LITA National Forum

As usual, this year’s LITA National Forum, “Technology with Altitude,” was full of new projects and ideas to enhance library services. The majority of presentations at LITA tend to be by academic institutions; however, there is a great deal that is relevant to public libraries. Several themes emerged over the course of the conference:

• Next Gen Catalog design: single interface overlays that combine searching (faceted browsing) and retrieval (ILL)

• User centric design: going to where our customers are, instead of expecting them to come to us. Connecting users to resources in a way that they understand.
  

• Ongoing need to continue to change and transform existing systems: find new out of the box ways of doing things that will involve users and make it easier for them to use our systems.

Session Summaries:

Keynote Session: The Scientific and Social Challenges of Global Challenging by Jeffrey Kiehl

LITA typically features a keynote presentation of local interest to the host city. This year featured a session on global warming, looking at the history and future of climate change, the role that humans play in affecting this change, and the dissemination of information about it. The speaker emphasized the need to insert personal narrative in delivering information; basic information is not enough. You need to know who is delivering the information, how it’s delivered, and know your audience’s beliefs and values in order to have affect.

5 Months to Worldcat Local

This session described University of Washington’s participation in a pilot project using Worldcat Local as their public catalog interface to search 3 catalogs and 4 databases, as well as make requests from their ILL systems. Worldcat Local is a Next Gen catalog overlay. The rationale behind such using such catalog interfaces is that we have too many silos of information resources, and we do not have any clearly marked path from each silos. By using this kind of interface, it brings the silos together in one place for the user. Peninsula Library System (CA), a consortium of public and community college libraries, is also piloting this software. Using this new interface resulted in an increase of borrowing and requests.

Enhancing the Opac

During this presentation, 2 community colleges described how they have customized their Sirsi systems to allow keyword searching of the subject headings and to enable their customers to tag the items in the collection, as well as write reviews in the catalog.

Keynote: The future is not out of reach by David King

This presentation focused on the types of transformations that are occurring in Web 2.0, including comments, friending, content, tagging, web as a platform, and mashups. According to King, libraries need to embrace these transformations in order to have relevance to the next generation. We can do this by teaching information literacy, saving time using new tech tools, participating as a community leader. We need to make the time and change our focus to accomplish this. In 5 years time, there will be even more change, more interaction, more participation, more personalization, more multimedia, more mobile connections, and easier design.

http://library2.0

Library 2.0 is thinking outside of the box to get things done, and the presenter gave a demonstration of 3^rd party tools that can be used on library websites. Using Charlie Brown’s The Great Pumpkin as a metaphor, he told a tale of a transformed 2.0 website. The benefits are many with a small investment – users will keep coming back if content is fresh, and they will be able to access the data how they want and reuse it. Specific tools of interest: delicious, rsscalendar, feed2js.

LibX

A VA Tech librarian partnered with the Computer Science department to build Firefox and IE toolbars for users that will allow them to search the library catalog as well as connect to the library catalog from sites such as Google, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, NYT, and Yahoo. They have used all open source software for this project, and make this product available for free for other libraries to use and adapt to their own catalogs and users.

Let the Cat out the Box
Library customers do not come to libraries first for information, and they do not search for fun. For the average customer, good enough is good enough, and they rely on friends, Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, etc. for their information. During this presentation, the speaker talked about staying relevant by embedding the library in the users’ space and finding new and creative ways to advertise and marketing by going where the users are. He demo’ed Facebook, course management systems, and other sites that libraries have used to create a presence.

Possible Projects for MCPL

Conversion of web links pages to a delicious format

Creation of feed2js feed for calendar of events

Creation of LibX toolbar for MCPL

Development of Facebook page

Further research into Next Gen catalogs and ILL systems