2009

Assessment & Research Committee Midwinter 2009 Meeting Report

DATE: 1/24/2009 GROUP: Assessment and Research Committee CHAIRS: Diane Bisom, Bonnie Postlethwaite REPORTER: Bonnie Postlethwaite CONFERENCE: Midwinter MEETING: Committee meeting ATTENDEES: 12 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: Discussion Items & Actions: Approved minutes from prior meeting. Mary Taylor presented data files on LITA membership (available on Committee’s Google docs site).  Available data points cover various parameters, such as membership in other divisions; number of programs; etc.  Data seems to reflect a recurring trend of membership increases and decreases over time.  Personal membership trends over the past few years are: 2003: 3907 2004: 3776 2005: 3423 2006: 3500 2007: 3752 2008: 3447 Mary also indicated that ALA will have a data dashboard later in the spring which may provide data and trends over time.  She also mentioned that ALA is doing a mailing to all people who have dropped membership in the last three years. Reasons for membership attrition were discussed, with speculation that…

2009

Technology & Access Committee Midwinter 2009 Meeting Report

DATE: 1/25/2009 GROUP: Technology and Access Committee CHAIR: David Nutty REPORTER: David Nutty CONFERENCE: Midwinter MEETING: Committee meeting ATTENDEES: 9 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: Planning for a program at ALA Annual Chicago has been the main focus of the committee prior to and at the Midwinter Meeting in Denver.  The committee has focused the topic to Net Neutrality.  The committee has tentative commitments (later confirmed) from three outstanding speakers.  Due to the quality of the speakers and the timeliness of the topic, we have requested a larger room for ALA Chicago. Other business at the Midwinter meeting included discussion of the LITA Strategic Planning Meeting; a request from the Board to draft a resolution for Judith Krug on the 40th anniversary of the Freedom to Read Foundation; and the committee’s role in promoting access to LITA conference programming via low-cost or mobile technologies. FUTURE ACTIVITIES: The committee’s program at ALA Chicago: “Net…

2009

Education Committee Midwinter 2009 Meeting Report

DATE: 1/24/2009 GROUP: Education Committee CHAIRS: David Ward, Mandy Havert REPORTER: David Ward CONFERENCE: Midwinter ATTENDEES: 12 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: LITA Education combined with Regional Institutes in the past year.  We spent from Annual 08 – Midwinter 09 reviewing our charge and creating organizational documents to track and help guide the newly combined committee’s role. Part of this involved assigning committee members as liaisons to all LITA IGs/Committees to gather information on possible educational programming opportunities, including Regional Institutes, Programs/Preconferences at Annual, Midwinter opportunities, and online webinar/tutorial/course planning. At Midwinter we reviewed liaison reports and decided on the following topics to pursue programming for over the next year: Open Source Mobile Tech RDA Extensible Catalog SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Semantic Web Additionally, we are going to work with LITA Forum Committee, Top Tech Trends, PPC, and others to pursue other topics and speakers as opportunities arise.  In particular, we are going…

2009

Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award Committee: Midwinter 2009 Meeting Report

DATE: 1/23/2009 GROUP: LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award CHAIR: Martin Halbert REPORTER: Martin Halbert CONFERENCE: Midwinter ATTENDEES: 5 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: The LITA Brett Butler Award Committee met on Saturday, January 24, 2009, at 1:30 PM in the Colorado Convention Center room 712.  Several members were absent because of budget cuts in travel at their institutions.  Attending were: Nancy Colyar (Past Chair), Martin Halbert (Current Chair), Ronald Peterson, Mary Alice Ball (Board Liaison), and Helen Wilbur (Awards Representative).  Absent were: Emily Ford and Billy Kwan. The committee selected this year’s recipient of the award, and will write this up together with the citation for presentation at the awards ceremony at annual. FUTURE ACTIVITIES: The group noted again the small number of nominations this year (3), and discussed ways of increasing the awareness of the award. Publicizing the award on additional listservs was the first priority: CNI-Announce (Martin) DLF-Announce (Martin) MLIS program listservs…

2009

LITA Publications Committee

I’m posting an abbreviated report here because, from the look of it, the committee report form (which should show up on LITA-L) automagically combines all those carefully-prepared paragraphs into one big ugly paragraph. Ah, the wonders of automation… Anyway: We had five people at the single 2009 ALA Midwinter Meeting session–two committee members (Judy Jeng and Juan Carlos Rodriguez), Board liaison Mark Beatty, ITAL editor Marc Truitt, LITA Executive Director Mary Taylor and me. Given the extent of his advance comments, I’d consider committee member Paul Bracke to be a “virtual attendee.” Topics: ITAL: The December issue is out, enough articles are on hand for the March and June issues, and probably enough for September. New submissions continue to arrive–and, as is typical of a high-value journal, fewer than half of the submissions are accepted. The ITALica blog hasn’t had a lot of activity to date, but it also doesn’t…

2009

Top Tech Trends – Midwinter 2009 Audio edition

This time around for Top Tech Trends we were able to stream the video, but we weren’t ignoring the audio either! Here’s just an MP3 of the session, edited a tiny bit for length and able to be loaded on to your favorite portable audio player. I apologize in advance for too much keypress noise on the recording. I was monitoring the sound, but couldn’t hear the fact that my typing was so loud! Sorry if that annoys anyone. In any case, here we are: LITA Top Tech Trends from ALA Midwinter 2009!

2009

LITA Town Meeting Update

I want to thank everyone who participated in this years LITA Town Hall meeting and remind you that you can continue to participate on Twitter. I will continue to follow #litath09, the tag assigned to the Town Meeting, so if you want to add to the conversation please do. I’m listening. Here are the questions we asked during the breakout session: What makes LITA unique inside ALA and in the greater community? Who else is filling the same role as LITA right now? What areas of IT are not be addressed in the community? How do other organizations see LITA? How can LITA work with other organizations? What can LITA learn from peer organizations? We had 12 tables in the room so 2 tables discussed each question. I posted pictures of the notes from each table and they can be found on Flickr. I want to thank the following guests…

2009

Web Coordinating Committee Midwinter 2009 Meeting Report

DATE: 1/25/2009 GROUP: Web Coordinating Committee CHAIR: Jean Rainwater REPORTER: Jean Rainwater CONFERENCE: Midwinter MEETING: Committee meeting ATTENDEES: 8 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: At the Midwinter meeting the WCC discussed the need for clarification and coordination of web communication. Meeting reports and minutes are frequently posted to a combination of LITA website, wiki, and blog. The WCC recommends that the LITA wiki be the official repository for Committee and IG documentation, meeting reports, minutes and the like. The LITA website should be focused on the current information needs of LITA members and the tools by which members can interact with the site and with each other, should draw news items from the LITA blog via RSS feeds and should provide links to the wiki for meeting reports and other documentation. A review of the LITA website found large gaps in metadata for Collage files; content without metadata is less findable by the…