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Isn't it great to be in the library… wherever that is?

President’s Program: Isn’t it great to be in the library… wherever that is? Sunday June 29th, 2008, 4:00pm – 5:30pm (I apologize in advance for the level of detail here. I wasn’t able to get online and post right away and so I’m working from my handwritten notes – which are difficult to read at times and a bit cryptic at others. So, while I think a few statements are worth providing, I can’t recall the exact context of them. Rather than trying to guess, I’m simply providing them as-is.) Joseph Janes, from the University of Washington and columnist for American Libraries, kicked off this session with a presentation about the evolution of libraries and how we can define what they are, followed by a panel discussion by the It’s All Good blogging team. Joseph Janes presentation: The evolution of libraries isn’t necessarily tied to technology. Instead, it relates to…

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LITA Top Technology Trends

This is going to have to be more of an experiential post than a factual one, I’m afraid… I attended the Top Tech Trends session and it held my attention throughout the whole thing – everything did. From the larger than life images of Karen Coombs and Sarah Houghton-Jan on one screen that flanked the live panel to the scrolling meebo chat room on the other screen, there was a lot to pay attention to! Karen and Sarah have already written up their trends on this very blog, so I see no point in duplicating their efforts – they can say it much better than I can anyway!

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Keeping Your Computers Running Session

In the one of the last session slots of the ALA Conference was a gem of a program geared toward smallish public libraries who have either no IT Department or a very small one. Diane Neal, North Carolina Central University, Brenda Hough, MaintainIT Project and Jennifer Lee Peterson, WebJunction were the panelists for the presentation. The session went from specific things that librarians can do to keep their technology running to a broader look at what resources are out there for troubleshooting specific issues, finding “best practices” and using free tools to plan and maintain your technology at a higher (library-wide, as opposed to a single machine) level. It started off with Diane giving a very nuts-and-bolts presentation about basic PC, printer and network troubleshooting. She went through the basic troubleshooting steps for your PC (reboot, check cables, discover “where it hurts” on the machine…) and then did the same…

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The Open Library: Realizing the Promise and Mitigating the Peril

Cindy Gibbon, Access Services Coordinator of Multnomah County Library (MCL), Oregon, opened the discussion about privacy and intellectual freedom in a web 2.0 world by sharing the results of a study of MCL’s users. Some things MCL users said they want: Notification when requested items are added to the catalog Public comments and recommendations of books read Blogs, podcasts, reference via instant messaging Text message alerts Saved lists of titles checked out or of interest RSS feeds Ability to communicate online with other library patrons She then shared some compelling data from the December 2007 Pew Internet & American Life Project Survey about the ubiquity of mobile communications technologies. The bottom line: MCL patrons want a 2.0 library experience. Some library patrons indicated that it is important to them that their library records remain private, and some did not. Cindy pointed out that it is librarians’ responsibility to protect patrons’…

2008

Building and supporting Koha

Building and Support Koha, an open-source ILS Saturday June 28th, 2008, 10:30-12:00 Hyatt Regency Orange County John Houser, Senior Technology Consultant for PALINET, and Johsua Ferraro, CEO of Liblime, set out to answer common questions about open-source ILS systems with a focus on Liblime’s support for Koha. The format was an interview, and the resulting questions and answers were recorded. Watch for a link to the podcast version here. Representative questions and answers follow, but these are only samples of an extremely rich discussion of general and very specific technical details. Cost Don’t necessarily plan to save lots of money on an open-source ILS, as planning to contribute to development efforts has many advantages–primarily that you get to set the priorities for new features in the ILS. A representative of a Koha library in the audience pointedly disagreed, stressing that in his case there were significant cost savings. How does…

2008

Open Source Legal Issues

Monday, June 30th, 2008 Hyatt Regency Orange County Walt Scacchi of UC-Irvine stepped in as a last-minute replacement speaker for Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Law Center and gave a talk entitled “Research Results for Free/Open Source Software Development: Best Practices for Libraries? (and some legal issues too)” based on his empirical research on open-source project processes, practices, and community development . The talk was rich in details on who open-source developers are and what they do. Using the current stats at Sourceforge as a starting point, he estimated approximately 180,000 current open-source software projects, of which approximately 18,000 (10%) are currently being succesfully developed. The largest area of open-source development is in games, in large part driven by the fact that the very successful Sony game systems are built using open-source software. Open-source developers tend to use the tools they build, which is not necessarily the case for…

2008

Open Source Open Services – Emerging Technology Interest Group

Joe Ford convened the Emerging Technology Interest group managed discussion on “Open Source, Open Services” Darrell Gunter began by discussing Collexis research projects and applications for libraries. Fascinating work is being undertaken on computationally derived ontology, what Collexis refers to as Fingerprinting. [Bibliographic ontology (like FRBR or FRAD not getting any play in the semantic portion of the presentation). ] Screenshots of tools (presentation slides to be posted to the LITA wiki) included the Knowledge Dashboard, which is being used for Hypothesis Generation by scientists. Biomedexperts.com discussed as a Collexis partner with tools for researchers including expert visualization, social network graphs of who is publishing with whom. Asklepios Group discussed as a user of collexis tools which utilizes mobile technology for patient-side consultation and comparison of relevant treatments. I would characterize Collexis methodology as relying on computationally derived indexing for data visualization (btw-the intellectual foundations of LIS exist (partly) in…

2008

Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Anaheim

We got a great crowd of around 20 people for our Drupal ‘Birds of a Feather’. The above is a shot of everybody in the BIGWIG Bloggers’ room — just before we got kicked out by some group from YALSA (bums, we’ll get even)! (We then proceeded to the next available empty room and had our get-together there.) First up on the agenda was setting up the Drupal IG, making sure we have enough signatures and asking for volunteers to serve as Chair and Co-Chair. For the first year, Leo Klein (i.e. me) graciously volunteered to serve as chair and Ian Chan as co-chair. The name for the IG is ‘Drupal4Lib’ and our purpose is “to promote the use and understanding of the content management system, Drupal, by libraries and librarians”. Next on the agenda was the true meat-and-potatoes of the BoF: shooting the breeze about Drupal and demonstrating a…

Top Technology Trends

Virtual Karen's Top Tech Trends

Sarah Houghton-Jan (see her summary and trends) and I participated in Top Tech Trends virtually this past Sunday. It was a blast. I had a little easier time hearing than Sarah, although hearing myself speak was slightly disconcerting. I really enjoyed talking with people in the back channel Meebo chat room. Though some people pointed out that that was distracting from the panelist present in person. APIs Galore Let’s be realistic APIs have hit their stride on the web at large. In libraries they are starting to come into their own as well. However, our focus in libraries has thus far been on bibliographic data. This isn’t the only data of value out there. Libraries need to think about how to use APIs to get digital objects like photos and videos in and out of web-based media service providers like Flickr and Blip.tv . If we do this we will…

2008

Top Technology Trends from Sarah Houghton-Jan, ALA 2008

I had a lovely time presenting virtually, despite the sound issues on all ends. It still was a rather successful demonstration of virtual participation, and I think that was wonderful. Big thanks to Maurice York for organizing this for myself and Karen. I have 5 Trends I’d like to throw out there. I was able to cover three of them (#s 1-3) in the live presentation, but apparently the echo in the room made parts of what I said difficult to hear. So, here’s what I said verbatim, near as I can remember (plus the bonuses of #s 4 and 5). Let’s hit it. #1: Bandwidth Every library complains about bandwidth. Many people have faster access at home than at the library, which is a reversal of what we used to see when people came into the library to use our connections. The problem is multimedia, which is wonderful, but…