2006

International Vistor to the 2006 LITA Forum

From October 26 -29, 2006, a fairly large group of librarians and information technology professionals from various institutions across the United States descended upon Nashville Tennessee to attend the LITA Forum. The 2006 Forum had as its theme ‘Web Services as Library Services. I was fortunate to be there as I had been selected by LITA-IRC to be the recipient of the International Visitor Grant in memory of the late Professor Errol Hill. My children, living in London, could not picture their father in Nashville, home to the Grand Ole Opry and the legends of country music. I come from Trinidad and Tobago, the land of calypso and steel pan music. In Nashville nonetheless, is where I was, and I found the city and the LITA Forum a wonderful experience. For me, it was an honour and a privilege to have been selected for the award, particularly as it was…

2006

Forum 06 poster sessions

Sadly, I only had an hour between meetings, so I didn’t get to every poster session, but here at last are the notes I do have. A PDF of the session descriptions is available on the LITA web site. There was a good range of topics and library types represented. Instructional Media and Library Online Tutorials Li Zhang – Mississippi State University Online tutorials require far more than just duplicating print materials to the web. They currently have a large project to develop tutorials for both distance students and on-campus students. They’re trying to develop a single set of online tutorials that works for all of their audiences. Too many bells and whistles distract rather than inform. Their web committee found that including audio or video for too many pieces of a tutorial makes it unusable for people using older computers or dialup Internet access. Integrating Library Services: An application…

2006

Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) Update: Part 2

Alternate (possibly better) title: Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation (oh wait, I already used the alternate title for a post) Continuing on with the program from Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) Update: Part 1… (a teaser for this part of the session was as previously blogged on LITAblog, btw) Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation Joanne Silverstein (jlsilver@syr.edu) Director of Research and Development Information Institute of Syracuse (iis.syr.edu) Information Institute of Syracuse was invited by the Office of Information Technology Policy at the ALA to write a White Paper about recent developments in Web-based innovations and their relationship to, and potential for use in libraries. Background: —Why call it “Participatory Networking”? .The authors propose “participatory networking” as a positive term and concept that libraries can use and promote without the confusion and limitations of previous language. The phrase “participatory network” has a history of prior use that can…

2006

Wikis : when are they the right answer?

Jason Griffey of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga presented a brief, bright and breezy look at the basics of wikis and their use in libraries to an attentive group of about 60 attendees at the end of day two of the 2006 LITA National Forum. The basic appeal of the wiki is that it is a modern day example of “Many people make for light work”. Wikis are designed to allow contributors to add to and revise the information on the site, so that the shape and scope do not have to be predetermined. In fact, wikis are a good choice when the shape and scope cannot be predetermined, and they can grow organically as new facts are added. They are good for dealing with “fringe“ items. Potential problems with wikis stem from the lack of control. Duplication, lack of cross references, and eventual entropy can make mature wikis…

2006

The Spin on Thin : Thin Clients in Academic Libraries

On the final day of the 2006 LITA National Forum, Helene Gold, electronic services librarian at Eckerd College (St. Petersburg, Florida) described how thin clients are being integrated into the computing environment in the college’s new library. The 25 people who braved Forum-fatigue to attend were not disappointed by Helene’s engaging and accessible presentation. When Eckerd College decided to build a new library, it also decided to house the campus ITS department in the new building. The ITS department in turn decided to use the opportunity to install thin clients in the new facility to showcase the technology. This had both positive and negative ramifications– while the ITS staff was committed to making the project work, “buy in” by the library staff came more slowly. Thin clients Thin clients are relatively simple and durable devices that have no storage or computing power of their own but which can be used…

2006

The impending demise of the local OPAC

Gregg Silvis presented his view of the not-so-rosy future of the local OPAC to a capacity crowd on the first day of the 2006 LITA National Forum. Reviewing the origins of today’s OPACs in the card catalogs of yore, he focused on the duplication of effort that has always been a part of the tradition of the local catalog, in both card and electronic form. The development of cooperative cataloging greatly reduced this duplication, but the advent of local automated systems caused libraries to migrate redundant physical processes to electronic form and decades later, in a very different technological environment, libraries still largely operate the same way. Each library follows similar or identical steps to locate, load, and index copies of the same records, separately perform identical authority control steps, independently maintain, upgrade and backup thousands of servers to host their OPACs, devote massive amounts of staff resources to the…

2006

SUSHI: The NISO Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative

The full title of this presentation was ‘Building a Web Service for the Library World, from the Ground Up’ and that’s exactly what the three presenters covered. We heard about the project’s beginnings and current status, what it means for content providers, and how it affects vendors of ERMs (Electronic Resource Management packages). The presenters gave the audience a thorough introduction to SUSHI and its implications for libraries, and I left feeling much better informed about the project and its significance for libraries, publishers, and ERM package vendors. Adam Chandler, Co-ordinator, Service Design Group, Information Technology and Technical Services, Cornell University Library, and also co-chair of the SUSHI Working Group, started by saying that retrieval of COUNTER usage statistics is currently a bottleneck. Most libraries currently do this by visiting individual publisher or aggregator websites, locating the desired statistics, and either displaying them or downloading an Excel file. The process…

2006

Archiving & Preserving the Web

Kristine Hanna was the main speaker for this session, and Linda Freuh also contributed. Both are from the Internet Archive. The session opened with a brief outline of the history of the Internet Archive. They were founded in 1996, and are a non profit organization dedicated to, well, archiving the Internet. They crawl two billion pages a month, plus other media files like audio clips. These snapshots are then stored and made available online. Currently the archive holds 55 billion pages from 55 million sites! To put this in perspective, Kristine estimated that if printed out the pages would reach to the moon and back 19 times. IA makes no distinction between what should be archived and what shouldn’t – the web is so ephermeral that they’re focused on just grabbing the data for now. All software used in the process is open source and developed from partnerships between IA…

2006

LITA Keynote Session: "Save America's Treasures"

“Save America’s Treasures: Preservation of Rare Acetate and Vinyl Recording Transcriptions” Speaker: Dr. John Rumble, Senior Historian Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (operated by the non-profit Country Music Foundation) Dr. Rumble spoke about the history of the CMHFM, which opened in 1967. It new location opened in 2001, and the Bob Pinson Recorded Sound Collection now include over 200,000 recorded cylinders and discs. Bob Pinson donated his personal collection of country music recordings to the CMHFM in 1972, when the library first opened. His collection of 15,000 discs, many of which had never been played, along with donations from record labels, forms the core of the current collection. Pinson followed the collection to Nashville and became the music librarian, a position he held for 26 years. The collections of the CMHFM include many rare acetate recordings, which were recordings cut directly to disk, not pressed for mass distribution….

2006

Many Users, One Computer

Eric Delozier of Penn State presented Many Users, One Computer, and Access to Web Services: Information Technology Risk Management in Libraries. I arrived a bit late, so I’m starting where I came in: Liability issues: without adequate protection, patrons’ personal files and information might be lost or stolen; systems can be damaged. Causes for loss: Hardware failure such as CPU or disk drives Environmental causes such as fire Software causes, either malware or software flaws Losses caused by user behavior: can be intentional or unintentional, by patrons or staff After identifying risks, identify the potential consequences and the likelihood or frequency of occurrence. See Jacobson, Robert V., “Risk Assessment and Risk Management” in Computer Security Handbook, 2002, Wiley & Sons. Risk mitigation: try to prevent losses, but also plan for recovery. Hardware prevention & control measures include locks and alarms; software measures used at Eric’s institution include disk wiping (DBAN),…