LITA Update, May 2, 2007

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

*Simplifying Complex Projects Using Dotproject for Project Management.
*Sunday Afternoon with LITA
*Award Winners to be honored at Annual Conference
*2007 LITA National Forum Keynote Sessions Scheduled
*Visit the LITA Blog and LITA Wiki

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Simplifying Complex Projects Using Dotproject for Project Management.

Dotproject is a powerful Open Source Project Management tool. This preconference is intended as a training session. An expert in Project Management teaches the basics of how to analyze and organize a major and complicated project, like a full website redesign. The workshop covers how to use Dotproject in managing the project. Additionally, the attendees receive all of the necessary technical information to enable the installation of Dotproject. This full-day LITA preconference is scheduled for Friday, June 22, 2007, in Washington, DC, in conjunction with the American Library Association Annual Conference.

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Sunday Afternoon with LITA

Plan to spend Sunday afternoon with LITA on June 24, 2007 at the Renaissance Mayflower in Washington, DC. Start with the LITA Top Technology Trends program at 1:30 in the East/State Rooms, followed by the Awards Reception at 3:00 in the Grand Ballroom, then followed by Bonnie Postlethwaite’s President’s Program in the East/State Rooms. You won’t want to miss this 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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Award Winners to be honored at Annual Conference

For all the details, please read the following press releases:

2007 LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award winners: Annette Bailey and Godmar Back
Annette Bailey, digital assets librarian at the Virginia Tech University Libraries, and Godmar Back, assistant professor in Virginia Tech Computer Science Department, are the 2007 recipients of the LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award. In summer 2005, they jointly developed an open source Firefox browser extension, LibX. LibX delivers library resources to users by seamlessly integrating access to them into the Firefox browser.

“LibX was conceived to solve an obvious problem that many librarians identify. Library patrons are bypassing the library’s collections in favor of search engines to find web-based resources, at the expense of discovering library-owned scholarly and peer-reviewed resources,” commented Leslie O’Brien and Mary Finn at Virginia Tech University Libraries, who nominated Bailey and Back for the award.

With features such as a toolbar for direct access to the library catalog, context menus dynamically adapting to what the user has selected on a page, and OpenURL support, LibX places access to library resources in a user’s “webflow” and makes it easy for users to discover resources in the library. Libraries can adapt LibX and create specific editions for their own use. According to the LibX website (http://libx.org/), currently 44 academic and public libraries are offering LibX editions to their users and 77 additional libraries are testing editions. Bailey and Back have received the IMLS National Leadership Grant to support the ongoing development of LibX. Future development plans include creating a plug-in for Internet Explorer.

“LibX is a creative use of browser extension technology for library applications which enhances the delivery of library resources to end users,” said Janet Lee-Smeltzer, chair of the award committee. “The committee selected Ms. Bailey and Dr. Back for the 2007 award for their exemplary innovation in the use of technology and entrepreneurship in developing LibX,”
The LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award recognizes exemplary entrepreneurship by providing an innovative product or service designed to meet the needs of the library world. Sponsored by Thomson Gale and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), the award includes a check for $5,000 and a certificate of recognition.

2007 Kilgour Award winner: Richard Pearce-Moses
Richard Pearce-Moses is the winner of the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology for 2007. The award is sponsored by OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association.

“The Kilgour Award Committee takes great pleasure in acknowledging the work contributions of Richard Pearce-Moses, whose work in the area of preservation of web information resources, together with the blending of professional practices and new technologies, provide a conceptual shift in the thinking of the organization of large-scale collections of digital information,” said Susan K. Martin, chair of the award committee.

Among Pearce-Moses’ achievements is the Arizona Model for preservation and access of web documents. The Model evolved from his work at the Arizona State library as director of Digital Government Information. It builds on a large body of theoretical and practical archival literature, and transposes these concepts to solve a practical library problem in organizing and cataloging information on Web sites.

The Arizona Model is currently a major component of a research project developed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and OCLC. The ECHO DEPository research project is funded by the Library of Congress through a grant under the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP), and is focused on developing software tools to support an archival approach to curating a collection of digital state documents. The tools are intended to harness the power of computers to analyze the enormous amount of information on the Web and present it in a way that supports the work of individuals who use human judgment to curate the collection. In the digital era, Pearce-Moses’ work stands out for its focus on key issues and its blending of professional practice and new technologies.

As president of the Society of American Archivists in 2005-2006, he worked diligently to build bridges between the records, archives, and library communities. He has a genuine vision of the broad information environment and a commitment to forging collaboration to ensure the preservation of the cultural record.

Pearce-Moses received a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from University of Illinois in 2001, and a master’s degree in American Studies from the University of Texas in 1987. He is a director of Digital Government Information at the Arizona State Library. The award was established to honor the achievements of Frederick G. Kilgour, the founder of OCLC and a seminal figure in library automation. The award is given to a person who has amassed a significant body of research in the field of library and information technology. Particular recognition is given to research which results in a positive and substantive impact on the publication, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information. The award consists of $2,000, an expense paid trip to the ALA Annual Conference, and a citation of merit.

2007 LITA/Library Hi Tech Award winner: Priscilla Caplan
Priscilla Caplan has been named the winner of the 2007 LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. Emerald and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association, sponsor the award.

The award recognizes outstanding achievement in communicating to educate practitioners within the library field in library and information technology. It consists of $1,000 and a certificate of merit.

Since 1999 Priscilla Caplan has served as assistant director, Library Services, Florida Center for Library Automation. Previously, she served as assistant director for Library Systems, University of Chicago Library, and as head, Systems Development Division, Office for Information Systems, Harvard University Library. Caplan has accepted leadership of important, challenging, and labor-intensive committees, guiding them to a successful conclusion, and disseminated the results through clear, accessible publications and presentations.

Caplan served as chair of the NISO Standards Development Committee from 1997-2002, during which time NISO instituted the Fast Track approval process. Most recently, she served as co-chair of the OCLC/RLG PREMIS Working Group, which produced the award-winning Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata. She is also the author of the Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians, a widely used text in information technology education.

Caplan’s work and leadership has made important contributions to the library community’s understanding of complex issues in such diverse and critical areas as standards, metadata, digital preservation and repositories. Her work has resulted in significant advancement of the state of knowledge regarding the maintenance of digital resources over the long term.

These three awards plus the LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award will be presented during the Awards Reception on Sunday, June 24 at 3:00 in the Washington, DC, Renaissance Mayflower Hotel in the Grand Ballroom.

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2007 LITA National Forum Keynote Sessions scheduled

The 2007 LITA National Forum Committee has announced the following keynote speakers:

• Jeffrey Kiehl, National Center for Atmospheric Research, CO
The Scientific and Social Challenges of Global Warming
Global warming is the greatest environmental crisis facing humanity; the magnitude of climate warming to occur in this century has not occurred for millions of years. Kiehl will review the science of global warming and its implications for society and explore the difficulties in communicating aspects of global warming to the public.

• David King, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library, KS
The Future is not out of Reach: Change, Library 2.0, and Emerging Trends
Emerging tech trends are good, but sometimes the changes needed to implement those trends feels like scaling a mountain. King will discuss the current social networking transformations and apply them to a library setting, addressing the changes a library needs to make to meet and participate in our new online world.

• Jeremy Frumkin, Gray Chair for Innovative Library Services, OR
In Our Cages With Golden Bars
We are increasingly forced us to look beyond our traditions and extend our thinking about how we provide our services; how can we think outside of our cages with golden bars and move to pursuing better ways of providing information and information support services to our users?

The National Forum is at the Marriott City Center in Denver this year from October 4 to 7. Plan to join this 10 year anniversary celebration of the Forums.

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Visit the LITA Blog and Wiki

Be sure to visit the LITA blog. The latest entry is from Diane Hillmann, LITA Standards Coordinator. Diane shares NISO highlights with us. Also, these LITA Updates are posted to the Blog shortly after distribution to the membership.

The LITA wiki includes a posting from the LITA Education Committee on “Opportunities for Systems Librarians.”

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I want to encourage you to connect with LITA by
1) exploring our web site at www.lita.org.
2) subscribing to LITA-L (send an e-mail to: sympa@ala.org with the subject line “subscribe lita-l”. (do not include the “”). That’s it; Sympa will pick up your email address and subscribe you to the list.
3) visiting the LITAblog.org, or LITA wiki , or
4) reaching out to the LITA leadership at any time (contact information is on the web).

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