Category: 2006

Sunday, June 25th, 2006 8-10am Hilton New Orleans Riverside – Burgundy Introductions – Attending: Pat Ensor, Mike Bolam, Kate Montgomery, Richard Kim, James Longwell-Stevens, Jennifer Weintraub, Kari Swanson, Howard Spivak, Christina Biles, Bonnie Postlethwaite. Howard Spivak was the only member present who was outgoing, so pat gave him his certificate of recognition for his service to the committee and thanked him. Approval of minutes – see http://tinyurl.com/n3vpf; minutes were approved. Membership Report: 2006 membership is 4056, down 3.05% from 2005 (at Midwinter, it was down 7.21% year over year) Items of interest from ALA Membership Committee (pat attended part of their Saturday meeting) – They and BARC are going to be occupied with following a Council directive to project the resources that would be needed to do a study of changing to a graduated dues structure based on salary. Then there will be a decision on whether or not to…

Opening General Session The following is a summary of the Opening General Session, with selected excerpts of remarks by New Orleans mayor C. Ray  Nagin, and keynote speaker Madeleine Allbright. Welcome from President Michael Gorman: “We’re proud of our diversity, united by our common values.” Next came

Over half the group has laptops upon the lap. It is quite amusing. These are just notes from our business meeting, so they are very informal. BIGWIG is the blogging, interactive media, wiki, and social software interest group of LITA. We have our program Monday at 10:30, Next Stop Blogging. (added later: which went grrreeeat!) Agenda Consider program for 2007 Hosting Publishing policy Flickr account is linked to a Yahoo ID and Yahoo does not have a great privacy policy – do we need to talk about this? Health of the blog In between meetings Standards category Officers category Wiki During the intros, Karen Schneider gets beignet powder on her laptop and there is much hilarity. Chris Strauber gets a picture, so it is out there somewhere. There is a LITA Wiki! The LITA education committee has content for the wiki and was wondering if this group would take on…

We Are Here. Where Are Our Users? Cathy De Rosa OCLC VP, Marketing and Library Services John Horrigan Pew Internet & American Life Project [My comments are in brackets. I might have to change batteries halfway through the program. Just a warning.] Where are the connections and disconnections between us and our users? Cathy goes first: It is easy to miss the things that are all around us. [We are immune to them because we see them each day.] Cathy spends some time showing us some of the things that have come from the OCLC environmental scan. Only about 1% of users start on our web pages when looking for something. In 1950, a similar study of library use showed that only 1% of the people said they would ask a librarian about a topic. Not much has changed in 50 years. For real change, there has to be behavioral…

LITA’s Emerging Technologies Interest Group met Monday morning and reveled in a successful audiobooks panel which discussed Playaway devices, Netlibrary offerings and other items in a well-attended session. It was interesting to hear how Apple has not been involved w/ ALA & has not had a booth in 4 years; they did not wish to participate in the panel. A discussion ensued about podcasting and how it can be seen as a narrowly focused term. Eric Ipsen, outgoing chair of the SIG discussed a need to discuss “push” technologies which get library information into the hands of users without having them come to us in physical libraries. He remarked that we need to use a term like “pod learning” to truly describe all of the possibilities of podcasting. Since kids communicate in bursts, Eric says, through IM’s and cell phone text messages, they have an ongoing knowledge of what others…

Just when I needed it (e.g. the ALA convention) I found I had lost my credentials for the LITA Blog, so I’ve been posting summaries of meetings on a personal blog, the Disruptive Library Technology Jester. Michelle has reset my password (thanks, Michelle!), but rather than reposting entire entries here I’ll just include a summary and a link to the DLTJ entry. (You really didn’t think I’d try to jam all four reports into one blog posting, did you?) It’s All About User Services: A Summary and Commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting A summary and commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting. What I tried to do is collate comments from the panel members and add my own commentary (marked off from the rest of the summary) where I thought I had something useful to add. The summary is broken down into “Evolution and Interim Solutions,”…

Ipsen Q: What kinds of libraries do audience members work at? (About half and half public and academic libraries, with a few school and special) Q to panel: How do you make your money? The service? The device? Potash: We’re a solutions provider. Libraries came to us and said this is what we want–as much popular stuff as possible. We want to control presentation and use. Two revenue models: system fees for integration with ILS and Marc records; partnerships with publishers to resell material (digital costs are lower than print); can also provide a digital repository with no content. Like a digital vending machine you can set up exactly how you want. 9000 audio books from many publishers, many in foreign languages. Celeste: We make things and sell them. Licensing content and reselling it in a new form. Or working with the publisher to distribute their content. Business model uncomplicated,…

Audiobook 3.0: the converging of the mobile lifestyle media platform Monday June 26 8-noon Speakers: Christopher Celeste, CEO PlayAway Steve Potash, CEO Overdrive Gillian Harrison, OCLC/NetLibrary Intro by Eric Ipsen, ETIG (Emerging Technology Interest Group) chair (about 50 people at start, growing to capacity as the session went on) Background: Ebook 3.0 was the former title of this session. Sony was very interested in coming and didn’t want to upset ALA, but are very concerned to get the rollout of their new ebook reader right for an important audience. Each of the presenters here does both ebooks and audio books. Goal: a conversation, not a vendor forum. Encouragement to ask tough questions (and for panelists not to be defensive) Steve Potash, Overdrive CEO (Cleveland OH) Digital book publishing for twenty years. Downloadable audio books. Software company. Originally diskettes, then CD-ROMs. Some evolution since then. Digital warehousing service for 500 publishers….

Crowd at Next Stop Blogging Program Originally uploaded by pix4lita.