The work of Vernor Vinge pushes information and technology to its incredible, but possible, conclusions. In A Fire UponThe Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, Vinge examines the concept of the technological singularity, a theoretical point where machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence, and does so in ways that play with information systems and processes. In Rainbows End, Vinge explores one potentially very real future for libraries in which we live in a world of complete information immersion. Jason Griffey interviews Vernor Vinge; futurist, author, thinker, and visionary. This program was recorded live on Saturday, January 8th 2011 at 1pm in the San Diego Convention Center. Sponsored by LITA’s Imagineering Interest Group.

I am taking questions both now and live during the interview. We will be streaming the Interview here on LITABlog, as well as at the LITA UStream channel, taking questions via Facebook and Twitter, but if you have questions you’d like to ensure that I ask, please let me know at the form below.

Dr. Vinge will be speaking for the first 1/2 hour or so of the program, and then we’ll settle in to the questions. Come join us for what will surely be a great conversation.

Jason Clark of Montana State University is presenting Creating Library Web Services: Mashups and APIs. Participants will learn how to bring pieces of the Web together with library data: del.icio.us subject guides, Flickr library displays, YouTube library orientation. Learn what an API is and what it does, the components of Web services, how to build a mashup, how to work with PHP and how to create Web services for your library. Participants should be comfortable with HTML markup and have an interest in learning about Web scripting and programming and are encouraged to bring a laptop for hands-on participation.

In addition, Amanda Hollister of LISHost.net will present Open Source CMS Playroom. This workshop will provide an overview of several content management systems, compare and contrast system functionality and features and demonstrate how open source CMSs can be used to enhance library websites. Open source content management systems present an opportunity for libraries to distribute content creation and maintenance and add Web 2.0 features to library websites. Bring your laptop to explore and compare basic installations of WordPress, Joomla and Drupal CMSs.

More information on these workshops and other LITA events at Midwinter can be found on the LITA web site.

Visit the ALA Midwinter Meeting registration page to register for these events. Please note you do not have to register for the ALA Midwinter Meeting in order to attend these workshops. You may register for the workshop only or add a workshop to your existing Midwinter registration by calling ALA Registration at 1 (800) 974-3084 or through the online registration form in the “Your Events” section.

This five-day course will help participants learn how to bring pieces of the Web together with library data: del.icio.us subject guides, Flickr library displays, YouTube library orientation. Learn what an API is and what it does, the components of Web services, how to build a mashup, how to work with PHP and how to create Web services for your library. Participants should be comfortable with HTML markup and have an interest in learning about Web scripting and programming. This hands-on course is synchronous with a daily lecture followed by a hands-on exercise. Instructors will be available for any questions during the exercises. By the end of this course, participants will be able to: understand and apply the major terms of Web services; use simple Web services like Yahoo Pipes to bring multiple sources of data together; build simple mashups with Javascript; build simple mashups with Server-side scripts (PHP). For registration and additional information, visit the LITA web site.

Contact: Melissa Prentice, LITA
312-280-4268
mprentice (at) lita.org

This full-day workshop presents best practices for writing for the web within the context of academic and public library websites. The format is lecture style, followed by critique sessions that examine how successful sites implement best practices. Participants will revise web copy and receive feedback on their work during the workshop and will leave the workshop with quick fixes they can apply to their site immediately as well as strategies for tackling long range projects that will enhance the quality of their library website. In this workshop, participants will learn how to critique current web content for immediate improvement, write quality web copy from scratch, identify content areas that require significant revision, assess the “findability” of important features or important library content and create a style guide so that content is uniform and meets standards across the site. The intended audience should be familiar with publishing content on library websites, either as a web designer or as a writer.

Brenda Reeb is director of the Business & Government Information Library at the University of Rochester, River Campus Libraries. In addition to her work as a business subject librarian, she began practicing usability testing methods in 2001 at the University of Rochester. Her usability experience includes developing web applications for academic and public libraries, commercial vendors and nonprofit organizations. She has worked with undergraduate students, adults and children. She speaks regionally and nationally on user-centered design and usability testing on library digital projects. She received a Master of Science degree from Simmons College in 1991.

LITA Regional Institutes are one-day workshops on technology-related topics. Taught by experts and presented throughout the country, they reach beyond ALA Conference locations to bring you high quality continuing education. LITA licenses institute to organizations and would like to hear from potential hosts. Please contact LITA if you would like more information.

Truly, I vote this the presentation most likely to make libraries say, “Hey, I think I will outsource my scanning to Clemson University”. Loving care is evident in the selection, installation, and use of their equipment.

Put on by the Digital Library Technology Interest Group

Tricked us by putting business mtg. first–Good Idea! Call to the floor–what ideas do you have for programs for next year. No answer–she will try again.

Mike 8:00am–we need an idea 51 weeks before the next ALA. Program developed from specific types of hardware into “how to set up a scanning center”

Emily Gore and Mandy Mastrovita from Clemson University. Emily says: North Carolina was late in starting a statewide cooperative for digitization. They divided the state into 4 regions, and they have a lab to scan for libraries.

Brief overview of what you need to ask if you want to scan:

Budget, staffing, expertise, facilities adequate to house equipment?

What materials? Precious and rare?

Would you consider outsourcing?

Clemson had about $100,000 for equipment, much from a grant. Knew they had to get at least one full-time librarian to manage the scanning project. She combined the IT staff with the digital project staff–because she knew that they could scan.

equipment–

Had no space for a Zeutschel A0, needing 8 foot or more. Settled for a “Better Light” and a different room. In the basement. But it had no outside lighting. But it had nasty flourescent lights so they use another ambient light source. It gets hot in there, though.

Selected materials, they expected to do their large maps, manuscripts, photographs and negatives, and expected to scan those. Did not expect to scan bound materials which other large digital projects including Google would have covered already. (Note-They have Strom Thurmond’s pajamas.)

However, lots of libraries in the area have bound items, including old country store ledgers, etc. that have value that they needed scanned. Scrapbooks. Yearbooks. It’s a donor relationship thing. You scan what they give you. They would like another solution for bound items. So do you outsource that? You should always think about that first thing and approach it as a hybrid solution.

Disadvantages of outsourcing

You are removed (can’t change or adjust in middle of process)

Is it an experienced vendor?

Contracts need to be set up prior which clearly articulate needs from the beginning.

Disadvantages of in-house

large investment–especially because each type

retooling staff-complex skills to be developed.

difficult to set prices per digitized/encoded items.

$2.00 per item to scan–there is a difference between archival quality scanning & what some vendors will offer.

Mandy, Digital Production Librarian, will now offer specifics:

workstations

multi-platform, some programs work better with Macs, Better Light is really designed for use with Macs. However, most of library is a PC shop.Batch processing programs are on PC.

(Server-ContentDM) Dual/side by side comparison monitors are set up because lots of comparisons must be made.

Task Lighting, Ott lights make it look a little creepy, but daylight balanced.Redundant central storage with campus IT, and local RAID 5 attached drives.

Fave Scanner:

Epson Expression 100000XL, probably is THE scanner in use. read area of 12.2×17.2, negatives and doc feeder available can scan up to 100 pages at time.

Also a Kodak iQ3 scanner, and can scan glass plates, transparencies and negatives. But has not been as good in terms of support and software upgrades. But is a fast and beautiful machine, with templates to arrange your negatives, 4×5′s, etc., and you can cut templates yourself with an Xacto knife.

The setup of their lab for large format scanning was labor intensive, but just like Christmas, and an engineering student did some of the setup, and their qualified vendor set up their HID copy lights. The tripod itself was just under 8 feet. It fit, whew.

A very heavy crossarm, weighted–they had to pad that with some bubble wrap to prevent injury.

For shooting on the easel, they are using a parallelism tool, the Zig-Align to ensure focus across the plane of the image.

They highly desired a Planetary Scanner for bound items. Currently they use the Bookeye and the Zeutschel. She likes the Bookeye with its hydraulic lift.

You do still need to deal with analog film. But younger students may not understand negatives, or have even ever seen it–really, it is supposed to be backwards and reverse. “Us old folks had to chuckle.”

Q &A -

What about using LCD instead of CRT?

They do a lot of color calibration with cards, and take care.They try to move forward, and the LED monitors are quite good with color matching, new Mac monitors are coming out. Mandy: “The IT person in me says, O God I don’t want to see another CRT.”

Part 2

Better, cheaper faster, or down and dirty Evaluating Consumer-Grade Digitization Equipment

Professional grade, over $10,000, purchase direct from vendor. This is not the stuff you see in SkyMall.

Are you scanning for preservation or access qualities?

What are your available resources, including hardware, software and STAFF.

cost of proposed solution divided by benefits of proposed solution=cost-benefit.

A Tale of Three Scanners

In places they say: “My IT Department wanted me to buy this scanner.” (for $179.99) but that is not right for a digitization center.

Look at the technical details. Do not interpolate. Pixels for free!

One for $657, 48 bit color, larger format maybe for “access quality” scanner.

The Epson Expression is the only one that anyone is seriously considering and is available for about $2,400. 48-bit color, 16-bit b&w. 2400x4800dpi resolution. You may not use it, but you will wish you had it.

Camera Mount or 3 dimensional. Heavier is BETTER. It should be hard to move. Manfroto makes some prosumer grade overhead camera mount and lights. What kind of camera? Prices have come down and we are getting there on quality. She has a Canon Digital Rebel XSI and purchased better 50mm lens. Full-frame cameras will be more expensive, and the concept is relatively new in the digital world. These cameras may not be right for preservation level, because many of these don’t get up to the baseline of 400ppi recommended for archival–so something as large as an original which is 11×17 may only give you access grade images. Also, these all have CMOS sensors.

Bound item scanning-A Consumer grade alternative!

Plustek Opticbook 3600 Plus A4 Book Edge pdf OCR Scanner. For around $350, this scanner will work for ‘Bread and Butter’ scanning for access grade.

The benefits of outsourcing.

Large format, maps–someone who specializes in a type of format can give you a cheaper per unit cost than you can do yourself, or than a scanning generalist can do.

http://tinyurl.com/LITAPrograms2010

The form will be available at the above link, on ALA Connect (http://connect.ala.org/node/76611), on LITABlog, and anywhere else we can embed it.

Once you submit your program proposal, the Program Planning Committee will be in touch with you by the middle of August, 2009. The deadline for submitting proposals to LITA for a program for Annual 2010 is July 31st, 2009.

Questions

If you have questions about anything relating to programs at ALA Annual, there is a public discussion board on ALA Connect designed just for that:

http://connect.ala.org/forum/6608

You do have to have an ALA Connect login, but you do not have to be an ALA member…you can register as a non-ALA member and still ask questions of the PPC. If you are an ALA member, you can login to Connect using your ALA login information.

If you have any problems that the Connect group doesn’t solve (or you have other issues), you can email me directly, Jason Griffey, at griffey at gmail.com or find me on Twitter at @griffey. But please try to use the forum first.

What Can You Submit?

I am well aware of the challenge inherent with planning technology programming a full year in advance of the conference. Feel free to be a general as you need to be in describing your program on first draft…we can always approach you and ask you for details as we move through the process. But you do not have to have every speaker booked, and every topic decided, to put forward a proposal. Have a topic area, a theme, an idea for where you think tech will be? Go with it.

Who Can Submit Proposals?

There is one more difference in the process this year that everyone should be aware of. In the past, all programs were driven by Committee and Interest Group submissions, with each group effectively submitting one program. While the PPC is happy to get submissions from these groups, it is NOT NECESSARY to be backed by a group in order for LITA PPC to examine and forward your proposal for a program.

If you, as an individual member, have a great idea and want to be considered, please put in a proposal. If you and two friends want to throw your hats in the ring, please do. If you aren’t a LITA or ALA member _at all_ and think you have the best idea for a program at ALA Annual in the history of technology, fill out the form!

Library Society of the World, Code4Lib, and other library groups: here’s your chance! Please participate and share with us! Let LITA give you a stage for your ideas. If you have an idea worth putting in front of 300 people at the largest gathering of librarians in the world, we are interested in giving you that opportunity.

Bring it.

Jason Griffey
Chair, LITA Program Planning Committee

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:

1. Approved minutes from prior meeting.
2. 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.

3. Reasons for membership attrition were discussed, with speculation that some decreases could be due to increased LITA and ALA dues.  However, it is hard to read the tea leaves, so maybe some direct data from former members could be collected by conducting an exit interview.  The idea of making personal phone calls to former members was suggested and passed on the Membership Committee liaison, Mike Bolam, for consideration.  Mary will also check resources available through the Association of Associations to find any available best practices or tools for conducting exit interviews.
4. The Education Committee reported on its survey to determine LITA members’ interests.  They are also looking at evaluation forms for various LITA programs (ALA conference, Forum, LITA camp).  And they are considering best ways to share data on what worked with a program to improve operations within LITA.
5. Bonnie mentioned the 7 Measures suvey of LITA Committee/IG Chairs that was conducted at ALA Midwinter.  The results are still being compiled and will be posted to the Committee’s Google docs site.
6. Co-chairs asked Committee to think about the LITA Research agenda in order to be able to advise the LITA Board on next steps and budget needs.  We need to work with other LITA units to determine what data might be needed.  Priority questions needing to be addressed are membership recruitment and retention and programming.

FUTURE ACTIVITIES: Action Items:

1. Action item: Develop a template for what this committee could do for the other units.
2. Action item: Committee members should go to Town Hall Meeting to hear about both member and outsider perceptions of LITA.
3. Action item: Review survey results that Bonnie is compiling and be prepared to discuss by email.
4. Action item: Committee members with terms expiring in June 2009 who are interested in renewing or joining this committee need to fill in the volunteer form on the LITA website.  The new appointment would begin after ALA Annual in July 2009.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: Present: Diane Bisom (Co-Chair); Bonnie Postlethwaite (Co-Chair); Frank Cervone; Gail Clement; Michelle Kowalsky; Mike Bolam; Andres Orphanides (via Skype); Stephanie Walker (via Skype); Elizabeth German (Guest); Mary Taylor (LITA Executive Director); Peter Hernon (Guest); Ranti Junus (Guest).

Minutes compiled by Gail Clement.

Charge:
To explore the possibilities for providing technical support to committees which need to include absent members using Internet connectivity.  To develop an implementation plan for the 2009 Annual Conference.

• Identify levels of support needed and appropriate tool for each level;
• Identify existing tools and develop new tools as needed;
• Identify services that might be needed;
• Determine best ways of providing tools and services.

Task Force:
Thanks to the following people for agreeing to serve on this task force:

• David Lee King, Chair
• Cindi Trainor
• Lauren Pressley
• Derik Badman
• Andreas Orphanides
• Barbara Blummer

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 Neutrality and its Implications for Libraries” is the primary focus for the committee in the next six months.

A committee member will work with the Chair to draft a resolution for Judith Krug.

A committee member will serve on the new e-Participation task force.

The committee will continue to respond to NISO feedback opportunities as appropriate.

The committee will continue to work closely with the LITA Legislation and Regulations Committee.

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 to look at ways to build additional educational programming from successful programs and events form other LITA committees.

FUTURE ACTIVITIES: Develop at least 2 education programming opportunities from the following topics:

• Open Source
• Mobile Tech
• RDA
• Extensible Catalog
• SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
• Semantic Web

Also, put on additional educational programming as opportunities are identified from the work of other committees/IGs/etc.

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 (Nancy) or school by school (Ronald)
• PLA Directors listservs (we will contact Mary Taylor)
• Statewide listservs (Helen, perhaps through LSTA listservs)

We also thought presentations at other non-ALA conferences might help:

• CNI (Martin and Helen will contact Cliff Lynch)

Next Steps:

• We will have Mary Taylor coordinate with other committees on publicity.
• We will engage Cliff Lynch with other thought leaders in nominating process.
• Get the word out at the beginning of the Fall circa September.
• Post on Gale website.
• Martin and Helen will coordinate this at the end of the summer (contact her right after Labor Day).

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: We discussed membership and will be in touch on either renewals or recruitment of new members.

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 show up in end-of-article blurbs yet. (There aren’t metrics for blog readership yet.) The group discussed ITAL’s print status and OA status (currently a six-month embargo). Apparently, only half of the production budget is print-related, and outside subscriptions almost cover the costs (but not quite). The group suggested a member and subscriber survey to determine current preferences for print vs. e-only. Mary Taylor will look into availability of recycled paper (used by some other divisional journals). (We noted the possibility of an OA e-only journal with optional end-of-year print using PoD, as some journals are now doing.)
• LITA Guides and LITA monographs: We discussed the current Guides contract. One Guide proposal appeared just after Midwinter, and will be routed to committee members for discussion. There’s not a big flow of monographs (or any, actually), and we discussed whether there were loads of ideas out there where LITA could add value and books needed to be written. Opinions differ.
• Technology Electronic Reviews: With a resigning editor, two 2007 issues (the second having only three reviews) and no 2008 issues, TER appears moribund. The general feeling during the meeting was that the best solution might be to revitalize ITAL’s reviews section and invite TER reviewers to submit reviews to ITAL. That discussion may also be ongoing.
• The role of Publications Committee: Some discussion. Is the committee vital as a revenue source? Should members be actively soliciting possible monographs? Should the group take a look at both content that’s out there and appropriate venues? This is probably a long-term discussion, maybe to be moved forward with a younger and more energetic chair.

–Walt Crawford, chair (for now), LITA Publications Committee

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 ALA and other search engines.

FUTURE ACTIVITIES:

• Before Annual 2009, the WCC will survey LITA members on what they want and expect to find on the LITA site.
• The WCC will work with ALA on a LITA website redesign which will harmonize with and include the web 2.0 features of the redesigned ALA site. A monitored discussion of this prototype will be held at Annual. After feedback at Annual usability testing will be conducted and the new site launched before September 2009.
• Members of the WCC with Collage training will address problems with missing metadata for website content.
• WCC members will test, provide feedback, and actively participate on ALA Connect.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS:

Attendees: Mary Axford, Kevin Clair, Anne Graham, Lisa Sibert, Lauren Pressley, Jean Rainwater (Chair), Michelle Frisque (LITA Board Liaison), Melissa Prentice (ALA Staff Liaison).

Absent: Tim Donohue, Karenann Jurecki, Karen Coombs, Daniel Suchy, Holly Yu, Rafal Kasprowski.

LITA Camp was briefly discussed. It will tentatively take place in Dublin, OH and is set for May 4-5 2009.

Sharon M. Shafer, Vice Chair, welcomed everyone to the 3^rd meeting of the Next Generation Catalog Interest Group.

The program panelists included Karen G. Schneider, Equinox Software, Sara Davidson, University of California, Merced, and Amy Kautzman, University of California, Davis,

“Running a Free and Open Source Software ILS does Not Equate to a Tightrope Act with No Net”

Karen G. Schneider began her talk with a definition of open source software from Wikipedia. Karen explained that open source software is free to use, free to download, and free to modify. Support is also available from the open source community or from a vendor. Karen further stated that “development” happens out in the “wild,” occurring on IRC, listservs, etc. It is important that development no longer take place in silos. With open source software problems can be quickly resolved. There is no need to wait for the next release. Software code develops rapidly. She also points to the FUD factor as a potential impediment to use of open source software. She recommends reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Karen also discussed the PINES library consortium’s implementation of the Evergreen open source library catalog software. As a support service of Evergreen, Equinox provides migration and support training for implementation, as well as hosting and consulting services. Karen also recommends that libraries considering the use of Evergreen talk with other libraries that have implemented the software and also download the software for evaluation.

“Launching a Next-Generation Consortial Catalog”

Sara Davidson and Amy Kautzman (Members of UC/OCLC Pilot Implementation Team)

“What can you produce when you bring together 10 University of California campuses, the California Digital Library (CDL), an existing union catalog, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), multiple task groups and the efforts of numerous individuals? In our case, the result is the Next-Generation Melvyl pilot which draws together content from UC’s existing union catalog and provides it on OCLC’s WorldCat Local Platform.”

The presentation included an overview and vision for the project, implementation procedures, the challenges encountered, and the features of the new Melvyl catalog. The project design included ten separate local views/scopes for the catalog and one union catalog view/scope. The goals of the project were to improve search and retrieval results, revise the architecture of the OPAC, adopt new cataloging practices, and a move to a support module based on continuous improvements. Also discussed was the organization of executive and implementation teams, task forces, joint work groups, and the partnership with OCLC. The various groups met challenges on several issues including: communications, working in new ways to handle technical hurdles, working through existing structures, creating new structures when necessary, data issues, managing expectations, and going live.

The most pressing issue being worked on now is how to bring up ten campuses all at once. The data issues include: reclamation projects, lack of OCLC numbers on some records, and the lack of OCLC records from some vendor sets. A recurring issue is the process of keeping the project from expanding beyond the stated goals. Additional features will continue to be developed in partnership with OCLC WorldCat Local.

The group also discussed plans for Midwinter. Instead of hosting a managed discussion as we have done in the past, we decided simply to hold a business meeting. We’ll work further on the 2009 program at Midwinter as well as begin the process of planning for Annual 2010.

As part of the Midwinter discussion, we also touched on the perennial topic of “what’s the purpose of this IG?” We concluded that our purpose was to provide programming on technology topics of interest to persons in public libraries and that we’d do well to market ourselves to new members this way. We’re hoping that a narrower focus that’s more easy to get a handle on will help us attract new members.

So if your interested in technology in public libraries and want to get involved in programming at annual conferences, be sure to look us up at Midwinter.

When: Friday, June 27th 6:30-8:00pm
Where: Anaheim Convention Center Room 203 A

Agenda:

1. IG Business (5 Minutes)

2. SUSHI- Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Open Forum – Adam Chandler and friends. Adam will be presenting the results of a SUSHI survey he is conducting of COUNTER
members and then using that as a lead-off for a discussion about what the challenges and opportunities related to SUSHI implementation are. (30 minutes)
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi

3. CORE-Cost of Resources Exchange update – Ted Koppel and/or Jeff Aipperspach (15-20 minutes)
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/core

4. KBART-Knowledge Base and Related Tools Working Group – Nettie Lagace (15-20 minutes)
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart

5. Update report on the ONIX family (Licensing Terms, Books and Serials) – Brian Green (5-10 minutes)
http://www.editeur.org/onix_licensing.html

6. NISO Update – Todd Carpenter (10-15 minutes)
http://www.niso.org

We look forward to seeing you in Anaheim.

Zoe and Clara

We will have presentations and discussion about two examples of recent next generation catalog endeavors.

Karen Schneider (Evangelist for Equinox’s Evergreen support) will share what she does as an Evangelist by giving some real world, grounded information on how “Running a Free and Open Source Software ILS does Not Equate to a Tightrope Act with No Net”.

Sara Davidson and Amy Kautzman (Members of UC/OCLC Pilot Implementation Team) will present “Launching a Next-Generation Consortial Catalog”.
What can you produce when you bring together 10 University of California campuses, the California Digital Library (CDL), an existing union catalog, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), multiple task groups and the efforts of numerous individuals? In our case, the result is the Next-Generation Melvyl pilot which draws together content from UC’s existing union catalog and provides it on OCLC’s WorldCat Local Platform. We will review the implementation process, the challenges encountered, beneficial features, and next steps.

A brief IG business meeting will follow the discussion.

Introductions and Announcements

The meeting was called to order by Michelle Robertson – Chair. We went around the room and introduced ourselves. We had representatives from the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Library System, Drexel University, Boise State University, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the University of Arkansas – Little Rock, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Brooklyn College, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Syracuse University, LexisNexis, the University of New Brunswick – Saint John, Temple University, Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Alberta, Tri-Colleges (Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore), and Anne Arundel Community College.

LITA & HoLT Business

Michelle explained the purpose of the interest group. From the HoLT website:

“Established in 2001 and renewed in 2004. To provide a forum and support network for those individuals with administrative responsibility for computing and technology in a library setting. Programs and discussions will explore issues of planning and implementation, management and organization, support, technology leadership and other areas of interest to library technology managers and administration.”

Michelle further explained that the interest group is a discussion forum. Many HoLT members are information technology people and may or may not have an MLS. HoLT has a web page under the LITA Interest Group section. We also have a listserv (information available at http://lists.ala.org/wws/info/lita-holt) that has relatively low traffic.

Richard Wayne – Vice-Chair – presented a summary of the program planned for ALA Annual in Anaheim, California. The topic is “Transformational Change: The Evolving Role of Library IT Departments.” We have finalized three speakers who can represent different points of view on the topic. Robin Hastings is the Information Technology Manager at Missouri River Regional Library. Carole Kiehl is the Associate University Librarian for Information Technology and Technical Services at the University of California at Irvine. Terry Nikkel is the Director, Information Services and Systems at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John.

HoLTalk (Discussion)

Our first HolTalk topic was the issue of ‘Information Commons’ and the various roles played by its supporters. Here are responses offered by a number of members:

We have a new Dean and have experienced some reorganization as a result. Our Information Commons is not formally an Information Commons or IC. No one entity is responsible for the IC. It’s a part of a larger effort.

The library was constructed in the 1960’s and renovation plans are being discussed. A new Law School is being planned and the 3rd floor may become the Law Library. They are trying to make the rest of the library’s public areas like an information commons. They are trying to get as much technology as possible for the IC areas.

We are just starting to plan for an expansion to accommodate an IC.

We don’t use the term IC. We try and use the term ‘library’ as much as possible. We are about to implement our 4th IC that will be in front of the reference area. The four IC areas have 60, 120, 115, and 85 computers respectively. The one with 85 computers is 24 X 7.

Please define the concept of ‘Information Commons.’

I have been involved in two projects related to the concept of Information Common or Learning Commons. These concepts are not just a cluster of PC’s on the main floor of the library. They are also the services that come with the computers. Some examples are reference services, technology services, and other services. Some of these other services might be writing assistance, homework help, tutors, statistical consulting, and research services. Furnishings are very important as well. Students like to work together. You need to create clusters for them. Buy chairs on casters that can be moved. You need to create a comfortable, inviting environment. Not a quiet environment. Some places have emphasized the services instead of the technology. The unifying element is that information services are more easily accessible. People can connect with librarians, IT people, and each other more easily. If you are building a new Information Commons, you can do it right from the start. The biggest trick to convert an existing area to an IC is usually acquiring the appropriate funds. In both of my experiences, the IC was a huge success. Students just get it. It works. It works at this time. The IC may evolve in a few years.

Our University learned from a neighboring University. Some of the IC is not technology driven. People want dining style booths.

At our institution, it has been part of the undergraduate library. Now it basically is the undergraduate library. We have incorporated a new classroom and re-modeled an old classroom. There is lots of ‘loanable’ equipment available to students. Our IC has been very popular and very successful. The library is almost at 24 X 7. Our scholarly commons area will take over the traditional reference area. It’s not clearly defined at this time but we would work with faculty and researchers. The scholarly commons is also tied in with our institutional repository and the School of Communications. Part of this area is technology, part of it is reference. There are also subject specialists available.

We are using the concept of ‘Research Commons.’ We engaged in a master planning process to see how space could be re-designed. There were several phases to this. The first phase was the development of a café. It opens tomorrow. We tried to take the existing furniture and make areas more group-friendly. We ripped down the circulation and reference desks. We now have desks where trained library personnel can help users find information and circulate materials and help out with technology too. Sort of one-stop shopping. We ripped down our glass walls. The space is much more open now. An Internal Development Officer is looking at various areas of our master plan to try to get funding. We are collaborating with campus IT to put more computer labs in the library to get more use. IT staff will also be helping students in some cases.

Originally our lab was run by a collaboration with Academic Computing. It was not just a technology thing but the way that services were provided in those days. We are rethinking this based upon the way that users are working with us.

There are many different models. Let me throw a few things out. At my last institution, Library IT had a presence. There was quite a bit of discussion about supporting personal devices. For example, getting a student’s personal laptop to work with the campus wireless network. There were a number of group study rooms for four to ten students to work together. Some groups used the computers, some did not. We provided multi-media capabilities and presentation rooms. A student that had a PowerPoint for a class could practice with the PowerPoint prior to his or her class. One of the most popular pieces of furniture was bean bag chairs. We purchased around 15 and they have been extremely popular.

We provide facilities for audio and video editing. It’s all about providing services many of which already exist in several places on campus.

Our DVD burner is very popular. We have Macs in rooms where you can close the door. The rooms can be loaned for several hours. We have Adobe suites on some of our computers. There is more specialized software too. We have about 100 PC’s and 8 or 9 servers. We maintain this with 1.5 FTE.

The discussion shifted at this point to how can you maintain an Information Commons with limited staff?

The first response was ‘get a larger cup of coffee!’

We partner with central campus IT.

But our central campus IT is 20 miles away!

We also rely on central campus IT in many cases.

You need to involve campus IT into the planning process. For example, you need to discuss the sorts of applications that campus IT can support.

We are getting rid of our library [Windows] domain.

Central campus IT Departments still don’t get the concept of the Integrated Library System (ILS).

We have 400 computers in campuses all over the city and just 2 technicians.

Money is not coming for more people for the IC.

The IC is starting to break the camel’s [library’s] back with the increase in support needs.

How do you find [to hire] good technology people?

Recent applicants have been deplorable. They don’t even have basic technical knowledge. We are a consortium and the money offered is reasonable. The applicant pool has not been our students.

Is there much competition for these people in your local community?

Perhaps you need to advertise differently.

At our institution, it took us quite a while, but we found some good people. We went through 2 or 3 cycles to hire good people.

That was our experience as well. It takes some patience.

A lot depends on the market at the time of advertising.

You might look also at how human resources categorizes a job posting. In some agencies, it is not clear what the posted job really is.

There are many potential listservs where you can post jobs.

What should HolTalk discuss at ALA Annual?

We might continue the Information Commons discussion. Perhaps we can survey members with a short survey prior to the next HolTalk to see where they stand with their Information Commons.

Future Program and Publication Ideas?

Michelle read from our list of potential programs:
• Panel of new managers of systems departments – share experiences
• Managing IT staff and librarians
• Handbook for library IT managers / supervisors
• Systems departments’ relationships / involvement with other Library IT projects
• Stakeholder’s expectations
• Hiring, recruitment, and retention of IT staff
• Continuing education for IT staff and library employees
• Keeping staff current with technologies
• Doing the most with the resources that you have
• Cross-training, internships, volunteers
• External funding (grants, gifts, etc.)
• Purchasing versus leasing
• Research & development role of systems departments
• Project management
• Centralized versus decentralized
• Workflow issues
• Establishing collaborative relationships with others outside of the library
• Strategic planning
• Establishing priorities
• New and evolving role of library IT departments and personnel
• Attracting potential IT personnel from current library staff
• How to get others to understand what Library IT does
• Image of systems librarians to the rest of the library community
• Body of knowledge for best practices in systems
• International Computer Drivers License (basic IT literacy)

Please think about these ideas for the next meeting. A new LITA committee (Assessment and Research) may also help provide topics for future HoLT discussion and programs.

Wrap Up

We will need to elect a Vice-Chair at the next meeting.
Please sign one of the membership lists.
The Editor of Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL) is here. A member of the Publications Committee and one of the co-authors for an upcoming publication – Making Library Web Sites Usable – is also in attendance. They are always looking for potential topics as well.
Our author – Terry Nikkel – asked how many libraries have something in place for usability:

Adjournment

The By-Laws and Organization Committee sent Helen Gbala to the meeting to discuss the charge of the committee. Since the charge was just written by the board and presented to the new committee last June, the members asked to try out the charge to see how it works before making comment.

The committee spent most of the meeting time discussing two topics: the continuing education needs survey of LITA members and potential online courses or webinars that LITA could offer. The survey should be ready to go by late spring. It will include questions on educational topics, preferred delivery method (live or async), reasonable costs, and other issues.

Interspersed with discussion of the survey the committee discussed offering online and live courses with these points:

Hot topics sell (Web 2.0, JPEG 2000)
Need a plan or schedule for courses going forward
Develop an application form to disseminate to the members
Need a webinar product like OPAL or Illuminate
LITA has access to Moodle

Before adjourning the group discussed possible times for the next meeting. It’s hard to pick a meeting time that doesn’t conflict with something else important.

http://www.ala.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/erm/index.cfm

Zoe announced that Vice Chair position, responsible for organizing managed discussions, will be open. Those interested are invited to apply. Also, any suggestions for topics to be covered at
ALA annual are welcomed.

The first presenter, Ted Fons from Innovative Interfaces, Inc gave a brief overview of the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) and a positive update that the standard was approved by NISO. He indicated differences between SUSHI and COUNTER. COUNTER is good on how to report the statistics on a smaller scale. SUSHI allows query for usage data through web services and saves time for staff. It took 18-20 months for the idea to be implemented. Last October the standard was finalized and approved for use, it is now standard Z39-93. Project EUCLID, Highwire Press, Gale all implemented SUSHI Server online. As of right now, content providers are at some stage of implementing SUHSI server. Mr. Fons jokingly suggested thanking your content providers for getting on board. There are several SUSHI versions, now we just need one efficient model. Read more about SUSHI: http://www.niso.org/committees/SUSHI/SUSHI_comm.html and http://www.niso.org/standards/resources/Z39-93-2007.pdf

Oliver Pesch from EBSCO gave an update on the new COUNTER schema upcoming release 3 since the previous was rather limited. This is no longer unknown technology. There are issues in implementation. On the server side it is issue of creating new user interface, backing up data, etc. It’s up to the client and the server to decide what reports to ask for, as long as the server and client agree.

Ed Riding from SirsiDynix gave a brief update and overview on the Cost of Resource Exchange (CORE) standard. It will allow pulling ILS-stored acquisition data into ERM system. He mentioned that the question of which data elements from ILS to bring into ERM system was queried by a group of librarians last year. Their white paper can be found on the DLF website: http://www.diglib.org/standards/ERMI_Interop_Report_20080108.pdf. At the same time SIRSI was discussing the same question with Serials Solutions. There were about 20-25 commonly requested data elements. Ed Riding’s group contacted NISO with proposal to create a standard protocol for exchange, using SUSHI and OpenURL as models. ERMS will store items with the same elements as ILS acquisition module: purchase order number, invoice number, fund code, vendor ID, etc. Whatever is used as markup language is to be determined by the group.
Next presenter, Brian Green from EDItEUR, was talking about developing standards for license communication: ONIX for Licensing Terms. It is a new ONIX standard for expressing and communicating licence terms between systems using a standard XML schema. With the explosion of digital resources libraries sign numerous licences with terms of agreement varying from institution to institution. The paper format is difficult for the users to consult on how to comply with licence terms. The answer is a machine readable license, and that’s when ONIX Publications Licence format (ONIX-PL) comes in. It is a structured XML statement of all terms and conditions which is sent to the library’s ERM system. The ERM system looks after user authentication and links the actionable licence terms to the relevant resources. When users access a resource, they are then informed about permitted uses. JISC and Wiley were one of the first to map the licence to ONIX-PL format. SCELC, Springer and Serials Solutions are also working on implementing ONIX-PL format.Some libraries want to receive ready mapped machine readable licenses, some prefer to map their own terms. ONIX-Pl is not intended to replace paper license, at least not yet.  Read more: http://www.editeur.org/onix_licensing.html and http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_pals2/synthesis/standards/olt.aspx

Last speaker, Kathy Klemperer from Library and Information Systems Consulting gave an update on recently published materials on ONIX for Serials formats and documentation. A content item description message was added in the latest release. It is used to transmit information describing individual content items (usually articles) within a release. Another message added is a content item extended description, which is used to transmit detailed information about individual content items (usually articles) in a release. New release supports the provision of table-of-contents alerts, notification of single-article releases, and distribution of article-level information suitable for populating abstracting and indexing databases. Ms. Klemperer finished her presentation with a statement that those messages benefit everyone: they help to keep holdings up to date and help with claiming.

All messages are available at: http://www.editeur.org/onixserials/ONIX_SRN09.html

Some ideas for subsequent programming could be a review of J2K tools and a discussion of how much metadata is appropriate to put in the JP2/JPX file format metadata boxes.

The IG is preparing a program on using JPEG2000 for preservation for the Annual meeting in Anaheim. The description of the program was revised to:

The JPEG2000 image file format has made modest progress as an access master in cultural heritage application. Its acceptance as a preservation master format has been necessarily more cautious and deliberate. Panelists in this program will offer perspectives for using the JPEG2000 standard for preservation of still and moving image archives. Participants will learn the advantages and disadvantages of JPEG2000 as a preservation format and gain an understanding of trade-offs in the parameters that the specification offers.

Billy Kwan was also mentioned the options for online courses using ALA’s new Moodle system. At this time, the j2kIG doesn’t have any plans to take advantage of that, but the chair will put it on the agenda for the IG’s business meeting in Anaheim. The j2kIG interest group is also up for renewal this year, and is working through the paperwork. In that process, the attendees at this meeting selected Peter Murray from OhioLINK to continue as chair and Nick Baker from Williams College to be vice-chair.

Technorati tags: jpeg2000, j2karclib, j2kig

Aaron Dobbs is the Committee Web Coordinator and he will put Committee reports up o the web site in a timely fashion, so make sure Aaron gets reports.

Chairs should also recommend committee members and let Andrew Pace know of suggestions.

President Mark Beatty encouraged all Chairs to report out about what we’re doing. He asked all Chairs to complete reports so that the LITA Board can be updated and so that all LITA members can have a clear up to date picture of organization activities.

Vice President/President Elect Andrew Pace asked Chairs to encourage people to volunteer for Committee positions by completing the online forms available. For those rotating off committees: it would be very helpful if you can mention a potential successor Once people are “in the system”, they can be tapped for all kinds of LITA activities. He also asked Chairs to attend the Town Meeting 8am Monday morning.

Executive Director Mary Taylor introduced Melissa Prentice, who pointed out resources listing incoming chairs and deadlines that will be vital for all Chairs. Mary also introduced Valerie Edmonds, Program Coordinator, who can provide information for those planning programs.

Upcoming deadlines: completed descriptions of programs are due January 15 and there’s a workstation with printer and net connection in the LITA office to help with this process. January 21 is the date for 2008 official program text, and Program Planning Committee will pass along what they have to Valerie.

Lorre Smith, of Membership Development Committee asked the group to discuss the aspect of MDC charge having to do with leadership development, and a discussion developed with possible programming and other activities to be pursued by MDC.

Bonnie Postlethwaite discusse the Assessment and Research Committee workshop and their efforts to help LITA be more reliant on data for analysis of issues and decision making.

Pat Mullins of the Nominations Committee is looking for volunteers to run for LITA Board and for Vice President, so please contact Pat with nomination ideas!

Barbara Spivey, the Education Committee Chair, is also looking for those who are able to offer online courses, so please contact the Committee with suggestions.

The membership has increased slightly and is slowly reaching former pre-dues-increase levels. The student category is the fastest growing category. The Committee had a brief discussion of “what next?” in terms of target groups and mention public libraries and technologists who are not in libraries at this time.

The Happy Hour on Friday comprised about 90 interesting people, with Don Lemke and Lorre Smith greeting members at the door and distributing “glowy things”. Planning for Anaheim Happy Hour got underway and it will be on Friday at 4:30, just before the LITA 101 Open House at 5:30.

Al Kornish took over the duties of scheduling members into the LITA booth, so all of you who are dying to spread the word about LITA can talk to Al about doing so in the booth at the annual conference!

Future MDC efforts will be in LIS schools, Second Life, at the Forum in the fall and at the Spectrum Professional Options Fair and the New Members Round Table orientation. Watch for interesting interactive events, audio and video!

I know it’s a busy time… Sunday… but we’re very excited about our special guests.

Saturday, January 12, 10:30-12:00pm, Courtyard Downtown, Salon III
#3 on the map (PDF).

The LITA Distance Learning Interest Group will meet at the 2008 ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia to discuss current issues in distance learning and some of the exciting things the interest group has planned. Here are a few of the things we’d like to discuss:

• Our program, If we don’t call it distance learning, does it exist?, for Annual 2008.
• A possible LITA webinar on distance learning issues.
• A possible online course.
• Uses for our blog at http://dlig.wordpress.com/ .
• General issues in distance learning such as integrating library resources with course management systems.

Are there other topics you’d like to discuss? Please feel free to leave them in the comments or email Karen Wetzel or Lauren Pressley and we’ll add them to our list.

All are invited! Please bring your experiences and ideas to share in an informal setting. We hope that you will join us for a lively and useful discussion.

Friday, January 11th 7:30-9:00pm
Courtyard Downtown, Salon II
21 N. Juniper St. (this is a conference hotel)
http://www.marriott.com/hotels/event-planning/floor-plans/phldc-courtyard-philadelphia-downtown/

Our agenda is set, though we welcome any additional announcements or topics for discussion:

– Discussion of the work being done on the Cost of Resource Exchange (CORE). The group working this standard has submitted the proposal to NISO and are waiting to hear back if it has been approved for further work under NISO sanction. Feedback on the draft is very welcome. — Ed Riding and Jeff Aipperspach
A brief draft description: “The purpose of this specification is to facilitate the exchange of cost and related financial information by an Electronic Resource Management System (ERMS) from an Integrated Library System (ILS) Acquisitions module. The population of ERMS financial data from the ILS Acquisitions system makes cost-per-click and other cost-related reports in the ERMS all the more
possible.”
http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/erm07/shows/erm07koppel_CORE.pps (powerpoint)
** for those lists that permit attachments – two documents related to this draft standard are attached **

– EDItEUR will have some real progress to report on the piloting of the ONIX-PL standard for XML expression of licensing terms, and the
implications for ERM — Brian Green, EDItEUR
http://www.editeur.org/onix_licensing.html

– NISO’s License Expression Working Group — TBD
A discussion about this group and its tie with ONIX-PL to get feedback and questions from the community on that area.
http://www.niso.org/committees/License_Expression/LicenseEx_comm.html

– Update on recently published materials on ONIX for Serials formats and documentation – Kathy Klemperer
http://www.editeur.org/onixserials.html

– Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) update — Ted Fons
http://www.niso.org/committees/SUSHI/SUSHI_comm.html

The above agenda does not necessarily reflect the order in which these topics will be discussed.

If you have any additional announcements or topics for discussion, please let us know so we can be sure to add you to the agenda.

Zoe Stewart-Marshall
ERMIG Chair

Clara Ruttenberg
ERMIG Vice Chair

ps. Be sure to check out the LITA ERM IG webpage. The ppt slides Ted Koppel’s presentation on e-books, from Annual, are available for viewing.
http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/erm/index.cfm

Day 1: Design Process; Day 2: Usability
Learn about design process for managing digital projects in libraries and usability theory and methodology. This workshop covers two days, and can be attended for either day, or both days. Day One focuses on design process. Staff skills and responsibilities, artifacts of the design process, and communication channels are addressed. Web technologies and standards are included as a framework. Day Two focuses on usability theory and methodology. Practice with usability technique and methods, information on additional types of test methods, and administrative issues are addressed.

Presenter:
Brenda Reeb, University of Rochester Libraries

Both Days: LITA member: $310;
ALA member: $520;
Nonmember: $720.
One Day: LITA member: $180;
ALA member: $285;
Nonmember: $385.

You do not have to attend the Midwinter Meeting to register for the workshop.

To register, please visit the ALA Conference Services Web site: http://www.ala.org/ala/eventsandconferencesb/midwinter/2008/registration.htm

The meeting will be Saturday, October 6th from 8-9am in the Molly Brown Room. Grab some breakfast and come in for a discussion.

Join us as we continue our discussions (started at ER&L, ACRL and NASIG) on the future of e-resources management. We’ve been exploring ideas of how to create a community, a collaborative work space, an understanding, and a vocabulary about how we need to manage and make accessible our electronic content. These conversations spurred this blog and ideas for other collaborative spaces, like the projects wiki.

Bonnie Tijerina will touch on some of the highlights of the discussions held so far and possible future projects. This is very informal, allowing for time to talk about what’s happening in your libraries and your ideas for ways to improve.

ER&L Forum: http://www.electroniclibrarian.org/forum/
LITA ERM IG: http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/litainterest.cfm

The Legislation and Regulation category will not duplicate the ALA Washington Office District Dispatch, but will include selected postings from that publication. We will also provide news from her sources such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation and EDUCAUSE.

We encourage LITA members to set up a feed for the Legislation and Regulation category to keep current on these issues. And if you can suggest other resources, please let us know.

• 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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!!

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.

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.

I’ve just added a Committee and IG Reports category to the blog listings. So if you are putting committee and IG reports or meeting minutes, please use this new category so it’s easy for folks to find those useful reports. Thanks.

Mark

Paul Keith and Irmgarde Brown (co-chairs) welcomed everyone, gave a brief introduction to our new interest group and encouraged public librarians to join LITA.

Our Discussion Topic
Our guest speaker was Brian Auger from Howard County Public Library in Maryland. Brian shared a few facts about his system: 3rd wealthiest county in the country, second smallest population at 260,000 people, and yet they circulate over 2M items a year out of only 6 branches.

Howard County started re-thinking their commitment to “traditional” computer software as Web-based technologies began emerging. It appeared to them that such a basic system should be cheaper and easier to secure. With the support of only 2 I.T. staff back then, the library began a slow evolution into Linux (first by implementing the Linux Firewalls and then moving into replacing servers as they aged or failed). Once this transformation was complete, they began looking at the desktop and determined that an Open Source solution would be much cheaper to maintain. Ultimately, they purchased Groovix which is a very inexpensive software that supports the Linux environment and secures it. This solution also includes the complete Open Office Suite that works seamlessly with Microsoft products. In the end, Howard County is using Groovix with both public AND staff computers.

Key Benefits: HCL is able to extend the life of a PC up into the 5, 6 and even 7 year range. Since HCL doesn’t filter with software (only social pressure by having PCs in highly trafficked public areas), any type of website can be viewed including MySpace, music sites, and other interactive sites. (Bandwidth issues were handled by moving all public activity to cable access and an 8 MB drop for each branch. They have had no rebooting or freezing issues. All PCs can do all the same things.

HCL is now adding “pods” which are made up of 10 computers that actually use/share one larger “box.” This has been very successful.

HCL only has 5.5 FTE in the I.T. department and successfully maintain all the 350 PC’s.

One downside is staff acceptance of the Open Source software… but it keeps getting better. HCL has not experienced any complaints from the public.

During Question & Answer period…
How is the Service Contract with Groovix
Excellent… runs about $2000/year.
How would you evolve to Open Source if you were starting now?Maybe consider looking at a “turnkey” system like Userful.
Do you see Open Source and/or Linux becoming non-compatible?Don’t think so… recent involvement with the European Standards Agency that accepted Office Open Standard in Europe…that’s a good thing.

There was some side conversations that discussed other concerns or emerging technologies or assistance such as Wimax (wide area wifi), Tech Soup (offers low-cost software to 501c3 compliant organizations).

Business Meeting
During the “business” portion of our meeting, we discussed possible topics are areas of interest to the group that was there.

• What are other people doing, how much do these technologies cost, and what is the real ROI?

What’s the “dirty underside” of some of the technologies or ILS migrations?

• What expertise is really needed to implement some of the newer technologies?

What about specific training on how to implement some of the social technologies or customizations?

• What about re-investigating security and wifi? How do the “bad guys” get access to that wireless data? What about getting a hacker to tell all?
• Is it time to investigate again the disconnect between I.T. staff and frontline staff communications?
• Technology planning comes in lots of shapes… what are some best practices? How do we include emerging technologies … but not just for their own sake, but because they meet an identified need. Consider partnering with LAMA.

General comments:

Follow-up Report
Paul and Irmgarde attended the joint PLA Technology Committee and PLA Practical Applications of Technology Committee meetings. We were encouraged by these groups to continue to meet and we’ll continue to communicate, but our group is not quite ready to “co-sponsor” events with either of these committees.

Paul and Irmgarde are focusing now on PLTIG (Pil-tig) to a forum/discussion group with key “speakers” at our discussion sessions at both Midwinter and Annual. If you have comments, please send an email to either Paul (pkeith@chipublib.org) or Irmgarde (brown@hcplonline.info).