2008

Gracelyn Cassell-2008 LITA Forum Travel Grant Winner

Gracelyn 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 process of preparing this report on my attendance at the Forum had me spending quite some time reflecting on the journey that led to the LITA National Forum in Cincinnati where I attended three general sessions and six of the concurrent sessions. It all started back in 1979 with my undergraduate studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica when students there were still using punch cards. On graduation in 1982, I started my library career in the Montserrat Public Library which became the local hub for regional initiatives in the…

2008

2008 National Forum: A Homegrown CMS

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. (Note: Rachel indicated her slides will be available on rachelvacek.com, but were not there as of this writing, or I didn’t go deep enough into her site.) UHL chose to develop their own CMS primarily because they wanted a system based on their vision of what a CMS is and should do, rather than modifying someone else’s. UHL feels that the CMS should be a growing and changing system. They felt that by building their own system their staff would be able to fix problems and incorporate customer feedback more quickly. They felt that by building their…

2008

2008 National Forum: Using Library Labs to Shorten Service Lifecycle

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 shorten their service lifecycles. The number of libraries discussing the concepts of agile development, perpetual beta, and rapid prototyping is encouraging. The one thing that all of these approaches have in common is including customers as active participants in the development and/or testing of new products and services. To that end, a growing number of libraries have been building “Library Labs,” which are based on the Google Labs concept. This approach to service development was discussed in the presentation “Building a Web-Based Laboratory for Library Users” by Jason J. Battles and Joseph (Jody) Combs. The…

2008

2008 LITA Forum: Library 2.0 PDQ

“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, the state of Ohio and the Miami U main campus issued new challenges for its regional campuses for delivering education. As a result, the Middletown library has faced many changes. Middletown is a commuter campus which has been offering courses for 40 years. They offer courses primarily to nontraditional students; the average age of students is 24, and most of them work at least part time. In 2007, Ohio announced a New University System which aimed to increase the number of degrees among Ohioans, and to expand the role of regional campuses to help meet…

2008

2008 National Forum: IT Management: There is Too Much Stuff

This past Spring, our library ‘completed’ what was a fairly significant reorganization. The library formalized relationships with several strategic partners which had been residing in our building. One of the outcomes included bringing together three independent IT departments, which I have been responsible for pulling together. Needless to say, the 2008 LITA Forum session entitled “Re-swizzling the IT Enterprise for the Next Generation: Creating a Strategic and Organizational Model for Effective IT Management,” presented by Maurice York, Head, Information Technology North Carolina State University Libraries, caught my attention. Maurice described the evolution of IT services at NCSU Libraries, which, by the audience reaction, was one which many other libraries experienced (Maurice: everything does go on the home page, doesn’t it?….) In summary, the current state of IT management is that ”there is too much stuff.” He outlined the various IT Business Models that his organization has used at one time…

2008

2008 National Forum: Civil Rights Digital Library

P. Toby Graham presented an overview of the structure and holdings of the Civil Rights Digital Library, the most comprehensive effort so far to provide digitized material on the civil rights movement. There is a video archive, a learning objects component that provides curricular support, and the portal. The library is based in the University of Georgia Libraries and was launched in the spring of 2008. Graham began by showing some video from the digital library, specifically from the Albany movement. This montage of video contained such material as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. exhorti ng the African-American community to remain nonviolent after the brutal beating of a pregnant young woman holding a child. Graham interspersed the clip montage with explanation of what was happening. The video is impressively clear, and the sound is quite good, allowing users to not only learn about but feel the singing and prayers in…