies and procedures, basic info, knowledge about reference resources. Info for work study students, volunteers.

Antioch University New England Library Staff Training and Support Wiki

It takes time to build knowledge management behavior into an organizational workflow–a wiki is not at instant fix. Patience and persistence are necessary.

Break to switch from PC to Mac…second time in two programs where this was an issue. I guess we need to find and tap MacBooks that can run Windows to avoid these problems in the future…

Tim Spalding from LibraryThing–talk about ubiquitous! See http://www.librarything.com/thingology/ Started with a quote from Michael Gorman on the Britannica Blog on “Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason”: “Human beings learn, essentially, in only two ways. They learn from experience—the oldest and earliest type of learning—and they learn from people who know more than they do.” Spalding felt this was a false construct–that people learn from conversations, as equals. “The education of scholar is an ascent through this conversation. We start with encyclopedias and straightforward books of facts—books that talk at us; certain books. We move to monographs, which seem at first like books of facts, but which we soon learn are really “arguments.” We learn to write papers that are arguments too—”Don’t just say what you know, have a thesis!” At some point we discover academic journals, and our eyes are opened to just how complex and contentious and uncertain this certain thing is. And, if we go on long enough, we graduate to conferences, and we learn that knowledge is an actual conversation, usually with alcohol.”

LibraryThing users have tagged 50 million catalog records–a form of social cataloging. The tags represent shared tastes and interests. Knowledge is a conversation. “Conversations work because, at their best, they know more and produce more than their members. They work because the knowledge is in the conversation. It happens in the very interplay of ideas—asserting, contesting, extending, simplifying and complexifying the dizzying whirl of fact and opinion, creative and synthetic, smart and dumb, right and wrong, from this angle and that. Literature works like this too, but can be even more meaningless without “conversational” context—genre, alusion and immitation and so forth. So, quiet or not, the library is a buzzing cocktail party—better and better the more people are there and the more they interact. It is already “hive” this session promises. It is, in point of fact, very much like the web.”

Library catalogs are like encyclopedias–general starting points. They bring titles together (can you spell concatenation?). LibraryThing brings together genres and identity groups not covered by LCSH. Even when a new subject heading is added, such as “chick lit”, no cataloguer goes back and applies it to existing records–it is only applied to materials that come out after the heading is accepted. LibraryThing users do apply new tags to previously existing records, so Jane Austen works will be listed under “chick lit” in LibraryThing. LibraryThingbrings together editions–FRBRizing records.

Some uses are outside authority files—in LibraryThing, there are differences between titles tagged GLBT and LGBT. Synonyms can be different. There are 5,000 tags associated with The Diary of a Young Girl. None are anti-semitic. When data has a large mass, errors wash out, become insignificant. Tags are not hierarchical. Flickr uses algorithms to create clusters. LibraryThing now allows customers to mash tags–France, WWII, minus fiction. Danbury Public is using LibraryThing on their Innovative web catalog. I will cover this more in my notes on the session on the LITA Blog and Wiki Interest Group, Sat., 6/23, 1:30-3:00.

I only stayed for the beginning of the Q&A.

The focus of LITA’s International Relations Committee meeting was on the selection of the International Visitor Travel Grant candidate to the 2007 LITA Forum, arrangement for the grant recipient’s visit to the United States, report of the 2006 Travel Grant winner and preparation for the announcement of the next International Visitor Travel Grant to the 2008 LITA Forum.

2007 Travel Grant Winner
The 2007 grant, sponsored by a private donation, was for a librarian currently living and working in the Caribbean. Annette Smith from Barbados, West Indies, one of 12 applicants, is the winner of the 2007 Travel Grant. Ms. Smith, Director of the National Library Service, holds a Masters in Public Administration, University of Manitoba, Canada, a Postgraduate Diploma in Library Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona, and a BA with Honors from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. She is also an advisor to the Barbados government on library and information services. The runner up winner is Gracelyn Cassell, from Montserrat, West Indies.

Announcements for the grant were posted on LITA-L, LITA’s blog and website. In addition, the University of the West Indies assisted in advertising the grant. The announcement was also sent to various Caribbean consulates and ACURIL (Association of Caribbean University, Research, and Institutional Libraries). It was suggested the perhaps IRC’s Americas Subcommittee could assist with publicizing the 2008 Travel Grant.

2006 Travel Grant Winner’s Report
The past recipient of the travel grant to the 2006 LITA Forum was Frank Soodeen, Systems Librarian, University of the West Indies. The 2004-2006 LITA-IRC Chair, David Nutty, coordinated Mr. Soodeen’s visit to LITA Forum and met him at the Forum. The committee was most grateful to Michael Dowling, IRC Director, for including Mr. Soodeen’s report of his trip in the June 2007 issue of International Leads, p.6.

2008-2009 Program Planning
The incoming Chair of LITA-IRC is Teri Sierra from the Library of Congress. In addition to managing the 2008 Travel Grant, Teri is interested in exploring a possible collaborative program for Annual 2009. An idea currently being discussed is the state of current international technology projects such as One Laptop per Child perhaps collaborating with ALSC-IRC, the Gates Foundation’s international projects, and digitization projects to preserve Afghanistan materials. LITA-IRC is looking for additional members and visitors to join this exciting committee. Just fill out an online LITA committee interest form on LITA’s website. We look forward to seeing you at the LITA-IRC Midwinter meeting.

Book Standard

Chronicle of Higher Education

This project differentiates itself from Google’s scanning project by focusing on quality control. As Lotfi explained in his presentation, Google and their partner libraries are privileging quantity—digitizing the most books possible in the shortest period of time—over quality—creating the most complete, accurate, and usable digital copies of books possible. (To demonstrate the problems in the Google method, he showed a set of images of one book that Google scanned that contained a very intricately manicured set of fingernails, and, in some of the images, the entire hand, earning some chuckles from the audience.) In his view, there’s no point in doing a project with such low quality control. The cost of scanning books is only a tiny fraction of the total cost of a digitization process; most of the cost will come in the following years as storage costs. In Lotfi’s opinion, there is no point in scrimping on the scanning and then spending all of that money to store a low-quality product—especially since the institution is unlikely to be able to afford to scan books again any time in the near future.

Robin’s company, BookSurge, is a print-on-demand publisher that was recently purchased by Amazon. BookSurge partners with Kirtas and the libraries to make scanned books available through Amazon, complete with the ability to search inside the book. The book shows up as in stock on Amazon, but no “stock” actually exists—BookSurge prints a copy of the book only when it is ordered. This printed book is branded as being from the library, with such features as the library’s logo on the front cover and images of and text about the library on the back cover. When the book is sold to the customer, Kirtas distributes some of the profits from the sale back to the library, helping to defray the cost of digitization.

Emory University, the University of Maine, and the Toronto Public Library are all doing their digitization work with their own staffs and their own purchased Kirtas automated scanners, giving them complete control over the process. The libraries are able to keep a preservation copy of the digital files, separate from the digital files used to print the books on demand. The libraries maintain control of the digitized books as far as dissemination, access, search, organization, etc. are concerned, and the libraries maintain the right to give the public full access to digital representations of the book.

Martin, the director for digital programs and systems at Emory University, spoke about the process that Emory uses in its digitization project. Emory is focused on digitizing collections, not just books. They have a Digital Collections Steering Committee that identifies and prioritizes collections for digitization (beginning with the Southern Methodist collection), and they provide scholarly contextualizations of the digitized materials. Emory is also planning to work with the Kirtas/BookSurge partnership to publish new digital peer-reviewed scholarly monographs and, in the future, some theses and dissertations written at Emory.

Joyce and Linda both spoke about the collections that are being digitized at their institutions. At the University of Maine (which has partnered with the Maine State Library), they first digitized the old University yearbooks, then moved on to town reports from Maine dating back to the early 1880s. Their next projects are going to be pre-1923 Maine history books, biographies of Maine citizens, and Maine travel books. The Toronto Public Library is going begin by digitizing its Canadiana collection, which contains around 11,000 items, and then move on to other special collections.

Lisa, from the intellectual property rights office at Emory, covered the legal considerations that must be considered when launching a digitization project. The biggest legal risk in a digitization project is being sued for accidentally digitizing something that is still under copyright. Having the digitized books available for sale on Amazon heightens this risk, because that makes it very easy for the copyright owner to discover that his or her work has been digitized. The easiest way to lessen this risk is to digitize only books that were published in the United States before 1923 and that have copyright dates printed on the items, since such books are almost certainly in the public domain. Lisa also emphasized the importance of keeping good metadata about how the institution determined that the item was in the public domain, since the penalties for copyright infringement can vary widely depending on whether the judge determines that the copyright was willfully infringed (damages up to $150,000) or that the infringer was acting on a good faith belief that the copy was not infringing (damages as low as $200).

For any libraries that are interested in joining this book digitization project, the person to contact for more information is Lisa Stasevich at Kirtas: lisa@kirtastech.com.

This panel was taped, so I assume that there will be a video of it available on the Web shortly.

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I was supposed to blog a third session, The Future of Information Retrieval, but due to the fact that it takes just shy of forever to get from Bethesda (where I’m staying) into downtown DC during the morning rush hour and the popularity of that session, I was unable to do so. By the time I got there, not only were all of the seats taken, but so was all of the standing room both inside the room and in the hallway outside of it but close enough to the door to hear the speakers. So this will be my last entry on the LITA Blog for ALA 2007. But please feel free to check out my own newly-launched blog at folksweb.blogspot.com.! I’m going to be blogging about the Semantic Web, folksonomies, Wikipedia, Freebase, and all of the other innovative new ways coming out to organize information on the Web.

Unfortunately, I missed the beginning of this panel. There are two Renaissance Hotels hosting ALA programs, I discovered today about five minutes before this discussion was due to start, and the Renaissance Hotel hosting this program was not the one right across the street from the convention center—it was the one two Metro stops away.

When I got there, they were discussing the Maricopa County Library branch that shelves its books bookstore-style, rather than by Dewey. Karen noted that, despite all of the uproar in the library community over this non-Dewey library, they have not had one single complaint from the public about the shelving system. All of the complaints have come from other librarians.

Everyone on the panel agreed that it is innovative to buy a product developed outside the library world and implement it in a library, but they also agreed that it would be nice to see more R&D in libraries as well. One panelist (I’m sorry, I was still trying to sneak into a seat and get set up at that point and I’m not certain whether it was Stephen or Joseph) pointed out that lots of libraries don’t have the scale to handle R&D, and that development is more important that research: basic research is a nice thing, but libraries probably can’t do it. Development with a research focus, the panelist said, is probably a more realistic goal. Another panelist (see above comment) countered with the point that you have to do research before you can do development. “We are not a research-driven profession,” was the reply. “That’s probably why we’re not innovative,” was the response.

When the panel was asked if libraries are not innovating because library schools are not innovating, both Joseph and Stephen pointed out that library schools are innovating. Joseph noted that trying to innovate in education can get you as much flak as the Maricopa library got for abandoning Dewey. When the University of Washington became an I-school, he said, some librarians thought it was the end of civilization. Stephen mentioned the fuss over launching a Second Life library school. It might be a terrible idea, but let’s try it!, he said. People thought distance education wouldn’t work until it was tried, too.

Karen wondered if age is one of the problems that keeps us from innovating. She noted that she was more of an innovator when she was younger, but she now finds herself defending the status quo more than she thought she would. Joseph and Stephen both disagreed. Joseph said that librarianship as a profession is inherently conservative, and for good reasons—so much of what libraries do is about explaining, storing, and preserving the past—but that when tradition becomes important for its own sake, that’s when it becomes dangerous. Stephen noted that as he gets older he feels more free to say what he really thinks.

A member of the audience asked if libraries need to view themselves as being in competition with tech companies for hiring creative computer programmers etc., sparking a discussion on the role of non-MLS-holders in libraries. The panel agreed that it would be a good thing to hire people without MLS degrees for certain library jobs—or, at least, that there is no reason not to try it and see how it works out—and that people who currently work in libraries without MLS degrees ought to get more respect. Karen noted how amused she is by the job ads asking for people who know Python and other programming languages and then saying that the person will be required to spend four hours per week on the reference desk. It’s crazy to expect people to be tech people <i>and</i> librarians, she said. Reference librarians aren’t expected to spend four hours per week rebooting servers!

Another audience member launched an extended tangent on the role of ALA and other library organizations in encouraging innovation. The panel agreed that ALA has an “archaic” (Karen’s word) association structure—emphasis on the “structure”—and that that can be a hindrance. We need people inside the glass house throwing rocks to let the air in, Andrew says. Karen says that it’s actually about taking rocks and stacking them up and making a new place.

The panel members also had some great advice about working within ALA to change things. Did you know that for membership meetings, a quorum is 15 people? (I certainly didn’t.) And, according to Joseph, a membership meeting can do “whatever the hell they want.” So, he says, gather up some of your friends and go to a membership meeting and wreak havoc! Or, you could help Karen in her quest to convince ALA to allow meetings to be held online. It’s not fair, she says, to ask people to pay for a plane ticket and a hotel room to be allowed to participate in ALA governance; that’s not a democracy. (She says that she’s been trying to get ALA to make this change for a decade.) Stephen’s take on this was that blaming associations (or governments or employers) for the lack of innovation is not helpful, because it discourages individual librarians from taking personal accountability for making changes. The culture of librarianship needs to change to recognize people who take personal accountability and go ahead and make changes, he said.

Throughout the debate, Karen and Stephen emphasized two overarching theories for why libraries have trouble innovating. For Karen, the problem is that libraries don’t have the resources to be able to support failure, and if you can’t accept the possibility of failure you can’t innovate: innovation is risky and uncertain. For Stephen, the problem is within the culture of librarianship, which he says is a culture of victimization. Librarians share disaster stories and commiserate over low salaries and other challenges, and then they come to believe that these disaster stories are the reality of all of librarianship and don’t even try to change it.

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This blog post was based off of a semi-verbatim transcript I typed live. (I would love to be a fast enough typist to do a fully verbatim transcript, but I’m not.) Anything in quotes is a direct quote. The rest of the statements attributed to the panelists vary from nearly or completely verbatim to summaries of longer comments. If you’d like to see exactly what was said in any portion of the session, someone from LITA was taping the panel and plans to post a video of it shortly.

This morning we slept late–jet lag kept us awake until around 1:30 am, so we slept until 10:00. Then we hopped on one of the free shuttle buses (if anything from Gale is ever free) and went to the convention center, which seems like a particularly uninspired exmple of civic architecture. I had never received my all-important conference badge in the mail, so I had to go to “will call.” I was expecting it to take an hour. It took under ten minutes–a huge improvement over previous experiences! Kudos to ALA.

Then we went to the Renaissance, one of the main conference hotels. Unfortunately, the highly anticipated OCLC Symposium was being held at the other main conference hotel, the Grand Hyatt. I can’t believe my ability to end up at the wrong hotel for something every single conference. These were of course several blocks apart. So we hoofed it. Fortunately, the weather was so nice it was impossible to believe we were in the mid-Atlantic region. Sunny, breezy–not even slightly humid.

The subject of the OCLC Symposium was “Is the Library Open?” In part, it was a panel on some of the subjects in a forthcoming OCLC membership report on “Sharing, Privacy, and Trust in Our Networked World.”

Cathy De Rosa, Vice President, OCLC, started us off with some of the same questions the survey had asked. We all got one of those audience response gizmos when we entered. We were quickly able to see that our group was more paranoid/cynical/informed than the general public or most library directors. We don’t want anyone saving our search records with or without personally identifying data.

The first speaker was Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. http://www.epic.org/
Rotenberg detailed concerns about Google’s purchase of DoubleClick Inc. His main complaint about Google is they maintain too much info for too long, and they refuse to provide transparency. He feels we have the right to see the search algorithms that are used to describe us. He hopes that Google will respond to EPIC’s requests by developing into a better company. Coming up with new methods for online anonymity would be a great step.
Q: Is privacy a right? A: Yes. In particular, the First Amendment guarantees anonymity.

Next up: Siva Vaidhyanathan, currently NYU. Moving to UVA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siva_Vaidhyanathan

“What’s so bad about a surveillance society?” We need to delineate the virtues and vices of each instance, and the role of the state. Privacy and security are not a dichotomy. You don’t trade one for the other. Too much surveillance erodes privacy and generates a culture of mistrust–East Germany. No one can say what is enough, setting up the vice of unlimited funding. With data mining, when government uses corporate info. Corporations ask you not to conform–niches are where the money is. You are free to be a freak. Hazards include: false positives, insecure systems–data dumps, lack of transparency, lack of due process or appeals. False negatives. Data, and errors, persist.

Digital rights management=copyright as surveillance. RIAA is pressuring universities; trying to develop content-scanning bots.

Web 2.0–user-generated content is massive corporate data collection, for mining and profiling. We need “cosmopolitan librarianship”. Privacy is not a national issue, but global. Libraries are nodes in the global flow of information and culture.

“Technofundamentalism” seeks simple interventions that can’t address complex issues–filtering. Inventing something to fix problems that last invention created. Trust versus “trust systems”. Systems don’t create trust. Transparency creates trust.

Had to leave before hearing Mary Minow. www.librarylaw.com. Assume she was also excellent.

WAC reviewed some Challenged Content Guidelines for discussion and possible adoption by Divisions
History: This is a response to a challenge to program write-up of a Program in 2003

Lots of cool stuff being done by ITTS, see the Agenda for the updates. We had wide ranging discussions about much of it (which I was too involved in to remember to take notes)

ALA ITTS Reports

• Sympa — All lists are now on Sympa
• I Love Libraries — added to ALA homepage in place of “Libraries & You” link (with no loss of links to content)
• Google (appliance) — Branding mostly changed to ALA from Google; search crawler was hammering web server, services moved to different server, all is better now; Searches should get more relevant responses rates as appliance continues to scan server
• Moodle — the Moodle test environment is much more flexible and well supported. WebCT will be evaluated against Moodle and the better option should win
• Collage Implementation — Rough (optimistic) guess is all units (except a few legacy programs) will be onto Collage by September

Action Items for 2008

• Now
  • Archives resolution
  • Chal Cont surv, results + what to do w/it
  • Onsite CMS training at future conferences — trainees will need to bring their own laptops
  • Posting Council Transcripts (resolution will be forthcoming to Council at this conference)
• Future
  • Access to conference content by non-conference attendees (notes will go out to WEBADV list)
    • This idea will be discussed by Division Boards at this conference

WAC Agenda

Guidelines for Challenged Content Memo

Able Chair Pat Ensor got through the two hour agenda with flexibility and grace. She brought news from ALA including discussions and evaluation of the re-branding of our Open House as LITA 101 and its inclusion in the general information for new conference attendees at the beginning of the conference program and in other promotional materials. The idea seems to have brought many new faces to the Open House on Saturday. Another ALA initiative includes ideas for recruiting students and Committee members will be scrutinizing the report on this idea, which includes developing LITA contacts on campuses with Library and Information Science Programs.

The Committee discussed our possible connections with the newly formed Assessment and Research Committee, reviewed the Open House and discussed future plans, reviewed the Happy Hour and got a volunteer to host the midwinter event in Philly, and the LITA booth, all on-going efforts.

Along with ALA, LITA Membership Development is looking at schools as our target for recruitment of new members, and we’re exploring retention ideas. We’re interested in Second Life as well. We were approached by the Denver Forum organizer Mary LaMarca , and will get together some ideas and activities for that event.

One retention idea we’ll be developing is the LITA 201 concept, a session that will provide how-to and how-I-did-it-good practical information for those who have gone through the newbie stage and really want to grow into LITA leadership positions.

After Chairs Coordinator Scott Muir distributed service recognition certificates, he reviewed the various resources available to committees for self-orientation and continuing support. Aaron posted the list in his entry.

If Committees find themselves in the position of needing to revise their Committee charge text or if they feel the Committee needs more members, it is most appropriate to consult the By-Laws and Organization Committee.

One attendee asked about how a Committee goes about removing portions of the web site and Committee pages, and Aaron Dobbs admitted to being responsible for all of that content editing.

Susan Logue filled in the Chairs regarding the recent merging of Regional Institutes and Education Committees. The merged committees will continue under the title of Education Committee. They will be considering LITA educational needs and the appropriate technologies to use for delivery of educational offerings.

Since everyone had arrived early, we finished the meeting early. People hardly knew what to do, so we did a little hanging out and talking. I was approached by our esteemed LITA Forum organizer regarding activities we might implement for Membership Development in the upcoming Forum in Denver. We have several ideas, including a new members/potential members session for discussing LITA, a less formal Interest dinner [my term] for new or potential members and other possible activities. If anyone is interested in supporting these ideas at the Forum, please let me know – my contact info will be in the LITA Roster.

NISO status

As a snapshot of what it is now, Todd said that NISO has 3 full-time professional staff, a dozen or so consultants and partners that make up a “virtual staff” and about 300 volunteers working on NISO standards activities. The organization is made up of 82 voting members, 27 Library Standards Alliance members, and 13 maintenance agencies. Revenue for 2006 was $714,000, up modestly from previous years; 80% of revenue is from membership dues while the remaining 20% is from seminars and publishing. Grants receipts are a new form of revenue with $196,000 received from the Mellon foundation and $24,000 from IMLS.

NISO is taking a much broader focus on standards related activities that was previously conceived. NISO will certainly continue to maintain a portfolio of Z39.xx standards and participation in ISO standard efforts, but it is now envisioned that there can be other types of outputs/solutions: recommended practice documents; tools, plugins, or web services definitions; white papers investigating and educating on new technologies; registries in support of identifiers and other processes; and creation of “living documents” such as wiki sites (with an editorial board). He highlighted the difference of two recent standards efforts (SUSHI and SEUR) as compared to the traditional ANSI standards process: incubation of draft standard in months rather than years (SUSHI – 13 months, SERU – 9 months) with draft standards for organizations to trial, test, and iteratively improve leading from concept to final approval in less than two years. (“Final approval” in this case is a majority vote of NISO members, not the full consensus needed for an ANSI Z39-track standard.)

The Strategic Framework

The “Blue Ribbon Panel” in 2005 describes a “Strategic Framework” of areas in which NISO should operate. This strategic framework helps pinpoint areas across the community that are most critical for the creation, persistent management and exchange of trusted information in support of research and learning. This framework is seen as critical for three reasons. First the community that NISO serves is changing rapidly, and it needs better ways of identifying and prioritizing the community’s requirements and take actions to address them. Second, NISO is working with scarce resources. Third, and related to the previous two, is a desire to avoid duplication of standards work.

The framework divides the world into three components. The first is “activities” (what an organization is doing) with these categories: Discovery to Delivery; Collection Management; Space-connecting (getting physical things from one place to another); Business intelligence (statistics and such); and management and policy. The second component is “entities” (what is being acted upon) with these categories: people; information object; collections; organizations; and services. The third is purpose of the standard with these categories: identification (what is being talked about); formats and structures (what is is and how it is constructed); transactions (how a process occurs); and policy. Todd offered Z39.50 as an example of how a standard can be placed in this framework: the activity is “discovery to delivery” of “collections” as entities with the purpose of defining a transactional format.

New Organizational Structure

NISO as an organization is changing to fulfill this framework. The former structure had a single Standards Development Committee, and all working groups reported to the SDC. In practice, this is found to be too top-heavy to effectively manage a diverse portfolio of standards. The new structure adds a layer to manage the diversity. At the top is the Architecture Committee with the primary goals of developing and maintaining the framework (as described above), gather input from external experts on the framework, reach out to other standards bodies, and managing topic committees (see below).

Working groups are structured much as they were before — doing the actual standards making. In between the working groups and the Architecture Committee are new Topic Committees. Each topic committee is aligned with the “activities” in the framework, and has these responsibilities: management of a portfolio of standards; coordination of the reaffirmation process for existing standards; and leadership in the strategic expansion of standards within the area of expertise.

One way Topic Committees will proactively explore areas of standardization needs within an area of focus is through meetings of “Thought Leaders.” Each topic committee will organize one or two meetings a year of eight to 12 key specialists to explore the state of the art in a particular topic area. The thought leaders will review the core issues and “points of pain” then priorities these issues based on the viability of solving or substantially improving the situation within 18 months, given current technology and “cultural” environments. After selecting the most pressing issue to pursue, the thought leaders then describe what a solution would look like and draft a charge for working group (including timeline, expected reporting, and anticipated outcomes) along with potential working group participants. This information is reported back to the Topic Committee and NISO. The outcome of the working group could be a standards- or recommended practice-based solution. Todd emphasized that participation in the thought leader meeting will not necessarily imply service on the working group. The initial series of thought leader meetings will revolve around institutional repositories, digital libraries and digital collections, electronic learning systems and digital information, and research data.

Updated Infrastructure and Outreach Efforts

Part of the Mellon foundation grant money is going to fund the creation of a suite of technological tools to improve the workflow of the standards making process. Areas of effort include organizational management (streamline voting, contact management) as well as committee communications (assign tasks and automate follow-up, collaborative authoring tools, document management, web video conference). Doing so will allow easier adherence to the ANSI policies for standards-making efforts.

The final area of focus for NISO is in outreach, education and training about standards. In particular, educational programming is a key aspect of outreach to the community. It fosters the adoption and application of standards as well as enhances the development process by providing an opportunity for the community to be engaged in the standards development efforts. These efforts also generate revenue to support the organization. The events will take the form of roving presentations at venues around the country and use of ‘webinars’ for quick, in-depth exploration of a technical area. Todd notes that while there is a great deal of individual participation in NISO activities (committee and working group membership, etc.) that there is not a lot of “organizational” participation. Member libraries make up only one-third of voting membership and the Library Standards Alliance program has only 27 members. He sees that library consortia may represent a way to pool the efforts of individual libraries to support the standards development process.

This meeting is for the purpose of introducing new IG and Committee Chairs with each other and with some of the people who will be very important to them during their term of leadership. All current, incoming and hopefuls will be well served by attending this meeting and find out how various LITA members and LITA staff members interact with committees and IGs.

The “take home” point of the meeting that I’d like to highlight is from the report/comments by Program Planning Committee Chair Gail Clement. Gail helped us all understand that LITA’s nimble program planning techniques are what allow us to hit on hot technology topics, but we all can be mindful that the earlier we begin planning our programs, the more PPC has time and space to help us find co-sponsorship, track them properly and logically and in general craft them into the superb programs we all want to experience. IGs and Committees can expect a quick implementation process, but please go gentle into the realm of expecting PPC and LITA staff to pull the rabbit out of the hat for every program.

In short: use it, don’t abuse it.

Moderator, Mark Dehmlow of Notre Dame University joined via Skype. Home (Indiana?) awaiting birth of child.
GRE word for the day is ubiquity. 95% of students have cell phones. Libraries need to portal their services to where the users are (except when driving ). Services for handhelds are user-centered.

First panelist, Bradley Faust from Ball State University.

http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/lits/mobileproject/project_summary.html

The Mobile Computing Project at Ball State began in 2004 with LSTA/IMLS grant.

Better, faster higher capacity networks & handheld devices, now integrating with course management systems. Users want:

• Audio, ebooks, podcasts
• Mobile search
• Quick facts
• Directional tours of facilities, services
• Video tutorials, instructional videos
• Texting

Regular web sites are unfriendly to small screens. Need short pages, easy to navigate, minimal images, anywhere access.

BSU developed a new gateway to their catalog using data from their Z39.50 server.
Developed searchable index of journals
Streaming instructional videos via Windows Media
Using Google Co-op search

Markus Wurst–MobiLIB at NCSU

https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/mobilib/

Commercial content providers going to phones–Yahoo, Google, MSN, Flickr, MySpace. Eric Schmidt, Google, “Mobile, mobile, mobile.”

Libraries need to think about what users are doing.

Design considerations–variety of browsers, platforms, small screens, need precise language.

NCSU offering:
1) cat search based on catalog web service using xml data 2) library computer availability 3) Library hours today and tomorrow 4) Campus directory 5) Contact us. 6) Links to external sources 7)University bus status

Just started this spring. No stats. Only staff time being used so far. Markus does not own a cell phone.

Michelle Jacobs–Univ. of Calif Merced mjacobs@ucmerced.edu

Text = short message service (SMS)

Merced is cell only library–no desk phones–they are always at work!
Started text reference with very little advertising. Instruction sessions and word of mouth. 2 faculty have used.
Likes Agile Messenger to access various IM clients. Allows video messaging as well.
YouTube ad with students. Pretty much everything free or at very little cost

Q&A

Response time? Text etiquette/culture does not expect instant responses. Generally 3 hours or next day.
All of these were side projects.
Megan Fox at Simmons is doing some research/gathering stats. http://web.simmons.edu/~fox/pda/

This was interesting. I would have liked to see some examples from non-academic libraries.

Those popular, glowing blue LITA necklaces, handed out by Mary Taylor, LITA Executive Director, identified members in the packed locale. Catherine Jannick from Georgia Tech in Atlanta and on the 2007 LITA Forum Planning Committee, reminded members that registration was now open for the Forum. Karen Schneider approved of the site stating it’s “crowded but wonderful.” John S. [I promised not to write his last name], a Cataloger and Systems Support Librarian, University of Maryland, agreed. He confessed to me that he really likes LITA people and loved coming to Happy Hour, adding shamelessly “even though my membership had expired.” Well, join again John!

Kansas librarians Martin Courtois, Leslie Nord and Monique Sendeze chatted with this blogger. Martin is the D-Space Coordinator from Kansas State Unviersity and is in the midst of convincing Anthropology and Food Science faculty to submit their articles to be posted on the D-Space platform. Leslie, the Information Services Training Coordinator at Johnson County Library told me that patrons at her library love blogging about the library staff…and in turn the librarians enjoy reading the blogs. Monique, also from the Johnson County Library, said that they had just purchased a new content management system, Episerver, from a Swedish vendor. What attracted them to this system was easy of patron contribution, flexibility of the stylesheets and RSS feeds.

The future generation of the catalog was on ExLibris’s Greg Gosselin’s mind though surrounded by the merriment of his University of Minnesota friends Betsy, Janet and Laura. They endorsed the Raspberry Wheat ale, though Janet preferred the Chocolate Belgium ale. “Librarians are good tippers and drink a lot,” Betsy told me. Then she added quickly, “But, not necessarily in that order.”

Aaron Dobbs, Systems and Electronic Resources Librarian, Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, came over to the table where I was dining on a bowl of delicious stout ale chili with Ray Schwartz. “I’ve read a lot of critiques of ALA in the biblio-blogosphere and other online chats and twitters,” Aaron said. As a result, Aaron has set up a wiki where people can add their views in a centralized place. He wants to see a slate of people run for ALA Council who will address issues raised in the wiki. Here is the wiki site: improveala.pbwiki.com.

While I enjoyed that tasty bowl of chili, Ray, Systems Specialist Librarian at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., mentioned that he had written some reporting modules for acquisitions and circulation data for their Voyager System using cold fusion and phps. He’ll share his reporting scripts if anyone is interested. Next on his plate was the Chicago Marathon in October. Good luck Ray! Have a terrific conference everyone.

Nevertheless, we had a lovely discussion and brainstormed ideas for what the interest group could do leading up to midwinter. We discussed how there is often only one distance learning librarian at an institution and the challenges associated with that when a new distance learning librarian is hired. We talked about how a designated DL librarian position can sometimes lead staff to assume all things DL are being taken care of, and maybe back-off in areas of their jobs that overlap. This becomes a problem as we discussed our next topic: what’s a distance learner anyway? Today, our students are accessing materials online and using the library website whether they’re studying in another country or in the building next door to the library. When everyone is using online resources, does it matter where the student does (or doesn’t) live?

DLIG has started a blog, where we hope to provide a space for community discussion and a place where people can share success stories or tips. We decided that some good topics to begin with include copyright law and licensing, case studies, screen casts of things that work, and materials that distance learning librarians can share among themselves.

We discussed programming opportunities around these ideas and talked about trying to put together an online distance learning interest group meeting so that we can get together the 25-30 people who typically would come to our discussion group. We figure, if anyone is well suited for an online meeting, it’s the Distance Learning IG!!

Grand Hyatt, Constitution D, 10:30am, Sunday June 24. Buzzing, excited crowd, almost 200.

Here are the goodies:

Background – Drupal (say “drooo-pull”, accented first syllable) is a fully featured open-source content management system, as opposed to a “build-it-yourself” with Frontpage, Cold Fusion. Another popular CMS for small libraries is Joomla! Plenty of libraries are experimenting with CMS in their internal communications structure, and with Drupal, Ann Arbor has taken it live in a feature-rich way for their library front end website. ILS developers take notice.

Part 1
John Blyberg speaks first- What is a public library website supposed to be? “Public representation of a cohesive and comprehensive technology program.” Hmmm. Why just technology?

Qualities of Great Public Library website:
A firm commitment to not settle, single sign-on, integrated OPAC, Significant quantities of content generated every day, Usefulness, Understand your community, Youth, Staff buy-in, The website is an extension of the library experience, not a resource.

Why a CMS for Ann Arbor Michigan? Might be better explained as: “Why use a Content Management System(CMS) for your front-end?” and “We happened to do it with Drupal”.

Use a CMS as opposed to:
Screwing around with Dreamweaver, Fussing with FTP, “WTF do I do with all these files?”, Circ vs. Reference vs. Youth vs… (turf wars), (Battling for the unsustainable) With a CMS, users can create and import content with a very low technical barrier. All librarians at Ann Arbor have the ability to post content, with version tracking natively available. Separate FORM from CONTENT. “Your web developers can develop, and your authors can write.” Invites participation and elicits contribution.  

What is Drupal and why should my library consider it? Open source, PHP, relatively low hardware requirements, can be run on Open Source platforms, LAMP, yes you can do WAMP.(Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

Taxonomies are available to:
classify all content, organize entire site, cross-post stories, blog entries, etc. (this is very useful as most organizations have content or segments that must live in many categories)
Can be extended to custom “nodes” a node is a segment of content you create

Drupal Theme engine: Separates form from content. (Which should be standard for all websites.) Closely integrated with Drupal’s API. You can easily do multi-site or civic spaces (remembering the 90s when libraries provided community e-mail addresses) PHPTemplate and Smarty can be used as your templating engines.

The Drupal API(what connects one side to the other)
Hooks (callbacks), programming that makes “something happen when you do something”. Not only can Drupal search internal content, the built-in API search hook can query external databases and more. Form generation and processing – you can quickly create forms that take the style of your templates, and you don’t have to fight the HTML. Menu system is flexible and contextual.
 

Part 2

Eli Neiburger speaking next about the user experience (users both staff and public), give a tour of the stats since launch(2005) and the site itself. AADL adopted a CMS when migrating the automation system and wanted to change the site look at the same time. Evaluated many different CMS products, Joomla! not ready for release. Stats shown are all July 2005 through July 2007.

Fun & Useful bits: “Catalog and website are one site, that was one of our design goals” “Joomla! is another similar product–when you are choosing, vibrant community is important, you want the user support. That makes a difference in sustainability.” Where are users going on the site–most are hitting the Front Page, the catalog Start Page, the RSS feeds(represent a quarter of visits, but these could be hourly updates), My Account, Card Catalog Image(what a card catalog image would have looked like, cute and clever)  40,000 users, 32,000 of those are actual library card holders. 4250 content nodes contributed by staff over the past 2 years.
Over 10,000 comments by patrons to the staff blog posts. 13,000 contact us comments.
85 accounts that can post (staff poster) single training class, any staffer is empowered to contribute with permission from managers.
Non-parallel ways to organize our information are aided by taxonomy and native Drupal structure.
Patron reviews on items in the catalog 248 taxonomy terms in 7 vocabularies. A personal card catalog for each patron through MyAccount.

The catalog, and my Account features. Taking the info out of the ILS, and putting it in Drupal. You can tag items in the collection as a patron and maintain your own tag catalog. Patrons can see the tags of others. (Beauty! In My Account, a wireless device list pulled from the wireless gateway. Hmmm.) “Anyone can promote their content to the front page, but it is a decision not to be taken lightly.” 1024×768 resolution page format for site. They drop content from the catalog directly into Drupal pages. A catalog blog, anyone can contribute. Staff are assigned to blog and follow current developments of interest to users, hot materials etc. Events blog also. “People want to know what their neighbors think about a book”. “The true value of these blogs is that nice patrons can see how “not nice” other patrons are immediately.” “Show your customer service standards to everyone.!” “There is nothing about Drupal that you cannot change.” All modules were written by PHP programmers that are on staff at AAPL.
Modules in Drupal created by AADL software scripters: catalog search page, catalog card generator, events display, featured item block, job postings, new & top items, social opac, catalog tags, user account tools, wifi devices management, aadl-gt tournament apps, catalog wrapper, cover image tool, equipment sale form, aadl, freespace, gallery, ILL form, Lego league registration, contact us form & browser research page display, REST catalog interface, summer reading.

Wrapping the catalog
Browser
Drupal session id Drupal Catalog module (used to render the information retrieved from the ILS)
User Authentication
Page Rendering Feature Integration-
ILS, Bib records, Search results, Account Data, Fulfillment

Q&A:
Where are you pulling your content, your covers from? ILS, Syndetics Solution, Amazon for the user-linked info.

Who controls training and content? Librarian who is a content manager, this is a role, not a position, she is in charge of training. What ILS are you using? Innovative InterfacesAre these modules importable modules, or are they just embedded code? They are modules, but are not up yet (at Drupal), source code is available through request, but it is highly locally customized.Challenges in interfacing with the ILS? A lot of data, a lot of things couldn’t be done, especially getting information directly from the catalog, so the wrapper was invented, and a script was substituted for the end user using a browser.

We welcomed Scott Reinhart and Bob Kuntz (Carroll County (Maryland) Public Library to our meeting and they gave a brief history of the their library and how they have managed to do so much with technology in their community. Clearly, one of their greatest assets is a well-funded infrastructure since the county “capitalized” their hardware and software, they receive over $225,000 per year for refresh and upgrades alone. They are also “entrepreneurial” and receive a small income stream from operating as an ISP for dial-up residents, providing server access and support to the local hospital, and partnering with two local community colleges. As the county moves to a complete fiber network, the library will benefit as well which will solve most, if not all, of their bandwidth issues. They service over 300 PCs with IIS servers and their ILS is Horizon. They are also wireless enabled and currently moving their branches to Voice Over IP for telephone service.

They are always looking for ways to enhance their users’ experience with enhanced content from Syndetics, AquaBrowser and now they are planning a beta test with Syndetics Ice.

So, what’s the message that Scott & Bob have for smaller systems: Be willing to try something new… but always have a fall back. Neither Scott nor Bob were originally in I.T. but started out in more traditional librarian roles. In a smaller system, it’s essential that someone take that next step and be willing to learn the technology. Both Scott & Bob learned on the job … asked lots of questions… and looked to their contacts in other systems (and associations), and consultants for help.

We had some additional discussion on handling PAC use through SAM and some of the issues faced (down time, lack of flexibility, etc.). One participant shared that at any given time, they could have 100 people waiting for computer time! We discussed some issues surrounding in-house “check-out” of laptops and how systems handle this as well as training issues for front-line staff dealing with customers brining in laptops (what is our role? – we had diverse opinions.) One solution presented was to consider a company called EthoStream that has been servicing and managing wireless in hotels but may be finding a niche with libraries. One of the biggest advantages is their HELP desk which can be used by patrons directly, taking some of the pressure off the staff to solve wireless issues or answer overly technical questions. (Again, this was merely a suggestion.)

Other issues we discussed were the new wireless 802.11 n wirelss standard that is expected in September 2008 and how it might impact library bandwidth and gaming.

At the end of our discussion time, we had a brief business meeting, encouraging attendees to join LITA, attend the LITA forum, and to attend the program we co-sponsored on Drupal (right after our meeting). We are also looking for a LITA liaison for the ALA literacy committee. Please contact the LITA office if you’re interested. Lastly, we discussed our planned discussion for MidWinter and the proposal that we will be presenting to LITA’s PPC tomorrow for a full-fledged program at ALA 2008. Our focus will continue to be small to medium-sized libraries and how they are tackling technology challenges. If you have any suggestions for discussion topics or programming, leave a comment. Thanks.

More Showcase information coming throughout the day. If you are in DC for Annual, please join BIGWIG today Saturday, June 23rd, from 1:30-2:30 in the Renaissance Mayflower Cabinet Room for discussion and conversation during the Social Software Showcase.

Introductions … 20 attended.
Discussion about renewals … it’s so important that the paperwork be completed… forms are available on the website. Also, the reports and chair(s) signatures are required. The following IGs are up for renewal: BIGWIG, Electronic Resources Mgmt, Human/Machine INterface, Internet Resources & Services, JPEG 2000 in Archives & Libraries, RFID Technology, Standards, and Topic Maps.

Gail Clement fielded questions …
– Do you “have” to come before PPC? You do have to “submit” a proposal and it will be reviewed by PPC. The time slots are limited, so everyone can’t appear anyway. Proposals can be mailed or faxed by first week of July to allow for new proposals after “business meetings” at Annual. However, if you do come in person, you’ll have access to the experience of PPC memberships. Forms are on the website under Lita.org… committee…. program planning, bottom link for 2008 Anaheim: Proposal Form. Please try to follow the procedures in the LITA Manual. If the proposal is really clean and well done, then, it’s possible that LITA PPC can approve it in a short time table.
– Program was booked in two different places (how did this happen)? Gail does not know… she had heard that this happened with other programs and is a larger picture problem. January 30 is the “drop-dead” deadline for programs. There is a master database with every program, speakers, etc. in the LITA office. But, Gail has noticed that data has gotten lost and/or corrupted and tried to correct it in time for the final program. Gail will bring to LITA Board. (After discussion, it was revealed that it’s possible that programs that are co-sponsored may be generating duplication, particularly when across divisions.) Gwen will check with Valerie Edmonds and/or Melissa Prentice.
– Should Managed Discussions go through PPC? Well, if you want to be “tracked” – then yes.
– Explanation of the “colored” spreadsheet… this is showing blocked out times from ALA and there are new “no conflict” times that must be protected for the vendors. Some favored time slots have to be changed. Each IG often has a “traditional” time slot, but you can always request something else each year.
– What’s happening with taping? Two programs were in conflict with other ALA programs. In the end, the vendor pulled out. Now, LITA has gotten approval for IG’s and Committees to set up their own taping … as long as speaker release forms are signed. If you let LITA know, it’s possible that LITA could help. BIGWIG also has digital recorders that could be used … if known in advnace. (Check out the “walk-through license” concept or putting the “approval” on the first slide of a powerpoint… basically, informed consent.) Remember, too, that equal access means that we need to be prepared to offer a “print-out” or description of visual content as needed if we are podcasting or recording in any way. You should always announce that it’s being recorded and tell how the recording will be distributed.
– How are the tapings being distributed? BIGWIG will post to LITA blog. There is also an archive on the LITA website.

PPC has been asked to help generate revenue with preconferences. Unfortunately, this year’s was cancelled and so the issue of devloping preconferences should be addressed. At this meeting, PPC is asking the IG’s to think about sponsoring or creating a preconference. LITA really wants 2-3 each year at Annual. We have enountered logistic problems because of the tech needs, but it can be done. Some indicators: A good speaker (and if the speakers are not ALA members, then many of their costs can be covered). If you notice that the time slot wasn’t enough, then maybe it’s a good program idea for a preconference. Remember, most preconferences are only about 40 attendees so off-site program is possible. Think about a vendor-sponsored preconference as well. Consider brainstorming at your meetings.

There are some issues with getting the incoming and outgoing chairs updated for IGs. Gail is aware of this and hopefully, this can be corrected this year. Right now, there are about 3 IGs per PPC liaison.. so there are some delays. Matt & Tim said that PPC can send them the list and they’ll update.
Matt asked that co-chairs also be added to the list… send the names to Matt and he’ll take care of it.

Is there any information that should be covered here? Someone mentioned that it was difficult to figure out “who does what” – on LITA staff level as well as web foks, etc. LITA office doesn’t always acknowledge IG requests. Tim (webmaster) also has to forward content to LITA office. Also, big request for more forms online… we shouldn’t really have to go to LITA office for forms at conference.

Is the one-hour format OK? yes, so far.

We shouldn’t despair, in reality, the IG meeting forum is working very well and it does give everyone an opportunity to talk and ask questions. Communication is getting better and better.

Important Resources for Committee Chairs

• LITA Staff
• LITA Table at Conferences
• LITA Committees web pages
  • Committee lists and membership
  • Reports submission form
    • All meetings are open (except awards or personnel matters
    • Please submit in timely manner (within a week or two of conference, please; not a week before the next conference)
  • Orientation Tip Sheet
  • Calendar
• LITA Manual
• Annual Program Planning (Manual Section 10)
  • 2008 Program Proposal Form
  • Speaker/Panelist Release Form

Committee Chairs suggested reciprocal LITA.org –> LITA wiki links for better committee flexibility. Web Committee will discuss this at the Web Committee Meeting. Also suggested adding Liaisons pages to wiki for more timely updating.

In addition to being thought provoking, Casey has used the Showcase as a place to announce a new project: OpenLibrary. Read up, and feel free to discuss the project here, within the Showcase Forum, or on the Showcase Wiki Discussion pages. We have lots of venues for the virtual world to participate with us here at ALA Annual, so please, join in.

More Showcase information coming throughout the day. If you are in DC for Annual, please join BIGWIG today Saturday, June 23rd, from 1:30-2:30 in the Renaissance Mayflower Cabinet Room for discussion and conversation during the Social Software Showcase.

1. 1. Introductions all around
2. President Bonnie Postelwaithe
3. Vice President Mark Beatty
   (I was stuck on a long bus and missed these 1st three)
4. Executive Director Mary Taylor
   1. LITA experiences 5% growth this year
      1. Mostly student members, we need to help our new mebers find their place in LITA
   2. National Forum in Nashville was a success, see you in Denver
   3. 4 Regional Institutes this year
      1. Mosly licensed by consortia and  institutions
   4. Schuman Publishers will be publishing LITA Guides
      1. So LITA gets 10% discounts from Schumann and ALA Editions LITA publications
   5. LITA-L moved to Sympa
5. Program Planning Chair Gail Clement
   Spoke about how LITA’s PPC is seen by other Division’s groups as a good model
   LITA PPC 1 year process is nimble, yet has a clear process to catch and fix omissions and errors
6. LITA Web Manager David Altenhof
   We’ve changed to the new CMS (first member unit to do so), it’s been a controlled crash so far
   Discussion about LITA site errors — if you’re having a problem, please please please report the problem to ALA IT or Help Desk (just a quick email with error and date & time of error will do)
   LITA Blog is alive and well, 27 volunteers covering >32 sessions
7. New Business / Questions
   Adjourned to Breakouts sessions

WCC 154B

Come join some of us, and blog the conference!

Washington Convention Center room 101
8:00 am to 4:00 pm
Saturday and Sunday

Do you find the most useful and energizing “session” is the ad hoc discussion in the hallway or during a break?  Do you yearn to expand on those conversations with colleagues who share your passion for ideas and concepts not necessarily on the formal program?  ALA is making space available and a facilitator, if necessary. Drop by for a while or stay for the day.

I thought I saw this on the Annual Wiki but now I don’t find it.  I cribbed the stuff above from Mary Ghikas’ “What’s Happening” notes (which I was given at my request while socializing in the Renaissance Washington Lobby)

Please have a look at the mockups UserWorks created for ALA as a result of the usability assessment and subsequent exercises they performed for us.

Background: http://www.ala.org/ala/pressreleases2007/june2007/ALAwebsiteredesign.htm

More background: http://wikis.ala.org/webplanning

The start page: http://userworks.com/ala/start.htm

These wireframes will be available at the kiosks at the registration area of the Washington Convention Center. WAC will talk more about this at the WAC meeting on Monday.

I’m liveblogging this session over on my blog, so far I’ve heard:

Mark Lloyd, Center for American Progress

Mark was speaking about the necessity of urban library support for the rural libraries provisions in this year’s Farm Bill. Please say to your Senators and Representatives: “Please support the rural library provisions in this year’s Farm Bill.”

Gloria Tristani, Spiegel & McDiarmid (former FCC Commissioner)

Gloria spoke about the importance of sufficient bandwidth for public libraries, wherever they are. She spoke about ALA WO efforts to simplify the E-rate for libraries, modify “poverty calculations” to bring libraries into parity with school districts and respond to “Notices of Inquiry” from the FCC. Sometimes FCC comment periods may say they are “closed,” if you have a comment you should send it in anyway (up until a decision is made). Grassroots advocacy and grassroots comments count with the FCC when they come in significant numbers.

While we are all here in DC, if we are interested in FCC-related stuff, we should take the opportunity to drop in on the FCC Commissioners — we are competing with many other players and a massive drop by of interested parties. Take the time to have a few relevant statistics about library connectivity to hand and encourage the FCC. Wisconsin specific data here for example.

Broadband deployment models that work

Bob Bocher Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Steven Hedges OPLIN
William Giddings MOREnet
Andrew McNeill Connect Kentucky

Partnering:
BadgerNet: state gov’t, K-20, libraries, tribes, telcos.
INFOhio, OSCnet, OhioLink, MORE: OPLIN also provides “postalized” pricing, same anywhere. All 3 agencies are now working together as Libraries Connect Ohio.
MOREnet started in 1986, REAL started in 1994, now 131 libraries with 107 branches.
Governor, State library, Dept of Ed, Dept of Higher Ed, U Missouri One network to rule them all (wait, no, There can be only one) in Missouri.

Funding:
MOREnet: Connection depends on tax revenues for service area — you get the connection speeds you need (smaller libraries pay ~$300/year, largest pays ~$12,000 per year) no questions asked.
BadgerNet: costs are “postalized” same cost anywhere — benefits rurals *big time* T-1=~$100/month, higher=~$250/month. Centralized purchase of access and divvied internally.
Dept of Higehr Ed, Sec of State via State Library, participant fees, E-rate reimbursements.

Services:
Video distance Ed, 24/7/365 Tech Support. Statewide VoIP soon, internet via WiSCnet, shared ILS in ~90% of WI libraries for resource sharing etc.

Success because:
strong state network office, strong legislative and executive support, governor support, collaboraive environment (inclusive), state-wide funding of connections.

Challenges:
Policy issues about funding of bandwidth for gaming may crop up if legislators ask about what kinds of traffic are being funded. WAN circuts insufficient, State USF has had 6 years of no growth, Web 2.0 interactions loading network, working to improve funding, general sys admin stuff (security, spam, remote mgmt, etc)
growing demand for bandwidth, term limits, site visits

Then a Q&A session to wrap up.

Leading off the afternoon will be the Top Technology Trends discussion. This program features our ongoing roundtable discussion about trends and advances in library technology by a panel of LITA technology experts. The panelists will describe changes and advances in technology that they see having an impact on the library world, and suggest what libraries might do to take advantage of these trends.

Scheduled panelists include: John Blyberg, Marshall Breeding, Karen Coombs, Walt Crawford, and Roy Tennant. Other experts will contribute via posts on this blog.

Meeting details: Sunday, 1:30-3pm in the Renaissance Mayflower East/State Rooms

Can’t make it? Check out other litablog posts for experts’ trends and notes from the event.

I thought I’d try something a little different for disseminating my trends. I know that I like examples and I’m a very visual learner. So, in addition to the text version of my trends (which contain links to examples), I created a Flash movie (screencast) of my trends with narration. I figured it would be the closest thing to actually being there and you can actually see the applications I’m talking about. You can watch the embedded video just below this text, or you can click on this link (recommended) to watch the full-screen version of the video.

Open Source for the Rest of Us
Open source software used to only be an option for libraries that had significant in-house technical support. That has become far less the case in recent years, and yet open source is still a dirty word, or at least a scary word, in many libraries.

I was recently approached by someone from a large public library who said that they were interested in purchasing wiki software and wanted to know what my recommendations were. Honestly, I could not think of a single enterprise-level wiki that I consider any better than the free and open source options out there like Twiki and MediaWiki. The main thing you’re paying for with these enterprise wikis is the tech support. If you have someone on staff with tech skills, or if you don’t want to do anything particularly exotic with your wiki and can read directions, the open source options are the best out there. The same goes for blogging software. Even open source content management systems have become pretty sophisticated and relatively easy to implement. Commercial doesn’t necessarily equal better and open source doesn’t even always equal “more work” as it used to. Sometimes it’s free as in kittens and sometimes it’s really free as in beer.

Even the open source catalogs have grown up. Do a few searches in the Nelsonville Public Library’s open source Koha catalog. Pretty impressive, huh? Does a lot better than the clunky and expensive catalog at my library! You don’t even need to have a coder on staff to implement this, since there are companies like LibLime and Equinox willing to take on the maintenance burden (for a healthy fee of course). Why would you want an open source library system if you still had to pay for someone to maintain it for you? Because you can benefit from the open source development model. The beauty of open source software is not just the cost savings, but that anyone can improve upon the product. Someone at another library may see the same flaws in Koha that you do, but they may be enough of a coder to create an extension that you can also benefit from. Instead of depending on a faceless company for development, you can benefit from the ingenuity of the community; a community that has the same interests you do in seeing the system be better.

But it’s clear to me that many people still think open source is something for serious techies, given the awe-struck media frenzy that followed Jessamyn West’s video showing her installing Ubuntu on some computers in a rural library. Many of these operating systems are getting easier to install and hardware manufacturers are getting much more cooperative in designing hardware that will work with many open source operating systems. But even if you’re not installing Ubuntu or Mandriva, there are many free or open source applications that have the same functionality as the desktop applications your library paid a small fortune to license. I use PDF Creator instead of Adobe Acrobat. I use Audacity to record sound http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. I use GimpShop instead of PhotoShop (which is not nearly as fully-featured, but good for small jobs). I typed these trends in Open Office, and I find that, for the basic tasks most people do, it’s just as easy to use as the Microsoft Office tools. In some cases, open source applications are far better than the commercial ones. Especially for cash-strapped libraries, it’s crazy to keep spending money on expensive licenses for commercial desktop software without at least considering the open source alternatives. None of these take a “techie” to install or learn how to use.

Here are three things you can do today to get more comfortable with the idea of open source in libraries: do some searching in the Nelsonville Public Library catalog, check out some of the open source alternative applications, and read about how the Howard County Library in Maryland switched to Linux years ago.

Capitalizing on User Contributions
Lots of online tools have been developed to capitalize on the knowledge and behavior of their users, but it seems like libraries are just starting to jump onto this important trend. There is so much useful knowledge just locked up in our and our patron’s heads. There is so much we can learn from the behavior of our users. And finally (FINALLY!) libraries are getting it.

Many libraries have created wikis for internal knowledge sharing. This is an important thing. Tell me if this sounds familiar: someone abruptly quits an important job at the library. Nothing about what they did was documented. Someone is forced to learn how to do their job from scratch. It doesn’t have to be that way. Wikis allow people to document what they do and what they know. It allows us to collect information more effectively than sending e-mails or taping a scrap of paper to the reference desk. If all of our colleagues shared the references they commonly use with patrons in their areas of expertise, we’d all be much better reference librarians. It would be like having all of your colleagues’ expertise at the desk with you every time you had a question.

The Ann Arbor District Library, the Hennepin County Public Library and the University of Pennsylvania are all bright shining stars in the effort to capitalize on user knowledge and behavior. Ann Arbor is using circulation information to show patrons what other folks who checked out the book they want also checked out. Sound familiar? They are also allowing users to assign tags to the catalog. They’re not throwing the Library of Congress Subject Headings out the window; they’re offering users more. Our patrons just don’t think in terms of Library of Congress subject headings and it would be nice to also have terms in the catalog that they do use.

The Hennepin County Public Library is letting users write reviews of books in the catalog. It’s pretty cool to be able to look at a book’s catalog record and then see what your friends and neighbors thought of it. Hennepin library users can also create book lists where they group books together on a specific topic and can also add annotations. Why not use your patrons’ own reading experiences as a readers’ advisory tool?

The University of Pennsylvania’s PennTags is a social bookmark manager for students and faculty at Penn. Members of the University can bookmark items from the Web or the library catalog and tag them with keywords that make sense to them. People can create annotated bibliographies using PennTags and save them as individual projects. These can include readings for a class or resources for a project. What’s really cool is that when something from the catalog is tagged, the tags, annotation and link to the annotated bibliography is included in the catalog record. This adds such rich user-generated information to the catalog record that can lead students and faculty to other related works that would be helpful in their research.

Social Software… Sustainably
I remember reading once that there is always a huge upsurge in purchases of Dalmatian puppies when Disney releases 101 Dalmatians for the big screen. Soon thereafter, there is a huge influx of Dalmatians placed in animal shelters. Lots of people bought Dalmatian puppies to make their children stop bugging them about it. Some were able to live up to the responsibility and take care of the Dalmatians, but others got rid of them when they realized that they couldn’t handle the responsibility and/or their kids lots interest.

I think the same has happened with blogs in libraries. For a while we often heard the refrain “every library should have a blog!” from prominent technology evangelists in the profession. And a lot of libraries listened, creating blogs for readers’ advisory, library news and much more. Like the Dalmatian puppies, I’ve seen a huge number of abandoned library blogs floating around on the Web. Many social software tools are ridiculously easy to get started with, but they take real effort to maintain on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Wikis need to be monitored, blogs need to be posted to, bookmarks need to be added. The library blogs that have survived and thrived are those in which the librarians built blog posting and maintenance into their daily workflow. The Champaign Public Library is a great example, plannings for their blogs much as they do for their reference desk shifts (Nanette Donohue, who manages their blogs, gave a great Webcast on blog management for Five Weeks to a Social Library).

I think we’re past the “every library needs to be using social software” phase, and now libraries are starting to think about social software in a much more level-headed and sustainable way. They are starting to put the need before the tool. They aren’t saying “we want a wiki! Now what can we use a wiki for?” They are starting to plan for how to maintain the technology before they implement it. They are developing policies for things like blog comments or for friending on MySpace so that decisions aren’t made arbitrarily. They are thinking about things like “will this company I’m putting my data on be here three years from now?” and “how can we backup our data?”

As a result, I think we’re going to see much better applications of social software in libraries; applications that meet real patron and staff needs and that will stick around more than a few months. Because it’s not cool just to have a blog, but it’s very cool to have a useful blog.

Going Where our Users Are or Letting Them Use Our Stuff Where They Want It
I’ve taught information literacy classes with freshmen, sophomores and juniors. And what I find without fail is that the majority can’t find the library Website. They’ll start at the University homepage and will then flounder around until I give them specific instructions on how to find it. This tells me that they do not visit the library Website and that is confirmed by our stats in Google Analytics.

So if our students are not visiting the library Website, where are they going? They’re going to Facebook and MySpace to socialize. They’re taking classes online using Blackboard, ANGEL and other course management systems. They’re watching YouTube videos for entertainment. They’re doing research on the Wikipedia. They’re often getting their news from an aggregator of some sort, be it Google Reader or MyYahoo!. So we can do two things. We can try to make our Websites more user friendly and more what our students want. And that may have some effect. But, we also need to go where our users are. We need to put our content where our users eyes go online. And we need to make it easy for them to take our content and get it how, when, and where they want it.

Lots of libraries have created profiles in MySpace, but so many of them are more a billboard for the library than a branch of the library. A lot of library MySpace profiles don’t offer students anything concrete; they just say “hey we’re cool! We’re on MySpace! Friend us!” The really effective MySpace library profiles are designed to be another branch of the library. The Brooklyn College Library, Ann Arbor District Library, Hennepin County Public Library, Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenberg County, and the Denver Public Library have all done a great job of developing a virtual branch in MySpace, offering things like a catalog search interface, event calendar, links to new books and movies, a news blog, links to databases, and an IM widget. They’re providing something really useful to young patrons and are making the library more visible in those patrons’ daily routine. Some people think it is frivolous to develop a library presence in such a space, but I think it’s no different than creating a library presence for online learners in WebCT. It’s just putting a portal to library collections and services where your users are. It’s good business.

There are so many great ways that libraries can be where our patrons are. We can put links to our collections in Wikipedia. There was a really great article in D-Lib last month about how some folks at the University of Washington added links to the library’s digital collections in the Wikipedia. We can create a library toolbar which lets our patrons easily access our collections and services from the top of their browser. We can put instructional screencasts into YouTube and other popular video hosting sites. We can provide reference services via instant messaging and get patrons to add us to their buddy list, which is often open while they work. The goal is to make the library more visible and to make it easier for users to access our stuff.

It’s also become easy to make our content more portable so users can get it how they want it. This is thanks to RSS, which separates the content of the page from the presentation and allows content to be syndicated in other places. Patrons can take RSS-enabled content and can subscribe to it in an aggregator or personal homepage, can have it send to them via e-mail or text message, and can even have it show up on their own Web site using an RSS to JavaScript tool. There’s a lot of content that can be syndicated using RSS, like new materials lists, catalog searches, library news, database searches, journal tables of contents, and more. With RSS, users can subscribe once and will get updated content for as long as they want to without ever having to visit the library’s Website again.

We all have spent so much time working to make our Websites as usable and accessible as they can be, so it can be hard to consider developing ways for your patrons to bypass all of that. But the goal is to get them to use the library, not the library Website. I’m sure some people had just as hard a time creating an online presence for their library in the first place when what they really wanted was for their users to come into the library. The trend is definitely for libraries to make their content and services as portable as possible and to put them into the spaces our patrons really do visit. The more we can be in their daily routine, the more likely it will be that they’ll take advantage of what we have to offer.

Here is the HTML version

Here is the Ical version (this imports nicely into Outlook 2003, and should work on Outlook 2007 and most every other desktop calendar app)

Here is the (wonky but workable) XML version for your RSS reader

BIGWIG wanted to do something different. Something that could spark conversations between people and would not be limited to a finite time and space. Something fun. We also wanted to devise a program for ALA that could be responsive to new technology. Current ALA planning procedures are not responsive to emerging technologies. In fact, at least two of the technologies that will be discussed are less then 4 months old!

Come and see what all the commotion is about. We have presentations by:

Casey Bisson and Lichen Rancourt
Michael Casey
David Free
Iris Jastram
David Lee King
Tom Peters
Michael Porter
Karen Schneider
Tim Spalding
Simon Spero
Jessamyn West

We will also be having a face to face roundtable discussion with some of our presenters at ALA Annual in Washington D.C. on Saturday, June 23rd, from 1:30-2:30 in the Renaissance Mayflower Cabinet Room. If you are in D.C. please come and join us for an hour of informal conversation.

Not coming to ALA? That will in no way inhibit you from enjoying the presentations! We want people who are not able to attend ALA to be able to engage in the conversation. Our content will be open and available starting the week of ALA for everyone and anyone who wants to discuss emerging and changing technologies.

We will have a Twitter feed, which you can follow here (once the presentations go up).

Questions? Please contact the BIGWIG group at bigwig.showcase@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Michelle Boule
Karen Coombs
Jason Griffey

The BIGWIG Team

My President’s Program is an interesting mash up of two hot topics: digital libraries, in this case, digital audio libraries, and the social tagging system PennTags. Historic sound recordings are an important part of our national heritage. Digitizing historic recorded sound collections for use on the web requires extensive indexing and access points. Using social bookmarking and tagging in combination with standard subject classification and indexing terms to create folksonomies creates a rich networking of resources that greatly enhances access to the collection. Chuck Haddix (Marr Sound Archivist at the University of Missouri Kansas City) presents The Voices of World War II collection as a case study of the creation of a digital library rich in historic spoken word and music recordings and the integration of digital library records into the online catalog for enhanced access. Michael Winkler (Director of Information Technology and Digital Development of the University of Pennsylvania) discusses PennTags using the UMKC digital audio collections to illustrate how it provides increased access. PennTags is a social bookmarking system that enables the creation of personalized, shared annotated bibliographies of resources in the library catalog, licensed databases, digital libraries and other Web resources using a combination of subject headings, index terms, and personally assigned tags. PennTags is being enhanced to provide specialized capabilities for tagging sound recordings.

I hope to see you all at Sunday Afternoon with LITA on June 24!

We are a busy group, as the time-slot conflicts demonstrate. What is it with the 1:30pm to 3:30pm slot on Saturday (10 overlaps) and the 10:30 to Noon slot on Sunday (9 overlaps)?! I guess we like to sleep in

Remember, the LITA Blogger’s Room is WCC 154B — Friday through Tuesday (8am-6pm) — LITA is sponsoring the room, but anyone who wants to (LITA member or not) is welcome to plug-in & power up with us.

Interestingly, the LITA Happy Hour is not [at the time of this post] listed on Friday evening on the LITA website. If you know the details, you know what to do… listed on this page: http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litaevents/Annual2007Washington.cfm. It’s Saturday, 5:30pm to 8pm at the Capitol City Brewing Company.

Don Barlow, Westerville Public Library, will discuss their work
with Innovative’s Encore product

Dale Poulter, Vanderbilt University, will discuss their work with
Ex Libris’ Primo

Steve Shadle, University of Washington, will discuss their
implementation of OCLC’s WorldCat Local

LITA IG meetings are open to all ALA attendees (and for non-attendees,
we already have a couple of bloggers lined up). Since this is a
discussion and not a formal program, we’re relying on you to show up
with questions and input.
–
Thomas Dowling
Chair, LITA NGCIG

Congratulations to the following members who have been elected to the LITA Board of Directors:

• Vice President/President-Elect: Andrew Pace
• Directors at Large (3 year terms): Mary Alice Ball and Susan Logue
• Director at Large (1 year term): Karen Starr
• LITA Councilor: Colby Riggs

Elected ALA Councilors who are LITA members:

• Allene Hayes
• Janet Swan Hill
• Bernard Margolis
• Catherine L. Murray-Rust

So: tomorrow morning, the remaining interviews will all hit the blog, and LITA members can listen in and make an informed choice in their voting.

As always, if anyone has any problems with the podcasts, please let us know.

Another reminder to stay tuned for the race for ALA Councilor between Kay Flowers and Colby Riggs, later this week.

Later this week, we’ll have the race for ALA Councilor between Kay Flowers and Colby Riggs, in podcast form for your auditory pleasure.

Welcome to the LITA Podcasts Election Series. For your listening pleasure, every few days a new group of LITA Officer hopefuls will be presented. Tune in here on LITABlog, via any RSS aggregator using our normal RSS feed, or now tune in via iTunes by clicking here or searching for LITA in the podcast area of the iTunes store.

Each individual, regardless of office, was asked to answer the following questions:

• Describe your professional experience as it related to holding LITA office.
• What do you bring to this position?
• How do you envision LITA being a technology leader in ALA?

Each candidate was interviewed by David Free who knows a few things about podcasting and who has been instrumental in making this a success.

The schedule for the release of each group of candidates is as follows:

March 15 – Vice President/President Elect
Diane Bisom and Andrew Pace

March 19 – ALA Councilors
Kay Flowers (did not respond to interview request) and Colby Riggs

March 21-22 – Director at Large 3 year term
Mary Alice Ball
Susan Logue
Dale Poulter
Barbara Spivey

Director at Large 1 year term
Both candidates declined to be interviewed.
Maribeth Manhoff and Karen Starr

For more information about the LITA Elections, see the LITA Elections 2007 page, as well as the ALA Elections page.