2008

Gracelyn Cassell-2008 LITA Forum Travel Grant Winner

Gracelyn Cassell, Librarian, Montserrat, West Indies 2008 Errol Hill LITA Forum Travel Grant Winner LITA NATIONAL FORUM 2008 REPORT I was indeed fortunate to have been the Librarian from the Caribbean who received the 2008 Errol Hill Travel Grant to attend the LITA National Forum that was held in Cincinnati October 15 to 20, 2008. The process of preparing this report on my attendance at the Forum had me spending quite some time reflecting on the journey that led to the LITA National Forum in Cincinnati where I attended three general sessions and six of the concurrent sessions. It all started back in 1979 with my undergraduate studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica when students there were still using punch cards. On graduation in 1982, I started my library career in the Montserrat Public Library which became the local hub for regional initiatives in the…

2008

The Obligation of Leadership by R. David Lankes

The final keynote of the LITA National Forum 2008 “The Obligation of Leadership” can be found at Virutal Dave … Real Blog. If you missed it do check it out. You can choose how you want to experience it. David posted his slides, audio and video versions of the keynote on his website. If you were lucky enough to be there to experience it in person you may want to listen to it again. It was just as good the second time around.

2008

Course Management Systems: Integrating Library Content, Panel Discussion

Elizabeth Black, Ohio State University Don Kim, Murray State University Kim Duckett and Jason Casden, North Carolina State University Session Summary: A great sampling of creative tools and solutions! Anyone looking to find innovative ways to push library content through course management systems will find great ideas from these presentations. Note: any reference in this post to “CMS” indications “course management system,” NOT “content management system” (i.e., Drupal). Elizabeth Black, Ohio State University: The CMS in use at Ohio State is called Desire2Learn. It’s made by a Canadian vendor, and as at many institutions, the course management system is run by a University IT department (educational technologists). It was important that the project was a true collaboration between campus IT and the library; commitment and maintenance were very important, with mutual authority and accountability given and expected from both parties. The project was designed by a cross-departmental team. The team…

2008

Institutional Repositories: Design and Development, Panel Discussion

Developing and Institutional Repository: Implementation of DigiTool at Colorado State University Libraries Shu Liu, Colorado State University Yongli Zhou, Colorado State University The first panelists, Shu Liu and Yongli Zhou, describe implementing a IR through DigiTool, exLibris’s Digital Repository software and their talk focuses on using an out of the box product. Colorado State used contentdm from 01-present, but will migrate to digitool (which they’ve also been using since 07) by 09. Digitool has a series of web based client for the user and staff to interface with the the database. There are also access and maintenance components.Aspects of the digitool product can be customized, the icons, menu, header and footer, etc. They also did do some work customizing the metadata display and there were automated and manual ways to do these functions. They also implemented handles for their documents, though it was a bit difficult to implement and took…

2008

2008 National Forum: Don't make me choose!

During the second concurrent session, Jean Rainwater and Bonnie Buzzell from Brown University talked about the challenges involved in borrowing materials not located in their own collections. In “Don’t Make Me Choose! (or, Just Get What I Need!),” they showed how it took 33 clicks to borrow an item from another library within the multiple consortia they belong to, which is 9-10 times the number of clicks the typical user will put up with. Rather than waiting for vendors to come up with a solution, they decided to develop one in-house, even if it was only a partial solution. When a new University Librarian (i.e., head of the library) was hired, this person made simplifying the borrowing process a priority, and put together a team with different, complementary skill sets to do the job. The “guiding principles” for this project were that the system they developed had to be: Simplicity…

2008

2008 National Forum: A Homegrown CMS

With all the commerical and open source content management systems on the market, why would a library still choose to build their own? In 2006, the University of Houston Libraries did just that. Rachel Vacek discussed their rationale and effort in Putting the Library Website in Their Hands: The Advantages and Challenges of a Homegrown Content Management System. (Note: Rachel indicated her slides will be available on rachelvacek.com, but were not there as of this writing, or I didn’t go deep enough into her site.) UHL chose to develop their own CMS primarily because they wanted a system based on their vision of what a CMS is and should do, rather than modifying someone else’s. UHL feels that the CMS should be a growing and changing system. They felt that by building their own system their staff would be able to fix problems and incorporate customer feedback more quickly. They felt that by building their…

2008

2008 National Forum: Using Library Labs to Shorten Service Lifecycle

Libraries expend a majority their limited human and financial resources to bring new products and services to their customers. However, libraries STILL have the tendency to wait until these products or services are ‘prefect’ ready before they are officially released. The rapid change in technology and the pressures of external ‘competition’ is requiring libraries to shorten their service lifecycles. The number of libraries discussing the concepts of agile development, perpetual beta, and rapid prototyping is encouraging. The one thing that all of these approaches have in common is including customers as active participants in the development and/or testing of new products and services. To that end, a growing number of libraries have been building “Library Labs,” which are based on the Google Labs concept. This approach to service development was discussed in the presentation “Building a Web-Based Laboratory for Library Users” by Jason J. Battles and Joseph (Jody) Combs. The…

2008

Weiling Liu, Building Collaborative Web Applications with Drupal

Weiling Liu, University of Louisville (Kentucky) Session summary: An excellent demonstration of the modular and flexible nature of Drupal, an open-source web content management system. Drupal has featured prominently in library conferences recently; however, one of the strengths of Liu’s presentation was in the two project examples she used: managing news and events web content that comes from a variety of library staff; and creating a library conference application that collected conference proposals, turned the accepted proposals into a conference schedule, and provided a place to link to conference presentations after the conference. Also useful are her “Lessons Learned the Hard Way” (near the end of this post). Liu began by describing Drupal and showing examples of Kentucky-area library sites that use Drupal. She then described two projects that used Drupal to solve what were complicated projects with poor workflows: enabling library staff to post content about library news and…

2008

2008 LITA Forum: Library 2.0 PDQ

“Library 2.0 PDQ: Meeting the Challenges of the Rapid Growth of Distance Learning and Off-site Courses at a University Regional Campus” was presented by John J. Burke and Beth E. Tumbleson from Miami University Middletown in Miami, OH. Miami U’s regional campuses are at the forefront of its distance learning push. During 2007 and 2008, the state of Ohio and the Miami U main campus issued new challenges for its regional campuses for delivering education. As a result, the Middletown library has faced many changes. Middletown is a commuter campus which has been offering courses for 40 years. They offer courses primarily to nontraditional students; the average age of students is 24, and most of them work at least part time. In 2007, Ohio announced a New University System which aimed to increase the number of degrees among Ohioans, and to expand the role of regional campuses to help meet…

2008

Optimizing Library Resources for Screen Readers

LITA National Forum 2008 Presenter: Nina McHale, Auraria Library, University of Colorado Denver. The speaker started her presentation by sharing her experience navigating a website with a user with visual disability. She pointed out that even though the information structure on a website makes sense for us (the visual users), it does not necessarily make sense for users with screen readers. Making your website accessible is very important because the goal of a library is providing access and not providing barriers. Accessibility matters because: 10 million people in the US are blind or visually impaired; 1.3 million people are legally blind due to age or other health issues. screen readers are used by blind users as well as people with learning and physical disabilities. writing good code is good practice and makes the web pages more accessible to all. Nina pointed out why accessibility is an issue: proliferation use of…