A special membership town hall meeting has been called for Saturday, January 24th, 2009 from 3:00 to 4:30 in the Colorado Convention Center Four Seasons Ballroom. (which is also where ALA Council meets) What library issues are most important to ALA members to share with President Obama? Â The ALA Town Hall Meeting will discuss this topic on Saturday, Jan. 24, 3 PM to 4:30 PM, in the Four Seasons Ballroom at the Colorado Convention Center. Share your views at the Town Hall Discussion wiki. http://wikis.ala.org/midwinter2009/index.php/Town_Hall_Discussion
Category: 2009
Eric Lease Morgan's Top Tech Trends for ALA Mid-Winter, 2009
This is a list of “top technology trends” written for ALA Mid-Winter, 2009. They are presented in no particular order. Indexing with Solr/Lucene works well – Lucene seems to have become the gold standard when it comes to open source indexer/search engine platforms. Solr — a Web Services interface to Lucene — is increasingly the preferred way to read & write Lucene indexes. Librarians love to create lists. Books. Journals. Articles. Movies. Authoritative names and subjects. Websites. Etc. All of these lists beg for the organization. Thus, (relational) databases. But Lists need to be short, easily sortable, and/or searchable in order to be useful as finding aids. Indexers make things searchable, not databases. The library profession needs to get its head around the creation of indexes. The Solr/Lucene combination is a good place to start — er, catch up. Linked data is a new name for the Semantic Web –…
LITA Town Meeting
LITA President-Elect Michelle Frisque invites LITA members to the LITA Town Meeting, Monday, January 26, 2009, 8:00 am – 10:00 am, Colorado Convention Center, Korbel Ballroom 2C. Meet your fellow LITA members, and participate in a conversation about what role LITA plays in the larger information, association, community-building, and technology- related landscape. What makes LITA unique? Special guests from other organizations that are involved in the technology related landscape will also attend and participate in the discussion. Rick Lugg and associates from R2 have graciously offered their services and will be facilitating the discussion. Other participating organizations include: American Society for Information Sciences & Technology (ASIS&T) http://www.asis.org/ Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/alcts.cfm Digital Library Federation http://www.diglib.org/ OCLC http://www.oclc.org Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/index.cfm TAIGA http://www.taigaforum.org/
LITA Happy Hour in Denver
Friday, January 23, 2009, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm Please join the LITA Membership Development Committee and members from around the country for networking, good cheer, and great fun! Expect lively conversation and excellent drinks. Lodo’s Bar & Grill 1946 Market Street Denver, CO, 80202 303.293.8555
LITA Workshop in Denver
LITA is offering User Centered Design for Digital Projects prior to ALA’s Midwinter meeting in Denver on Friday, January 23, 2009, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm. Learn about design process for managing digital projects in libraries, usability theory and methodology. Receive practical steps to implement a design process in your own library plus a copy of presenter Brenda Reeb’s latest book, Design Talk: Understanding the roles of usability practitioners, web designers, and web developers in user centered web design. You do not need to attend the Midwinter Meeting to register for the workshop. Visit the ALA Conference Services Web site to register: http://www.ala.org/ala/conferencesevents/upcoming/midwinter/2009/registration.cfm To add a workshop to your existing Midwinter registration: Call ALA Registration at 1-800-974-3084 OR use your log in and password to access your existing Midwinter registration using the online registration form: http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=Events&Template=/CFApps/Experient/Redirect.cfm Add events in the “Your Events†section; check out and pay for the events…
LITA IG plans at Midwinter 2009
Seven of the 17 LITA Interest Groups responded to repeated requests for their plans at the 2009 ALA Midwinter Meeting. You’ll find those plans here, on the LITA Wiki. One of the other ten IGs has since noted that it’s not meeting at all during Midwinter. That leaves nine unaccounted for–nine IGs for which one of the following must be true: The IG doesn’t actually exist, or has no chair, or the chair never reported an email address to LITA. The chair won’t deal with email or lists because, you know, they’re so 20th century. The (repeated) request to provide a one-paragraph email response required an unconscionable amount of effort and was ignored. The IG has no plans. The IG has no interest in attracting new members. Which of those is true for each of the nine remaining non-responding IGs? Your guess is as good as mine. NOTE: Don’t send…