LITA BlogGracelyn Cassell, Librarian, Montserrat, West Indies 2008 Errol Hill LITA Forum Travel Grant Winner LITA NATIONAL FORUM 2008 REPORT I was indeed fortunate to have been the Librarian from the Caribbean who received the 2008 Errol Hill Travel Grant to attend the LITA National Forum that was held in Cincinnati October 15 to 20, 2008. [...]
The final keynote of the LITA National Forum 2008 “The Obligation of Leadership” can be found at Virutal Dave … Real Blog. If you missed it do check it out. You can choose how you want to experience it. David posted his slides, audio and video versions of the keynote on his website. If you [...]
Elizabeth Black, Ohio State University Don Kim, Murray State University Kim Duckett and Jason Casden, North Carolina State University Session Summary: A great sampling of creative tools and solutions! Anyone looking to find innovative ways to push library content through course management systems will find great ideas from these presentations. Note: any reference in this [...]
Developing and Institutional Repository: Implementation of DigiTool at Colorado State University Libraries Shu Liu, Colorado State University Yongli Zhou, Colorado State University The first panelists, Shu Liu and Yongli Zhou, describe implementing a IR through DigiTool, exLibris’s Digital Repository software and their talk focuses on using an out of the box product. Colorado State used [...]
During the second concurrent session, Jean Rainwater and Bonnie Buzzell from Brown University talked about the challenges involved in borrowing materials not located in their own collections. In “Don’t Make Me Choose! (or, Just Get What I Need!),†they showed how it took 33 clicks to borrow an item from another library within the multiple [...]
With all the commerical and open source content management systems on the market, why would a library still choose to build their own? In 2006, the University of Houston Libraries did just that. Rachel Vacek discussed their rationale and effort in Putting the Library Website in Their Hands: The Advantages and Challenges of a Homegrown Content Management System. [...]
Libraries expend a majority their limited human and financial resources to bring new products and services to their customers. However, libraries STILL have the tendency to wait until these products or services are ‘prefect’ ready before they are officially released. The rapid change in technology and the pressures of external ‘competition’ is requiring libraries to [...]
Weiling Liu, University of Louisville (Kentucky) Session summary: An excellent demonstration of the modular and flexible nature of Drupal, an open-source web content management system. Drupal has featured prominently in library conferences recently; however, one of the strengths of Liu’s presentation was in the two project examples she used: managing news and events web content [...]
“Library 2.0 PDQ: Meeting the Challenges of the Rapid Growth of Distance Learning and Off-site Courses at a University Regional Campus†was presented by John J. Burke and Beth E. Tumbleson from Miami University Middletown in Miami, OH. Miami U’s regional campuses are at the forefront of its distance learning push. During 2007 and 2008, [...]
LITA National Forum 2008 Presenter: Nina McHale, Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver. The speaker started her presentation by sharing her experience navigating a website with a user with visual disability. She pointed out that even though the information structure on a website makes sense for us (the visual users), it does not necessarily make [...]