2005 LITA National Forum: Conference Report

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/07419050510644301
Date01 December 2005
Published date01 December 2005
Pages4-6
AuthorColby Riggs
Subject MatterLibrary & information science
2005 LITA National Forum:
Conference Report
Colby Riggs
4LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 10 2005, pp. 4-6, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050510644301
The 2005 LITA National Forum,
was held in San Jose, California from
September 29-October 2, 2005. The
Forum is a three-day educational event
that includes preconferences, general
sessions, and more than 30 concurrent
sessions. The forum theme was ``The
ubiquitous web: personalization,
portability, and online collaboration.''
In general the forum is considered a
``small'' conference but provides an
excellent opportunity for networking
with LITA leaders, forum speakers and
peers. The forum in addition to the
programming activities holds a Sponsor
Showcase which this year had 12
sponsors on hand to discuss their latest
products and services.
The forum opened with three
informative pre-conferences. May
Chang, web development librarian,
North Carolina State University
presented a half-day preconference
titled ``Open source communication
and collaboration tools.'' This
preconference explored new web-based
applications in the areas of
communication and collaboration. The
pre-conference workshop focused on
lightweight and practical tools which
are readily available as open source
software, and can be easily
implemented in libraries as part of
public and staff services. These
applications included discussion
forums, weblogs, RSS feeds, wikis, and
instant messaging systems.
The full day preconference focused
on the Greenstone digital library
software in a presentation by Ian
Witten, professor at the University of
Waikato, ``Building digital library
collections with the Greenstone
librarian interface.'' This pre-
conference demonstrated how digital
library collections can be produced and
customized with the new Greenstone
librarian interface. Witten described the
basic features of the interface which
allows users to add documents and
metadata to collections, create new
collections whose structure mirrors
existing ones, and build collections and
put them in place for users to view and
several of the more advanced
functionalities.
The ``Moving image collections''
(MIC) preconference was presented by
Grace Agnew, AUL for Digital Library
Systems at Rutgers, and Jane Johnson,
the MIC Project Manager at the Library
of Congress. Their expertise in moving
image collections is based on their
experiences in the MIC (http://mic.
loc.gov). The MIC is a collaboration of
the Library of Congress and the
Association of Moving Image
Archivists (AMIA). MIC integrates a
union catalog, archive directory, and
informational resources in a portal
structure delivering customized
information on archival moving
images, their preservation, and the
images themselves to a number of
diverse constituencies. The pre-
conference explored best practices for
describing and preserving moving
images and digital video using
metadata, as well as MIC's extensive
metadata strategy for making digital
resources accessible and useful to
different audiences.
The forum attendees were treated to
four keynote speakers this year. Roy
Tennant, of the California Digital
Library (CDL) presented ``Googlezon,
Episode VI: return of the librarians or
the end of the world as we know it.''
This presentation was about the ever
present ``Google'' search engine and
how it is encroaching on the traditions
of librarianship. Tennant stated it is
hard to predict the future and the world
moves at an incredibly face pace. In his
talk, Tennant outlined where librarians
need to be going and the strategies to
get there in this rapidly changing
environment. He said much of what we
do as librarians is being questioned,
replaced or ignored and it is time for
librarians to get our acts together. He
believes we must act as though our jobs
are on the line and must remake
librarianship to fulfill our goals in
entirely new ways and using entirely
new methods. He asked, ``What does
this means in real terms?'' ``Howdo we
need to respond to challenges and
opportunities?'' We need to borrow
concepts from ``good systems'' that we
can use to improve our own library
systems. He used the example of the
RLG Red Light Green Project to
illustrate this concept.
Tennant argued that we should stop
spending time tweaking systems that are
deeply and systemically broken,
outmoded or ineffective. We should
take the time and energy and redirect
our resources to better solutions. He
stated that as a profession we need to be:
.user focused;
.organizationally agile; and
.professionally flexible.
He suggested that we need to build
modular and interoperable library
systems and will need to collaborate
more deeply and more thoroughly than
ever before.
Dana Boyd, a graduate student from
the University of California-Berkeley
presented ``Blogging outloud: shifts in
public voice.'' She outlined the
relationship between information
technology and people and expressed
the key value of librarians as possessing
a deep understanding of this
relationship. She next described the
environment of blogs and how they
represent the way things are changing.
She stated, the blogshere is doubling
every five months and generating huge

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