2006

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….

2006

ALA President's Program

This important program had more than a little schizophrenic feel to it. People obviously came to hear big name author and PBS commentator Michael Codrescu, but his remarks had little to do with the title of the event, or with Michael Gorman’s focus on library education. That was how it should be, but it divided the program focus quite dramatically and creating an event with a marked split personality.

2006

Internet Resources Interest Group Meeting

Chair Laura Cohen summarized the purpose and mission of this interest group and reviewed the programs it has presented at ALA Annual Conferences in recent years. Plans for the 2006 Annual Conference program were reviewed. This program will be in debate format. Program title: “The Ultimate Debate: Who Controls the Future of Search?” The roster of panelists is complete: Roy Tennant, moderator, with Stephen Abrams and Joe Janes, debaters. The IG has coordinated its plans with the LITA Program Planning Committee (PPC), which has been very helpful in shaping the program. Holly Yu, Vice-Chair, will attend the PPC meeting at this conference to give the committee an update on our plans. The debate will be guided by a series of questions posted to the panelists by the moderator. The panel will prepare the questions beforehand. It was suggested that these questions be posted on the LITA blog in advance of…

2006

LITA/OCLC and LITA/LSSI Minority Scholarship Committee Meeting

Sunday, January 22nd, 8 – 9 am, Gonzalez Convention Center, Room 206B Four committee members and Valerie Emonds-Merritt, ALA staff liaison, attended the meeting. Debra Kurtz, Committee Chair, explained the selection procedures, with the additional notes from the previous chair, Adriene Lim, and Valerie. Debra distributed selection criteria, which are grouped into four categories. She also passed a timetable for this year’s process. Deadline for the applications is March 1st. The Committee members will start receiving application materials in March and will conduct the selection via e-mail and conference calls. The winner will be announced prior to ALA Annual.

2006

IG Chairs Meeting

The meeting started with introductions. There were 21 people in attendance representing 13 IG’s. Margaret Kelly from Bylaws and Organization spoke briefly about IG renewals. IG’s now have a new renewal form. Any IG that is up for renewal should have already been contacted by Margaret. Matt Calsada, the IG Coordinator will be posting a list to the LITA website of IG’s and their respective renewal years after the midwinter meeting. Gail Clement from the Program Planning Committee distributed a handy guide to LITA programming which will be posted to the IG’s web page under Resources for IG Chairs. Gail urged chairs to discuss their future plans for managed discussions with the PPC. The only way to have something tracked in the conference handbook is by going to the PPC to discuss your discussion. The PPC can also help with fine tuning a program or discussion and also aid in…

2006

OCLC Symposium – Part 4

I really saved the very best for last. Antony Brewerton from Oxford Brookes University Library, UK (not only does he have a delightful accent, but he has a great sense of humor and keeps the audience laughing) We need to change the perspective of libraries and reach people from different backgrounds at a local level. Antony spends a lot of time looking at particular comments in the OCLC study to highlight the fact that people think libraries are only about books and they may not use our other resources because of that belief. Libraries are different things to different people and we should market to them all accordingly. He then says something that seems to be the advice of the day: We should be customer oriented not product oriented. At Oxford Brookes, they have a team in the library whose primary function is marketing. Their marketing was informaed by their…