Podcast

The Lost Art of Conversation

Technology is often viewed as a double edged sword: it makes life easier but it also has the power to threaten jobs, privacy, and human connections.  Yale University & Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute polled industry experts in 2016 and found that machine intelligence (A.I.) will replace all human jobs by 2136. Despite statistics like this, I’d like to make the case that there are many ways that technology actually revitalizes communication. The next few posts will explore tech tools, like podcasts, that encourage rather than diminish human connections. Podcasts are everywhere, even TV legend Levar Burton recently announced his upcoming podcast: “LeVar Burton Reads.” That’s right, the host of Reading Rainbow who encouraged us to read as children is back, 2.0 style, with a podcast where he will read a “piece of short fiction.” A very brief history of the term “podcast”: Ben Hammersley, a British Journalist, invented the…

News & Noteworthy

LITA Personas Task Force

Personas group set

Coming soon to the LITA blog: the results of the LITA Personas Task Force. The initial report contains a number of useful persona types and was submitted to the LITA Board at the ALA Midwinter 2017 conference. Look for reports on the process and each of the persona types here on the LITA blog starting in March 2017. As a preview, go behind the scenes with this short podcast presented as part of the LibUX Podcast series, on the free tools the Task Force used to do their work. Metric: A UX Podcast @metricpodcast Metric is a #libux podcast about #design and #userExperience. Designers, developers, librarians, and other folks join @schoeyfield and @godaisies to talk shop. The work of the LITA Personas Task Force https://overcast.fm/+DVQCBwh2o In this podcast Amanda L. Goodman (@godaisies) gives you a peek into the work of the LITA Persona Task Force, who are charged with defining and…

2011

Video: The World (and Jason Griffey) Interview Verner Vinge

The video for Saturday’s interview with noted science fiction author Verner Vinge is now available on the LITA Ustream Channel. The complete interview runs for about two hours and is available in part 1 and part 2. 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.

2009

Joan Lippincott Video

As promised, here’s the first of the three Keynote videos from LITA Forum 2009. It’s not perfect, as we tried several different strategies throughout filming the various keynotes…try and frame the speaker and the screen wasn’t great, so in later videos we just concentrated on the speaker. In any case, I hope you enjoy! The embed is to a web-friendly version, but we do have the HD version as well…at least until our hosting decides to kill us for the massive filesize (seriously, I plan to move these over to archive.org for permanent storage, but for now, go easy on the HD, please). HD m4v download Joan Lippincott

2009

LITA Forum 2009 Media explosion

Introducing the Keynote Media Series from LITA Forum 2009! First up we’ll have the audio from the Keynote presentations by Joan Lippincott, David Weinberger, and Liz Lawley, followed up in the next week or so with video of those same keynotes! Some people prefer audio, some video, so we’re gonna give you the best of both worlds. I’ll apologize in advance for the delay on the video…we recorded the keynotes in 1080 HD, and I had forgotten how very, very long that takes to render down to web-watchable sizes. So, watch this space over the next few days for the audio files of the LITA Forum 2009 Keynotes!