A great crowd met on Saturday night at the Capital City Brewing Company for LITA’s Happy Hour. This was the place to be…to catch up with colleagues, sample the wide selection of cool ales and a bit of the hot cuisine!
Those popular, glowing blue LITA necklaces, handed out by Mary Taylor, LITA Executive Director, identified members in the packed locale. Catherine Jannick from Georgia Tech in Atlanta and on the 2007 LITA Forum Planning Committee, reminded members that registration was now open for the Forum. Karen Schneider approved of the site stating it’s “crowded but wonderful.” John S. [I promised not to write his last name], a Cataloger and Systems Support Librarian, University of Maryland, agreed. He confessed to me that he really likes LITA people and loved coming to Happy Hour, adding shamelessly “even though my membership had expired.” Well, join again John!
Kansas librarians Martin Courtois, Leslie Nord and Monique Sendeze chatted with this blogger. Martin is the D-Space Coordinator from Kansas State Unviersity and is in the midst of convincing Anthropology and Food Science faculty to submit their articles to be posted on the D-Space platform. Leslie, the Information Services Training Coordinator at Johnson County Library told me that patrons at her library love blogging about the library staff…and in turn the librarians enjoy reading the blogs. Monique, also from the Johnson County Library, said that they had just purchased a new content management system, Episerver, from a Swedish vendor. What attracted them to this system was easy of patron contribution, flexibility of the stylesheets and RSS feeds.
The future generation of the catalog was on ExLibris’s Greg Gosselin’s mind though surrounded by the merriment of his University of Minnesota friends Betsy, Janet and Laura. They endorsed the Raspberry Wheat ale, though Janet preferred the Chocolate Belgium ale. “Librarians are good tippers and drink a lot,” Betsy told me. Then she added quickly, “But, not necessarily in that order.”
Aaron Dobbs, Systems and Electronic Resources Librarian, Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, came over to the table where I was dining on a bowl of delicious stout ale chili with Ray Schwartz. “I’ve read a lot of critiques of ALA in the biblio-blogosphere and other online chats and twitters,” Aaron said. As a result, Aaron has set up a wiki where people can add their views in a centralized place. He wants to see a slate of people run for ALA Council who will address issues raised in the wiki. Here is the wiki site: improveala.pbwiki.com.
While I enjoyed that tasty bowl of chili, Ray, Systems Specialist Librarian at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., mentioned that he had written some reporting modules for acquisitions and circulation data for their Voyager System using cold fusion and phps. He’ll share his reporting scripts if anyone is interested. Next on his plate was the Chicago Marathon in October. Good luck Ray! Have a terrific conference everyone.