Category: ALA Annual Conferences

(From LITA-L): The PowerPoint slides and resource list from the “Policies and Practices of Institutional Repositories” program at Annual 2005 are available on the Emerging Tech. Interest Group site.

In which I summarize the excellent program on Shibboleth from Saturday afternoon, June 25th, though it be a full week after the fact.

Added more notes and picture to Greenstone post. Added lots more pictures to OCLC Bloggers post. Didn’t blog the LITA awards reception earlier, so I’ll just post a photo from it here: Apparently wherever there was free food, I was there with the camera 🙂

6/25/2005 RUSA/MARS User Access to Services Committee Do You Trust Your IT Staff? Do They Trust you? Talk about a topic close to my heart! Though somehow, in thinking about it before the conference, in my mind it morphed into “Does Your It Staff Hate You?” In fact, around Wednesday, I had to talk to someone in IT via phone, and I asked him if he hated me. He said no. Do I trust him enough to believe him? /humor This program was held on the fourth floor of McCormick, which had had a power failure. No elevators or escaltors, few lights, no A/C. I felt like I was in a Gibson novel as I traveled long, seemingly endless, dark service corridors and stairs. Maybe it was Stephenson? Heinlein? When my friend and I finally encountered humans, I said, “Our kind!” There were four panelists. If you want the names,…

Frances Maloy, ACRL President, 2004-2005, opened the ACRL President’s Program on Monday, June 27, 2005 with a report on the year in review and a statement on the organization’s progress that brought cheers and applause. Frances set the stage for a terrific program saying, “After being President for a year, I have concluded that ACRL rocks!” Awards and Speakers The 2005-2006 President-Elect, Camilla Alire, was introduced. She noted marketing and advocacy to be her passions and priorities for the upcoming ACRL year. Awards were presented to libraries and librarians who demonstrate excellence and employ best practices. A humorous video created by Pierce College Library followed and introduced the members of their 2005 Excellence in Academic Libraries Award-winning institution. The Time for a Reality Check: Academic Librarians in a TiVo®-lutionary Age program speakers presented next as a panel. Beloit College Mindset List Tom McBride, Keefer and Keefer Prof. of Humanities, Beloit…

Part 2 speakers: Ann Caldwell and Terry Reese

In this second half of a 4 hour (!!) program, the presenters included a fair amount of tools demo’ing.

Part I: William Moen, Marty Kurth and Rebecca Guenther

This was an extremely dense but immensely useful session; PowerPoint presentations will be available online at the ALCTS site some time soon (as of June 28 they are not yet linked).

Thankfully this RFID session was much warmer than the experts panel at the Hotel Intercontinental the previous day. Interestingly, I found it to be less well attended. About half of the seats in the ballroom were filled up. I suspect that the LITA top technology trends program drew a lot of potential audience members away. Overall I found the panelists — Jim Lichtenberg, Jackie Griffin, and David Molnar — to be entertaining and informative. I was familiar with much of the content but learned there is still work to be done as privacy issues have not yet been completely resolved in library RFID. Lichtenberg, a library technology consultant and regular Library Journal contributor, provided an overview of the technology. We’re still at a point where many librarians don’t fully understand how the technology operates and so this explanation was welcome even if it was a bit repetitive for the more…