Category: ALA Annual Conferences

Stopped off at Leslie Burger’s Blogger Bash, which turned out to also be a Celebration for Gulf Coast Library Heroes (the PL employees who just kept coming to work to hlep the public — even though they may have been/still are in the same or worse straits as the general public). Had a grand time, tik-takking away on the sidelines trying to dump everything I heard about the gulf coast libraries into a text file so I could copy & paste it into my blog “later” (read: when I could get free wifi again). Saw & spoke with several fine upstandnig library folken from the gulf coast, and caught up with the lib-bloggers present, including (apologies for forgetting those of you whom I’ve not listed, I’m sure you’ll tease me unmercifully for years to come – especially those of you I’ve linked to the “wrong” blog or heckled when you…

LITA Standards IG, Saturday, June 24, 2006 Managing Identifiers Moderator, Pat Stevens Pat told a story about attending an ISO meeting in Asia where one topic was the international trade in ring tones. She pointed out that public identifiers are critical to link heterogeneous services, they require support—technical and social infrastructure. The presenters were asked to talk about what went on behind the scenes to support identifiers. Regina Reynolds, US ISSN Center, Library of Congress “The ‘Business’ of ISSN: What Does it Take?” The center has been around since the early ‘70s. The ISSN is undergoing a major revision, has 80 centers all over the world, the International center in Paris. Governed by a board and has a User Group which had its first meeting in 2005. New centers need training and documentation. A unique key title and metadata record backs up every ISSN assignment. Decisions are made at the…

The Ultimate Debate: Who Controls the Future of Search sponosred by LITA’s Internet Resources Interest Group Saturday June 24, Convention Center Moderator: Roy Tennant, California Digital Library Disputants: Stephen Abram, Sirsi/Dynix (also president-elect of SLA) Joe Janes, Univ. of Washington Be it resolved that the future of search will occur without library influence. A series of sample questions, paraphrased as: Will large commercial search services like Google replace libraries? Should libraries cooperate with large commercial services by sharing metadata? What would Google Scholar or similar need to have before libraries abandon their own metasearch? Or are they there now? Will libraries incorporate the better search tools into their own catalogs? Will user familiarity with the new tools make library catalogs obsolete? What is your worst nightmare and finest vision for the future of library search services. How likely do you think either is? *NB by Jason: the “more” is a…

ALA Membership Committee I 6/24/2006 10:30 AM — 12:00 PM Morial Convention Center Rm. 290 Mostly fyi, since I’m sure tired of the whole membership dues issue, Council tasked the ALA Membership Committee to study what should be covered in a study about the possibility of a graduated dues structure. Dizzying resolution, imho. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, the details of the preliminary discussion can be found at Annual 2006 – ALA Membership Committee I

Just a reminder to those attending: The LITA Happy Hour is tonight (Saturday) from 5:30-7:30 at the Wolfe Restaurant in the New Orleans Marriott. Love to see you there!

The LITA Board of Directors usually devotes at least an hour of its Saturday meeting to discussion of an issue important to LITA. For this meeting, it was membership recruitment. Discussion was focused around these issues: Who do we want to recruit? How do we attract members of other ALA divisions? How do we target the different audiences we want? Andrew Pace raised the issue of library school students: ALA is interested in this as a potential focus, and LITA is definitely accepting of “non-l-word” people, something that library school students have expressed concerns about. Library schools are giving grants to attend conferences and join organizations. Mary Taylor reminded the group that LITA gives free membership to Spectrum Scholarship and LITA Scholarship winners. Another group LITA has talked about targeting is non-MLS IT people who work in library environments. Bonnie Postlethwaite and Susan Logue have been having conversations with EDUCAUSE…

The meeting was facilitaed by Matt Calsada, LITA IG Coordinator. * IG Renewals – Mary Ellen Tyckoson, Bylaws & Organization Committee, discussed items missing from renewal forms and IG’s not heard from re: their renewals. Suggestion was made to change wording so IG only has to attach reports from the last 3 meetings if they haven’t been posted to the web. Reminder given that renewals are every 3 years and Chairs should talk to the group at Midwinter re: function statement or name changes (and get Chair, Vice Chair signatures on renewal form). * Program Planning Committee – Rachel Cheng handed out proposal form, checklist, and diagram for interacting with PPC (guide also on web). Chairs should talk to PPC at conference (meet Sunday & Monday at 10:30). Even managed discussions should talk to them to get scheduled and help get the meeting advertised. * Matt reminded everyone that more…

The meeting was chaired by Scott Muir, LITA Committee Coordinator and Matt Calsada, LITA IG Coordinator. * LITA President Pat Mullin reminded everyone to get the word out quickly about program/meeting changes (use the blog, for example). * The incoming LITA Web Manager is David Altenhof (couldn’t be here due to flight cancellation). * LITA Vice President Bonnie Postlewaite and Executive Director Mary Taylor shared info about the new Online Communities. The Comm/IG Chair will need to get remote 3-hour administrator training & set-up from Louise Gruenberg, ALA e-Learning Instructional Designer, and then members can get 2-hour training for how to use (some may need less time, prefer groups, happens over web and phone). * In addition to the blog for communicating with the general membership, LITA now has a Wiki to post topics for which you desire community input. * The LITA Board has a new conflict of interest…

Okay, I admit it. The main reason I coughed up $200 for this seminar was so I could figure out what to do with my subject guides. Happily, the experience was more than worth it, as I came away from ACRL’s “Taking Your Library Liaison Program to the Next Level” a little brighter and a little better equipped to bump things up a notch. The speakers, Craig Gibson and Jamie Coniglio of George Mason University, kept things moving with lots of case studies. At one point our individual tables had to craft a liaison program from scratch with just a year to do it, which turned out to be a complicated process. There was a lot of talk of freeing up librarians to do their liaison work. One sticking point, of course, is the amount of time liaison librarians typically spend on the reference desk. It’s tough to pry us…

Want to be considered for future appointment to the LITA Membership Development Committee? Wonder why we don’t have the wisdom to do things your way? Come and tell us about it! You’re welcome to attend the meeting tomorrow morning. Yes, it’s at 8am — do you have the right stuff?! Sunday, June 25th, 2006 8-10am Hilton New Orleans Riverside – Burgundy (Street Level Floor, next to the Grand Ballroom) Partial agenda: Membership Report: 2006 membership is 4056, down 3.05% from 2005 (at Midwinter, it was down 7.21% year over year) Reports on Open House, Happy Hour, LITA Booth, Board discussion NMRT – pat attending NMRT’s student recruitment reception and has been appointed NMRT/LITA MDC liaison by NMRT. Another recruiting opportunity was the Spectrum Scholars Leadership Development Institute Professional Options Fair, attended by pat. Follow-up on other items from MW 2006 – Forum (Biles); EDUCAUSE (Hollar); public library IG (Postlethwaite) MDC…