Category: 2005

Danah Boyd Danah does not hold back and she starts her talk by chastising librarians for some of our anti-Google stances and takes some swings at Michael Gorman for his remarks against “blog people.” “Librarians should not be the sole gate keepers of information.” People detest the gatekeeper and librarians present themselves as the only “real” gatekeepers. There are people squirming in the audience. Danah is challenging us and what we believe is “our” place. (I hope that some people will leave this session thinking about what we do and how we do it from a different point of view.) Blogs have greater increased the sheer amount of information out on the web. They are evolving and therefore are targets for those who do not understand the medium. The inflammatory rhetoric of those who rail against blogs are used to reduce the relevance and worth of blogs. Bloggers can provide…

Walk a block north of the conference hotel to the Tech Museum, where this exhibit of historic video games opened today. TheTech.org

In a meeting room far, far away… Mark Phillips from the University of North Texas Libraries spoke to a small gathering of LITA librarians who found their way to the remote Convention Center Meeting Room C1+C4 about web harvesting government information. If you imagine that it is a simple thing to do, you are wrong! Why would you even consider harvesting data from government websites? 96 percent of federal government information is now digital and much of it is not archived; much of it is disappearing at the direction of bureaucrats who do not know or follow any archiving directives. The University of North Texas Libraries (UNT Libraries) was contracted by the Government Printing Office (GPO) in 1997 to begin harvesting the web pages of government commissions that were filing final reports and agencies whose functions were ending. The result is the CyberCemetery, which archives the websites of 42 defunct…

Sean Cordes from Iowa State University Sean opens by talking about Pong, the Atari game that many of us grew up with, and makes the point that even though it is simple; it is still engaging. When we first started building web sites, we could envision the entire site in our heads, but now the complexity of the web and our sites are overwhelming (attributed to Peter Morville). I think this is sometimes the reason why our websites get out of our control and we end up with web sites, or tutorials, that do not make sense. Though we have to divide the labor because of the size of our sites, we also need to make sure that we do not become so specialized that we lose sight of the mission of the web site and organization. The mission has to be balanced within the structure of the library or…

Michael Doran from the University of Texas at Arlington presented this session about the process of creating, releasing, and licensing open-source software.

Roy’s opening keynote discusses lessons to be learned from Google and Amazon.

May Chang’s workshop on open source communication and collaboration tools, Thursday, Sept. 29.

I’m on the 25th floor of the San Jose Marriott. They gave me a room facing the right direction, towards the eastern hills. If you look out the other side of the building you have a choice of at least four different freeways to watch the traffic crawling along. On entering the Marriott, please go upstairs to the second floor to find the Forum meetings. There’s a map of the meeting rooms on the hotel website. You’ll also want to sign up in your room or at the front desk for your Internet access. This will also entitle you to a passcode for access to the lobby wireless.

If you are unsure of what to do Friday in San Jose, let me suggest the following: Come and watch Serenity with fellow geeks. There is a cinema within walking distance of the conference hotel and they are showing Serenity at 9:35. You can purchase a ticket online from Camera 12 Cinemas for the show. If you would like to join us and you get a ticket, drop a line to me in the comments here, email me, or find me Friday and we will arrange a meeting place. I’ll be wearing a Serenity ringer t-shirt and a big goofy grin.

San Jose State University’s School of Library and Information Science will hold a reception during LITA Forum: Saturday, October 1, from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. Marriott Arcadia Room All LITA Forum attendees are welcome. SLIS Associate Director Linda Main will host. Stop by, say hi, and grab some munchies!