DATE: 1/24/2009 GROUP: Assessment and Research Committee CHAIRS: Diane Bisom, Bonnie Postlethwaite REPORTER: Bonnie Postlethwaite CONFERENCE: Midwinter MEETING: Committee meeting ATTENDEES: 12 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: Discussion Items & Actions: Approved minutes from prior meeting. Mary Taylor presented data files on LITA membership (available on Committee’s Google docs site). Available data points cover various parameters, such as membership in other divisions; number of programs; etc. Data seems to reflect a recurring trend of membership increases and decreases over time. Personal membership trends over the past few years are: 2003: 3907 2004: 3776 2005: 3423 2006: 3500 2007: 3752 2008: 3447 Mary also indicated that ALA will have a data dashboard later in the spring which may provide data and trends over time. She also mentioned that ALA is doing a mailing to all people who have dropped membership in the last three years. Reasons for membership attrition were discussed, with speculation that…
Author: AnneG
Technology & Access Committee Midwinter 2009 Meeting Report
DATE: 1/25/2009 GROUP: Technology and Access Committee CHAIR: David Nutty REPORTER: David Nutty CONFERENCE: Midwinter MEETING: Committee meeting ATTENDEES: 9 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: Planning for a program at ALA Annual Chicago has been the main focus of the committee prior to and at the Midwinter Meeting in Denver. The committee has focused the topic to Net Neutrality. The committee has tentative commitments (later confirmed) from three outstanding speakers. Due to the quality of the speakers and the timeliness of the topic, we have requested a larger room for ALA Chicago. Other business at the Midwinter meeting included discussion of the LITA Strategic Planning Meeting; a request from the Board to draft a resolution for Judith Krug on the 40th anniversary of the Freedom to Read Foundation; and the committee’s role in promoting access to LITA conference programming via low-cost or mobile technologies. FUTURE ACTIVITIES: The committee’s program at ALA Chicago: “Net…
Education Committee Midwinter 2009 Meeting Report
DATE: 1/24/2009 GROUP: Education Committee CHAIRS: David Ward, Mandy Havert REPORTER: David Ward CONFERENCE: Midwinter ATTENDEES: 12 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: LITA Education combined with Regional Institutes in the past year. We spent from Annual 08 – Midwinter 09 reviewing our charge and creating organizational documents to track and help guide the newly combined committee’s role. Part of this involved assigning committee members as liaisons to all LITA IGs/Committees to gather information on possible educational programming opportunities, including Regional Institutes, Programs/Preconferences at Annual, Midwinter opportunities, and online webinar/tutorial/course planning. At Midwinter we reviewed liaison reports and decided on the following topics to pursue programming for over the next year: Open Source Mobile Tech RDA Extensible Catalog SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Semantic Web Additionally, we are going to work with LITA Forum Committee, Top Tech Trends, PPC, and others to pursue other topics and speakers as opportunities arise. In particular, we are going…
Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award Committee: Midwinter 2009 Meeting Report
DATE: 1/23/2009 GROUP: LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award CHAIR: Martin Halbert REPORTER: Martin Halbert CONFERENCE: Midwinter ATTENDEES: 5 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: The LITA Brett Butler Award Committee met on Saturday, January 24, 2009, at 1:30 PM in the Colorado Convention Center room 712. Several members were absent because of budget cuts in travel at their institutions. Attending were: Nancy Colyar (Past Chair), Martin Halbert (Current Chair), Ronald Peterson, Mary Alice Ball (Board Liaison), and Helen Wilbur (Awards Representative). Absent were: Emily Ford and Billy Kwan. The committee selected this year’s recipient of the award, and will write this up together with the citation for presentation at the awards ceremony at annual. FUTURE ACTIVITIES: The group noted again the small number of nominations this year (3), and discussed ways of increasing the awareness of the award. Publicizing the award on additional listservs was the first priority: CNI-Announce (Martin) DLF-Announce (Martin) MLIS program listservs…
Web Coordinating Committee Midwinter 2009 Meeting Report
DATE: 1/25/2009 GROUP: Web Coordinating Committee CHAIR: Jean Rainwater REPORTER: Jean Rainwater CONFERENCE: Midwinter MEETING: Committee meeting ATTENDEES: 8 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: At the Midwinter meeting the WCC discussed the need for clarification and coordination of web communication. Meeting reports and minutes are frequently posted to a combination of LITA website, wiki, and blog. The WCC recommends that the LITA wiki be the official repository for Committee and IG documentation, meeting reports, minutes and the like. The LITA website should be focused on the current information needs of LITA members and the tools by which members can interact with the site and with each other, should draw news items from the LITA blog via RSS feeds and should provide links to the wiki for meeting reports and other documentation. A review of the LITA website found large gaps in metadata for Collage files; content without metadata is less findable by the…