You are cordially invited to the LITA President’s program, Tag! Your IT!: Online Digital Audio Collections Meet PennTags. The program will take place Sunday, June 24, 2007, 4-5 pm, following the Top Technology Trends (1-3pm) and the LITA Awards Reception (3-4pm), at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel’s East and State Rooms. My President’s Program is an interesting mash up of two hot topics: digital libraries, in this case, digital audio libraries, and the social tagging system 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…
Author: postlethwaite
Meet the LITA Candidates for the 2007 Elections
Can’t get enough of the podcasts from Midwinter? Want to know more about the folks running for various positions on the LITA Board? Podcasts of interviews with all the candidates for the LITA election will be available beginning March 15 when the ALA polls open. The podcasts will be posted here on the LITA Blog and available from the LITA Web site’s election page. Interviews are currently being recorded for 2 candidates for Vice-President/President-Elect, 2 candidates for Councilor, 8 candidates for directors-at-large. Set up feeds to your RSS aggregator or iPod to listen in to what our slate of candidates have to say!
LITA Sponsors Michelle Boule in the ALA Emerging Leaders Program
The LITA Board is pleased to announce its sponsorship of Michelle Boule to the ALA Emerging Leaders Program. LITA had a number of excellent applicants. LITA has a very bright future with such bright, rising stars. ALA has selected 100 participants for the 2007 program. Each participant will attend leadership workshops at both ALA conferences in 2007. In addition, they will participate in an online working group between the conferences as they continue to grow as leaders. Each participant is expected to provide 2 years of service to ALA or one of its units. The LITA Board wishes to ensure that our Emerging Leader has a meaningful leadership experience within LITA. Michelle will work closely with the LITA President and President-elect, working most closely with the President-elect for continuity, on aspects of the LITA strategic plan implementation. Michelle Boule is indeed a LITA emerging leader. She was instrumental in starting…
LITA to Sponsor an Emerging Leader
ALA President Leslie Burger has announced a new Emerging Leaders Program to prepare 100 librarians new to the profession in leadership (http://lb.princetonlibrary.org/emerging_leaders.html). LITA is very pleased to announced that it has agreed to sponsor one individual in this Program. Are you: –a current LITA member? –no older than 35 OR have no more than five years of post-MLS library experience? –able to meet the obligations that Leslie outlined on the website? –interested in the Program? If so, please submit the following items to LITA President Bonnie Postlethwaite (postlethwaiteb@umkc.edu) by September 15: –A list of LITA or ALA activities (no more than five, if possible) –Participation in state, regional or other library associations (no more than five) –Three ways you have demonstrated leadership potential (500 words or less) LITA sponsorship is not required for application, but it will give you preference in the selection process. A memo from Leslie Burger clarifies…
In Memory
In this LITA’s 40th anniversary year, we have lost two icons to the profession who also served in LITA’s formative years as president. Henriette Avram passed away on April 22 and Frederick G. Kilgour passed on July 31. It’s hard to imagine today’s libraries without the work of these two giants of our profession. Their work was intertwined. Without the communications format of the MARC record championed by Henriette Avram, shared cataloging and OCLC, which Fred Kilgour founded, would not have been possible. Much has been written about both of these people. However, it is fitting for LITA to recognize their special contribution to our organization which was still called the Information Science and Automation Division (ISAD) in their days. Fred Kilgour served as the eighth president for two terms in 1973-1975. Henriette Avram followed as president from 1975-1976. According to Stephen R. Salmon’s article, “LITA’s First Twenty-Five Years: A…
LITA 2.0
This past spring, I was fortunate to participate in the ALA Library2.0 Bootcamp sponsored by ALA. This was a wonderful learning opportunity and testing ground for how ALA could use Web2.0 concepts and tools to incorporate into the member experience of ALA. The group of people were about 50% ALA staff and 50% members. ALA retained The Otter Group and Kathleen Gilroy to facilitate the process. Michael Stevens and Jenny Levine served as the faculty. The group was divided into 10 teams, each with their own topic. I served on Team 9 with our own LITA Blog Guru, Michelle Boule, Mary Taylor (LITA Executive Director), and Sherry Vanyek, (ALA Director of ITTS). Our topic was Integrating Library Services Into Search Engines. We used our topic as the first to appear on the new LITA Wiki which can be found at http://wikis.ala.org/LITALibrary2.0/index.php/Main_Page . There is no concensus on the use of…
First Days on the Job as LITA President
The ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans was an awe-inspiring experience on many levels. I was so overwhelmed by the gratitude of the New Orleaneans who could not have done a better job of making the 16,000+ visitors comfortable. New Orleans has a huge struggle ahead as the recovery has only begun. ALA set the example to the world that we believe in the city and want to help as much as possible in its recovery. Librarians not only helped economically by coming to the city, but many donated time and energy through volunteer service. I am proud to have attended the conference and even prouder that ALA chose to keep the conference in New Orleans. I began my LITA Presidency at the end of the day on Tuesday, June 27. I want to thank Pat Mullin for all he did in the past year as President. He has been…
LITA Town Meeting Summary and Action Items
The following are the suggestions that came out of the LITA Town Meeting which focused on the education goal. (Thanks to Pat Ensor and Michelle Boule for their summaries on the LITA Blog.) The following is my summary along with action items discussed at the Spring meeting of the LITA Executive Committee. Many action items are already underway. 1. A LITA Wiki — to share expertise, what people are working on, what they’re familiar with, share the knowledge of LITA members, what products they work with. 2. It was noted that attendance at regional institutes had dropped. One idea was to plan some around other organizations’ conferences. 3. Webcasting seems like a good way to go — the kind of thing where someone can pay to receive a feed and have other people view/listen to it. This would be especially good for hot topics where quickly-produced, timely coverage is needed….
Impressions from CNI
As the LITA Representative to the Coalition for Networked Informationn (CNI), I had the privilege of attending the Fall 2005 (Dec. 5-6) and Spring 2006 (April 3-4) CNI meetings. CNI meetings are always professionally invigorating. Cutting edge work is being reported on. As its name suggests, networking is key to the success of these meetings and CNI in general. CNI is a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE and has about 200 member institutions from higher education, publishing, networking and telecommunications, information technology, government agencies, foundations, museums, libraries, and library organizations. I will not attempt in this report to summarize the presentations as they can all be found on the CNI site. In fact, it would be impossible for me as one person to adequately cover this meeting as there are 7-8 reporting sessions offered in each time slot except for the keynote speakers at the…
Town Meeting Discussion on LITA Education Initiatives
One of LITA’s 3 strategic objectives is ‘to educate’. LITA seeks your input on how to meet this objective through this blog and at the LITA Town Meeting at the ALA Mid-Winter conference on January 23. Please participate in making your organization work for you!