Category: 2007

LITA Next Generation Catalogs IG 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…

New Technical Services Supervisor? Check Here for Help Saturday, June 23, 2007 4-5:30 p.m. LAMA / SASS 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…

Authority Control Meets Faceted Browse, ALCTS Authority Control IG, June 24, 2007 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….

LITA-IRC Meeting, Monday, June 25, 2007 10:30am -12pm Renaissance Hotel – Room 17 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…

This panel featured six speakers who are involved in a new project to digitize books and make them available both online and print-on-demand via Amazon. Two of the speakers, Lotfi Belkhir and Robin Asbury, work for the companies that are behind the project—Kirtas Technologies and BookSurge, respectively—and the other four speakers are with institutions that are digitizing books: Martin Halbert and Lisa Macklin, from Emory University; Joyce Rumery, from the University of Maine, and Linda McKenzie from the Toronto Public Library. 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…

Hello LITAblog readers! I’m Julia Bauder, a student in the MLIS program at Wayne State and one of the LITA conference bloggers. I’ll be blogging three sessions this weekend. First up is The Ultimate Debate: Do Libraries Innovate?, featuring Andrew Pace of North Carolina State University as the moderator, Joseph Janes of the University of Washington, Karen Schneider, and Stephen Abram of SirsiDynix. 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.