In his February 11 post, my fellow LITA blogger Bryan Brown interrogated the definitions of librarianship. He concluded that librarianship amounts to a “set of shared values and duties to our communities,” nicely summarized in the ALA’s Core Values of Librarianship. These core values are access, confidentiality / privacy, democracy, diversity, education and lifelong learning, intellectual freedom, preservation, the public good, professionalism, service, and social responsibility. But the greatest of these is access, without which we would revert to our roots as monastic scriptoriums and subscription libraries for the literate elite. Bryan experienced some existential angst given that he is a web developer and not a “librarian” in the sense of job title or traditional responsibilities–the ancient triad of collection development, cataloging, and reference. In contrast, I never felt troubled about my job, as my title is e-learning librarian (got that buzzword going for me, which is nice) and as I do a lot of mainstream librarian-esque things, especially camping…
Month: February 2015
Jobs in Information Technology: February 25
New vacancy listings are posted weekly on Wednesday at approximately 12 noon Central Time. They appear under New This Week and under the appropriate regional listing. Postings remain on the LITA Job Site for a minimum of four weeks. New This Week Director of Library Services, Salve Regina University, Newport, RI E-Services Manager/Senior Librarian, Marin County Free Library, San Rafael, CA Head of Research Services, Special Collections Library, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, University Park, PA Instruction and Outreach Archivist, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, University Park, PA Metadata and Digital Curation Librarian, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI Visit the LITA Job Site for more available jobs and for information on submitting a job posting.
2015 Election Slate
The LITA Board is pleased to announce the following slate of candidates for the 2015 spring election as follows: Candidates for Vice-President/President-elect Nancy Coylar Aimee Fifarek Candidates for Directors at Large, 2 elected for 3 year terms Frank Cervone Martin Kalfatovic Susan Sharpless Smith Ken Varnum See candidate bios and statements for more information; voting in the 2015 ALA election will begin at 9 a.m. Central Time on March 24, 2015. Ballots will close at 11:59 p.m. Central Time on May 1. Election results will be announced on May 8. Check here for information about the general ALA election The slate was recommended by the Nominating Committee. Karen G. Schneider is chair of the committee and Pat Ensor, Adriene Lim, and Chris Evjy are the committee members. The Board thanks the Nominating Committee for all their work. Be sure to thank these candidates for agreeing to serve, and the Nominating Committee…
2015 LITA Forum – Call for Proposals, Deadline Extended
The LITA Forum is a highly regarded annual event for those involved in new and leading edge technologies in the library and information technology field. Please send your proposal submissions here by March 13, 2015, and join your colleagues in Minneapolis . The 2015 LITA Forum Committee seeks proposals for excellent pre-conferences, concurrent sessions, and poster sessions for the 18th annual Forum of the Library Information and Technology Association, to be held in Minneapolis Minnesota, November 12-15, 2015 at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis. This year will feature additional programming in collaboration with LLAMA, the Library Leadership & Management Association. The Forum Committee welcomes creative program proposals related to all types of libraries: public, school, academic, government, special, and corporate.
Tools for Creating & Sharing Slide Decks
Lately I’ve taken to peppering my Twitter network with random questions. Sometimes my questions go unanswered but other times I get lively and helpful responses. Such was the case when I asked how my colleagues share their slide decks. Figuring out how to share my slide decks has been one of those things that consistently falls to the bottom of my to-do list. It’s important to me to do so because it means I can share my ideas beyond the very brief moment in time that I’m presenting them, allowing people to reuse and adapt my content. Now that I’m hooked on the GTD system using Trello, though, I said to myself, “hey girl, why don’t you move this from the someday/maybe list and actually make it actionable.” So I did. Here’s my dilemma. When I was a library school student I began using SlideShare. There are a lot of great things about…
Jobs in Information Technology: February 18
New vacancy listings are posted weekly on Wednesday at approximately 12 noon Central Time. They appear under New This Week and under the appropriate regional listing. Postings remain on the LITA Job Site for a minimum of four weeks. New This Week Library Technology Professional 2, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM Systems & Information Technology Librarian (Assistant Professor), NYC College of Technology, New York City, NY Visit the LITA Job Site for more available jobs and for information on submitting a job posting.
The Internet of Things
Intel announced in January that they are developing a new chip called Curie that will be the size of a button and it is bound to push The Internet of Things (IoT) forward quickly. The IoT is a concept where everyday items (refrigerators, clothes, cars, kitchen devices, etc.) will be connected to the internet. The first time I heard of IoT was in the 2014 Horizon Report for K-12. Yes, I’m a little slow sometimes… There is also a new book out that was shared with me by one of the fellow LITA Bloggers, Erik Sandall, by David Rose titled Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things. If you want an interesting read on this topic I recommend checking it out (a little library humor). When I first heard of IoT, I thought it was really interesting, but wasn’t sure how quickly it would fully arrive….
Diagrams Made Easy with LucidChart
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Marlon Hernandez For the past year, across four different classes and countless bars, I have worked on an idea that is quickly becoming my go-to project for any Master of Information Science assignment; the Archivist Beer Vault (ABV) database. At first it was easy to explain the contents: BEER! After incorporating more than one entity the explanation grew a bit murky: ME: So remember my beer database? Well now it includes information on the brewery, style AND contains fictional store transactions WIFE: Good for you honey. ME: Yeah unfortunately that means I need to add a few transitive prop… I lost your attention after beer, didn’t I? Which is a fair reaction since trying to describe the intricacies of abstract ideas such as entity relationship diagrams require clear-cut visuals. However, drawing these diagrams usually requires either expensive programs like Microsoft Visio (student rate $269) or…
Let’s Talk About E-rate
E-rate isn’t new news. Established almost 20 years ago (I feel old, and you’re about to too) by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, E-rate provides discounts to assist schools and libraries in the United States to obtain affordable telecommunications and internet access. What is new news is the ALA initiative Got E-rate? and more importantly the overhaul of E-rate which prompted the initiative- and it’s good news. The best part might well be 1.5 billion dollars added to annual available funding. What that means, in the simplest terms, is new opportunities for libraries to offer better, faster internet. It’s the chance for public libraries of every size to rethink their broadband networks and make gains toward the broadband speeds necessary for library services. But beyond the bottom line, this incarnation of E-rate has been deeply influenced by ALA input. The Association worked with the FCC to insure that the reform…
ALA Midwinter 2015 LITA Preconference Review: How User Testing Can Improve the User Experience of Your Library Website
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Tammi Owens Last July, Winona State University’s Darrell W. Krueger Library rolled out a completely new website. This January we added to that new user experience by upgrading to LibGuides and LibAnswers v2. Now, we’re looking for continuous improvement through continuous user experience (UX) testing. Although I have some knowledge of the history and general tenets of user experience and website design, I signed up for this LITA pre-conference to dive into some case studies and ask specific questions of UX specialists. I hoped to come away with a concrete plan or framework for UX testing at our library. Specifically, I wanted to know how to implement the results of UX testing on our website. The instructors Kate Lawrence is the Vice President of User Research at EBSCO. Deirdre Costello is the Senior User Experience Researcher at EBSCO. I was a little…