2008

LITA Heads of Library Technology (HoLT) Meeting

January 13, 2008 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania [Apologies for the delayed posting] 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…

2008

Top Tech Trends

——————————————————————– In 1908, Thomas Edison stated “Anything, Everything is Possible.” According to Smithsonian Magazine, the events and innovations that occurred a century ago marked America’s entry into the modern world. The innovations in 1908 literally put us in motion. Wilbur Wright flew 2 hours and 20 minutes. Henry Ford introduced the Model T to the masses. The First Skyscraper – the Singer Building was built in NYC. ——————————————————————- At ALA’s Annual Discussion, K.G. Schneider said there were two ways to look at this years library tech trends. – Architecture of Aesthetics – Architecture of Participation Below are a few new concepts Alexander Cohen collected for LITA that affect the Library of the Future and its’ Architecture of Aesthetics… Google’s Library Digitization Projects, Artificial Intelligence / Web Search Projects Virtual Streetscapes Kindle Amazon’s Ebook Reader Harvard’s Green Campus: LEED Status Bibliotheca Alexandrina “recapture the spirit of openness and scholarship” British Library…

2008

LITA International Relations Committee Meeting

The LITA International Relations Committee 2008 met from 10:30 – 12:00 noon on Monday, January 14 at the Marriott Courtyard. Teri Sierra Committee Chair led the discussion of the various items on the agenda. Minutes from 2007 Annual were approved and a report from LITA Board of Directors Liaison Mary Alice Ball was given. The process for applying for the International Visitors Grant for the LITA Forum for Oct 2008 was discussed as well as sending a representative to IFLA. Focus centered on pursuing plans for a program at the ALA Annual Conference, 2009 in Chicago. Approval for the program has already been granted. The committee would like to bring Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC), or someone from the foundation to discuss this vision and the foundations work. Other possibilities would be other organizations that are doing the same kind of work internationally such…

2008

Public Libraries Technology Interest Group

The Public Libraries Technology Interest met on Sunday, January 13th at the Four Seasons Hotel from 10-12 noon. Featured guests included Larra Clark from the ALA’s Office for Research and Statistics; and Kim Bolan and Robert Cullins authors of Technology Made Simple: An Simple Improvement Guide for Small and Medium Libraries. Larra Clark discussed the recent study Libraries Connect Communities: Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study 2006-2007: ALA Research Series. Larra discussed the highlights of the study. Some of the findings include: technology is bringing more, not less public library use; libraries infrastructure (space, bandwidth and staffing) is being pushed to capacity; and libraries need more technology planning and dedicated technology support. The report also includes a state by state summary of technology. Kim Bolan and Robert Cullins, authors of Technology Made Simple: An Improvement Guide for Small and Medium Libraries, discussed their perceptions of technology in libraries. They…

2008

LITA Education Committee Meeting

The Education Committee met on Sunday, January 13, 2008 with 12 members and guests present. This was the first meeting since the merger of the old Education Committee and the Regional Institutes Committee created the new Education Committee. 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…

2008

Assessment and Research Meeting on Friday, Jan 11

The recently formed LITA Assessment and Research Committee hosted a session on Friday morning about establishing a research strategy for LITA. Approximately 20 people from the Assessment and Research Committee, the Membership Committee, Committee and Interest Groups Chairs, LITA Emerging Leaders and the LITA Board participated in the session. Robin Wedewer, from Tecker Consulting, facilitated the session. While the session took place at Midwinter the work began in December via email. Participants were asked to answer a series of questions. Those questions included: Please think about the environment in which you live and work and what is happening in those areas that could have the potential to impact you and your business. As you look to the future, what are the issues and trends that you think could have some effect, either positive or negative, on you and your workplace? In other words, what is going on in the environment…

2008

Minutes for the BIGWIG meeting at ALA Midwinter 2008 (1/13/2008)

Agenda 1. Questions regarding podcasts for LITA office candidates 2. Discussion on BIGWIG & Transparency 3. Conference podcasting 4. Brainstorm potential topics for social software showcase 5. ideas for interactivity or innovation for LITA forum 1. Questions for podcasts for LITA elections (Karen Coombs) Podcasts for LITA candidates contained these questions last year: 1. Briefly describe your professional experience as it relates to holding LITA office 2. What do you bring to this position? 3. How do you envision LITA being a technology leader in ALA? These informal podcasts were about 5 minutes long. David Lee King did these last year and will continue in this role for the next set of Candidates. The BIGWIG members present agreed that the set of questions was good. 2 BIGWIG & Transparency (Michelle Boule) The Leadership of this interest group believes in and wants to exercise radical transparency for all discussions and decisions…

2008

Open Source Systems IG Meeting

LITA Open Source Systems IG business meeting Midwinter, 2008 January 14th Marriott Philadelphia Present were representatives of the National Archives of Canada, Liblime, Rowan University, Index Data, the Texas State Library, City College of San Francisco, Georgetown’s Law Library, Texas Wesleyan, the Massachussetts Trial Court Law Library, Florida State University, Wayne State University, Minnesota’s CLIC consortium, PALINET, Eastern Michigan University, and Wofford College. Who’s Using What Open-source content management systems were the most commonly used type of software, with Plone and Drupal coming up most frequently. About half of those present were at some level of consideration or implementation of an open-source ILS, with Evergreen and Koha being most mentioned, though there was also discussion of VuFind, Blacklight, and the eXtensible Catalog project; several had been to the Next Gen Catalog IG meeting the previous day where several of these projects were discussed. DLXS (digital library image management), WordPress (blogging),…

2008

Electronic Resources IG Meeting, Friday 1/11/08 7:30 pm

The IG meeting on Friday night attracted an impressive group of information professionals, with standing room available only. Zoe Stewart-Marshall, an ERMIG Chair and Clara Ruttenberg, an ERMIG Vice Chair started the meeting with Electronic Resources IG mission statement and goals 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…

2008

Meeting of the JPEG 2000 Interest Group on Jan 14th in Philadelphia

The JPEG2000 in Archives and Libraries Interest Group met on Saturday afternoon. 11 people attended the meeting. In the information sharing part of the meeting, there was discussion of the benefits, drawbacks, and considerations of “visually lossless” versus “digitally lossless”. In particular, one of the attendees talked about how the Internet Archive had chosen to go with visually lossless J2K files after extensive testing and review. (This attendee was not from the Internet Archive, but knew about its project.) 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…