General information

LITA Update 3/12/07

This is one of our periodic messages sent to all LITA members. This update includes information about the following:

*New CMS
*Vote for your favorite candidates in the election this week
*Student Writing Award deadline extended
*Visit the LITA Blog
*LITA Annual Conference plans
*Mark your calendar for the next LITA National Forum

New CMS

LITA is one of the first ALA units to be converted to the new ALA CMS. The conversion has gone smoothly but there are a few temporary glitches. Please note that the web site address is again back to normal at lita.org. With the election coming up, I just wanted to be certain that you were looking at the latest information.

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Vote for your favorite candidates in the election this week

As Bonnie Postlethwaite indicated in an earlier message on the LITA blog, you will want to visit the LITA Web site to listen to candidate interviews beginning March 15th when the ALA polls open. Currently, you can access pictures of each candidate and the text for the ballot on our site. Also, be sure to listen to all the great podcasts in previous posts. The candidates are:

Vice President: Diane Bisom and Andrew Pace;
Directors at large (three year terms; vote for two): Mary Alice Ball, Susan Logue, Dale Poulter, and Barbara Spivey;
Directors at large (one year term; vote for one): Maribeth Manoff and Karen Starr;
LITA Councilor: Kay Flowers and Colby Riggs.

ALA Councilor candidates who are LITA members:

Tiffani Conner
Aaron Dobbs
Clayton Garthwait
Catherine Greene
Allene Hayes
Janet Swan Hill
Bernard Margolis
Catherine L. Murray-Rust
William Paullin
John J. Riemer
Jim Simonis
Amy Tracy Wells

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Student Writing Award deadline extended

Student members please note that the Student Writing Award deadline has been extended to April 2nd.

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Visit the LITA Blog and Wiki

The LITA blog continues to provide a place for LITA members to share information of interest to all of us. A recent entry is from Pat Ensor who reports on the De Lange Conference on Emerging Libraries, March 5-7 at Rice University. This conference was designed to “Describe How Knowledge Will Be Accessed, Discovered, and Disseminated in the Age of Digital Information”. Pat provides a three part report that you won’t want to miss.

The LITA blog also provides extensive reporting on the Midwinter Meeting including interviews with Bonnie Postlethwaite, LITA President, Mark Beatty, LITA Vice President, and Michelle Boule, LITA sponsored Emerging Leader. Our member volunteer bloggers capturing much of Midwinter including the Town Meeting, Board Meetings, LITA Top Technology Trends, and a number of committees and interest groups sessions.

The LITA wiki includes a posting of the latest edition of TER, Volume 13, Number 3. In addition, if you haven’t visited the Standards Watch lately, you will find Diane has expanded this site.

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LITA Annual Conference plans

You won’t want to miss the LITA preconference this year:

Simplifying Complex Projects Using Dotproject for Project Management
Join this training session for Dotproject, a powerful Open Source Project Management tool. Learn the basics of how to analyze and organize complicated projects and how to use Dotproject in managing them. Receive all of the necessary technical information to enable installation of Dotproject.

This full-day LITA preconference will be held Friday, June 22, 2007, in Washington, DC, in conjunction with the American Library Association Annual Conference. Register online

In addition, you will want to plan to spend Sunday afternoon with LITA. We begin with the LITA Top Technology Trends program at 1:30 followed by the Awards Reception at 3:00 followed by Bonnie Postlethwaite’s President’s Program:

Tag! Your IT! : Online Digital Audio Collections Meet PennTags

Historic sound recordings are an important part of our national heritage. Digitizing historic recorded sound collections for use on the web requires extensive indexing and access points. Using social bookmarking and tagging in combination with standard subject classification and indexing terms to create folksonomies creates a rich networking of resources that greatly enhances access to the collection. Chuck Haddix (Marr Sound Archivist at the University of Missouri Kansas City) presents The Voices of World War II a case study of the creation of a digital library rich in historic sound recordings and the integration of digital library records into the online catalog for enhanced access. Michael Winkler (Director of Information Technology and Digital Development of the University of Pennsylvania) discusses PennTags, a social bookmarking system that enables the creation of personalized, shared annotated bibliographies of resources in the library catalog, licensed databases, digital libraries and other Web resources using a combination of subject headings, index terms, and personally assigned tags. PennTags is being enhanced to provide specialized capabilities for tagging sound recordings. This program mashes-up digital collections with Web2.0 social bookmarking and tagging.

Visit the LITA Web site for a complete listing of LITA programs and meetings.

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Mark your calendar for the next LITA National Forum

The 2007 LITA National Forum is scheduled for October 4 – 7 in Denver. The theme is Technology with Altitude.

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I want to encourage you to connect with LITA by
exploring our web site
subscribing to LITA-L (send an e-mail to:listproc@ala.org with the message (do not include the brackets): subscribe lita-l [YourFirstName] [YourLastName].),
visiting the LITA Blog or LITA wiki , or
reaching out to the LITA leadership at any time. Full contact information for LITA leadership can be found here.

Mary Taylor
Executive Director, LITA
800 545 2433 x4267
mtaylor@ala.org