Digitization Projects at UNLV Libraries

Thoughts from ALA: the happiest conference on earth?

2008-07-03T22:59:06Z

Well, maybe not everyone agrees...but since my lodging was within a stone's throw of Disneyland and I could hear the screams from the roller coaster from my hotel patio, there was a certain added thrill to the 2008 ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim.

So how was this year's conference and what did I accomplish in my four days? Lots of running around looking for conference rooms (anyone else find the Disneyland Hotel a total nightmare?), lots of vendors in the exhibits hawking their schwag, and fun times reconnecting with librarians from far and wide.

I arrived on Friday afternoon and was able to register and drop in on the very end of a committee meeting before heading out to grab some dinner and meet up with former colleagues. Saturday began the marathon race to fit in as much information and experience as possible in four days and after a quick tour around the exhibits, it was time to present one of my two poster sessions. The first one was a summary of how we built the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project digital library and the poster was well-received with lots of interest and questions. I think ALA puts the poster sessions in a somewhat buried area of the exhibits and there wasn't much foot traffic, but nonetheless I gave out handouts and bookmarks and talked to several folks that are also working on oral history projects. After lunch and a few aspirin to combat a wicked headache, I attempted to find the Digitizing Indian Country presentations. This was one of the few sessions directly related to digitization, and I do wish that there were more presentations to attend in my specific area. Often I digital collections topics are spread throughout LITA, ASCLA, ACLTS, and other random groups. The last session I attended Saturday was the Collaborative Digitization Discussion Group that turned out to be the most interesting and informative session I got to see.

Toby Graham (Director of the Digital Library of Georgia) talked about the Civil Rights Digital Library, an impressive digital collection that contains digitized content from Georgia (news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives) as well as serving as a comprehensive portal to other digital collections on the subject. The video included in this collection is amazing to watch and Mr. Graham did a great job summing up the process of building the collection. This presentation was followed by two speakers from ALA's Washington Office who specialize in copyright policy: Carrie Russell and Corey Williams Green. Both speakers did a great job of providing concise and informative updates on Orphan Works legislation and how this legislation may affect those of us doing digitization of works with uncertain copyright status. All in all there are still some worrisome notions in the various bills (i.e. a proposed "dark archive" of materials seems more than a bit problematic), but I am very glad to have more knowledge of the issues to help in making local decisions.

Saturday night I ventured out to a local Korean restaurant with some colleagues and co-workers. I couldn't tell you the name of it, since I don't read Korean, but it was off the beaten path and had some seriously tasty eats. Nothing like sitting around a table with hundreds of condiment plates and piles of searing meats (sorry vegetarians out there!) to dispel the mob-feeling of the ALA conference.

Sunday, I got up early and attended a breakfast for YA authors at my hotel. I talked with some librarians at the opposite end of my professional spectrum and enjoyed the change in conversation. After the breakfast I tried to attend a session on the Myers-Briggs Personality Types in the workplace, but ended up leaving early as the whole session was predicated on deep understanding of the Harry Potter characters, and I haven't read any of the books. Instead, I went to a research presentation put on by LRRT. The various speakers all presented research results from large library studies with very interesting topics (career tracking of LIS graduates, National Board Certification and achievement in school media centers, and information services during community disasters). After this meeting, I helped my co-worker set up for her poster session before taking a quick detour to the LITA Awards ceremony.It was really fun to see some extremely talented people be recognized for their work before I headed off to attempt to attend the Alumni Reception at the Disneyland Hotel. This was a bad experience that left me frazzled in the Sleeping Beauty Tower (not good!) and frustrated at the apparent lack of a Central Ballroom. Luckily, Downtown Disney was close by to explore before attending a lavish vendor party. I even made it back to the hotel in time to see the fireworks.

Monday I attended the CONTENTdm user group meeting which packed a lot of stuff into one morning session: breakfast, networking, two presentation, roundtable discussions and a product update that previewed the 5.0 release in the Fall, which promises a totally revamped Acquisition Station and Report Generator (among other enhancements). After the user group meeting, I met up with my co-presenters at the poster sessions for my second presentation entitled, "Sayonara Party Girl, Hello Real World: Surfing Into Library Technology Positions". Things went really well and we talked to several folks in our targeted demographic of recent graduates. Our data provided some encouragement with a healthy dose of reality and I think it was interesting for people to see. We rushed a bit to pack up and load the car for the return trip, but we all returned to Vegas without incident. I don't know if I could tolerate Anaheim for every conference, but I have to say that it was a interesting venue with fun options for kids of all ages.

Report from CONTENTdm Western User Group Meeting 2008

2008-06-11T14:41:59Z

Over the weekend, I joined two other library staff members at the CONTENTdm Western User Group meeting in Claremont, CA. The conference was generously hosted by the Claremont Colleges where we could stroll the gorgeous campus and network with fellow CONTENTdm users in between sessions.

This two-day conference began with an extremely content-packed session (perhaps it could have been divided into two?) that included overviews of two digitization projects. Of particular interest was the Washington Rural Heritage project that involved the leadership of the Washington State Library in mentoring small rural libraries to help get them started in digitization. The projects has been very successful in building grassroots support for digitizing content because Laura Robinson of the State Library had done an impressive job of reaching out to the community with information and technical support. The financial support of continuing state library grants help sustain the initial efforts and further build the collections. There was an additional presentation by the Claremont University Consortium about their digitized scrapbooks, and a vendor presentation on large-format scanning issues and challenges.

I came away from the second session thinking about how to structure collection in CONTENTdm, because while it is possible to purchase an "unlimited" item license, there is still a "collection" limit and this has presented problems for some institutions with extensive collections. The main issue is that it can be very difficult to merge collections because you must refer users to a new URL and they may have trouble locating content they depend on. In addition, it can be hard to navigate long, long, lists of collections. Good food for thought as we start to grow our program.CONTENTdm is increasingly being used for institutional repositories, and there was a presentation from Oklahoma State about how collections were transitioned between IRs...yet another data wrangling issue that is a headache, but can be accomplished.

The afternoon was a treat for me, because UNLV's own Alex Dolski unveiled his spatial search tool, ISIS and talked about the shortfalls of text searching maps. There was a general awe in the audience when he demonstrated the searching. It is always exciting to see what can be done by creative and talented developers like Alex and his co-presenter Eric Luhrs from Lafayette College. Eric showed his MetaDB tool and how their organization has used it to streamline decentralized web-based metadata creation.

That's was it for day one and we ended the day with a meal in the quaint Claremont Village at a place called Heros and Legends where you could shuck your peanuts on the floor and order monstrously-sized portions of bar food.

Day two started with an update on the new features we can expect in new versions of CONTENTdm; including: Unicode support, Powerpoint plug-in redesign (works with Office 2007!!), a revamped acquisition station, and improved image viewers. This is all good news as we have been anticipating these changes and hoping OCLC would respond.

The second morning session detailed the University of Utah's, U-SKIS repository inventory system, which is truly a fabulous tool that they are using to manage IR content. The tool allows them manage comprehensive research on publishers, status of author's documents, notes for staff, and archival copies while seamlessly integrating into CONTENTdm for presentation. It was shared that it is a priceless "teaching moment" for faculty on Utah's campus when they experienced the scholarly communication crisis first hand. Often the library's research into publisher policies would reveal that publishers only allow the peer-reviewed (not the final version) copies of the publication or no rights at all and faculty learned quickly about these challenges.

The final session was on getting the word out about digital collections and I was pleased to see that as of our last two collections, UNLV is using all the methods mentioned in the presentation. While, we have not moved into YouTube or Flickr, we do add links to Wikipedia to our content and web statistics show that referrals do come in from those links.

The afternoon was a developer's meeting and was lightly attended. There is much discussion of a shared workspace for CONTENTdm users to create a code repository or to seperate out "newbie questions' from customization/technical enhancement questions. There is also a need to improve CONTENTdm's reporting features and search results (faceted searching was often brought up). My co-workers and I ended the conference with a bike ride around Claremont and up into the foothills of the Claremont Wilderness Park. It was an enjoyable and informative meeting. Stay tuned for next year....

LOEX of the West Conference Starts Today at UNLV

2008-06-04T14:55:55Z

From the conference web site:

This intimate conference will feature programming highlighting the work of risk taking, game playing, fun-loving librarians and educators. Sessions in a variety of formats, including the experimental, will be creative and interactive and will showcase genuinely innovative approaches to helping students develop core information gathering and management skills.

Though the focus of the conference is library instruction, the keynote speaker, Greg Niemeyer, will talk about games and the learning process. Certainly a timely and interesting topic that could easily translate to the online environment and digital collections. I've noticed a rise in the frequency of interactive games (one example is the London Science Museum's game) and learning modules especially in online museum exhibits and this is definitely an area ripe for exploration as we seek to integrate primary materials and learning objectives into value-added digital collections.

Enjoy the conference!

Grant-funded Digitization Employment Opportunities at UNLV

2008-05-16T22:07:05Z

Recently, The University Libraries were awarded an LSTA grant to fund a new digitization project: Southern Nevada: The Boomtown Years 1900-1925. This project will focus on digitization of materials in our historic mining and railroad collections and will involve collaboration with local partners to identify content and make it more accessible through an online collection.

The Libraries are currently seeking candidates for the following two temporary grant-funded positions: a Digital Collections Metadata Specialist and an intern currently enrolled in the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Sciences program. More detailed information and required qualifications can be found on the Libraries' employment page.

This is a great opportunity to get involved in the full digitization life-cycle and work with a great team of people at the Libraries. Contact me for more information.

Spending a Little Quality Time with Metadata

2008-05-05T21:59:18Z

This week marks the start of an online course my employer was kind enough to pay for me to attend called "Metadata for You and Me: A Training Program for Shareable Metadata".

I was interested in taking this course for two main reasons: first, because in the world of digitization we spend a huge amount of time creating metadata on the item level for every digital object in out repositories and this equates to lots of dollars in staff time. So, I'd like to spend some time thinking about this investment and what type of returns it is providing for us. Are we agonizing over the right things? Spending too much time or detail? Using appropriate standards?

Secondly, we do indeed have the noble goal of providing accurate, easily discoverable, re-useable records but are we delivering the goods or deluding ourselves? What exactly does our metadata look like outside our own local repository and does it mind its manners? As much as I'd like to say that my metadata is a model citizen...I just don't really know. With more and more materials being aggregated with the goal of broader access, it's time to try and find out.

I logged into the on-line course this morning and printed out some of the readings for the first module. I couldn't help but draw attention to a fabulous article, Metadata For All: Descriptive Standards across Libraries, Archives, and Museums that worked miracles in helping me to understand what exactly we are talking about when we discuss metadata (especially across library, museum, and archives standards). It is also recent enough (2007) to provide up-to date information about recent trends and proposes a format-based way of looking at standards in the parallel disciplines. A very good read.

I will update this blog as I progress through the course and learn more!

UNLV Announces New Digital Collection: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project

2008-04-18T18:36:08Z

The University Libraries are pleased to announce the launch of a new digital collection:

The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project
http://digital.library.unlv.edu/ntsohp/

The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project documents the remembered past of persons affiliated with and affected by the Nevada Test Site during the era of Cold War nuclear testing. Through the Libraries' partnership with the UNLV College of Liberal Arts, a wide range of oral history interviews were organized to be presented in an digital collection representing diverse points of view including: scientists and engineers; labor and support personnel; military personnel and corporate executives; Native American leaders; peace activists and protesters; Nevada ranchers and communities downwind of the test site. The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project was directed by Mary Palevsky from September 2003 through July 2007 with funding from U.S. Depts. of Energy and Education. For the academic year 2007-2008 work on final interviews, the digital collection, and project website was supported by the University Libraries and the Department of History.

Nearly 200 full-text searchable transcripts and audio clips are now available in this digital collection. For more information about the collection, or to share your comments, please feel free to contact me via e-mail at cory.lampert@unlv.edu.

New Report on JPEG2000 Image Format

2008-02-21T18:55:38Z

Just released today, a new report by Robert Buckley and published by the Digital Preservation Coalition is titled, JPEG 2000 - a Practical Digital Preservation Standard? and addresses archival and preservation issues with the JPEG2000 format.

Aren't sure what JPEG2000 is all about? The report also does a good job of concisely explaining the attributes and advantages of the format:

A single architecture for lossless and visually lossless image compression
• A single JPEG 2000 master image can supply multiple derivative images
• Progressive display, multi-resolution imaging and scalable image quality
• The ability to handle large and high-dynamic range images
• Generous metadata support

With JPEG 2000, an application can access and decode only as much of the compressed image as needed to perform the task at hand.

JPEG 2000 also improves a user’s ability to interact with an image. The zoom, pan, and rotate operations that users increasingly expect in networked image systems are performed dynamically by accessing and decompressing just those parts of the JPEG2000 codestream containing the compressed image data for the region of interest.

Using a single JPEG 2000 master to satisfy user requests for dynamic viewing reduces storage costs and management overhead by eliminating the need to maintain multiple derivatives in a repository.

To see JPEG2000 files in action, try examining one of the maps in the Southern Nevada History in Maps collection. After selecting an image of interest, click on Zoom and Pan in the record and compare what is viewable by zooming in from the default size to 100% to see the amazing detail available.

Blending, Merging, Integrating: Librarians and IT Departments

2008-02-05T00:08:04Z

Check out this interesting article, Strains and Joys Color Mergers Between Libraries and Tech Units about the possibilities of merging librarians and IT departments to help provide user-centric services.

David W. Dodd, the CIO who arrived at Xavier University in 2005, said students and faculty members wanted three basic things: "Provide the services I'm looking for, in the manner I want, and get out of my way." They weren't getting any of them.

It doesn't look easy or comfortable, as you can see reflected in this quote from a failed merger:

Tensions arose when technology workers, ponytailed young men, began sharing the same office space with librarians, most of whom were older women, said Ms. Wagner. According to her account, the men brought in a huge microwave, were slobs, had messy cords dangling from equipment, and said they worked much harder than the librarians who left work at 4:30 and took breaks throughout the day.

While this may be a humorous quote, you can imagine some librarians being rocketed right out of their comfort zone as they experience being "blended" with IT staff. And it can be hard to imagine some IT departments ever refining their customer service skills to the standards most librarians pride themselves on. If this is the way things are headed we all need to start thinking about our current library culture and how we can integrate the best of both worlds to benefit our users.

New Hybrid Publication: Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries

2008-01-25T23:31:43Z

About a year ago I observed a group of New Media researchers from a variety of disciplines, including the UNLV School of Journalism, who came together to research the Consumer Electronics show, trade shows, and technology through a variety of academic disciplines. These scholars, working with the Center for History and New Media proposed an interesting methodology of "swarm" scholarship (spontaneous, "in the moment", data collection) combined with a hybrid publication of both a monograph and an evolving digital component (a wiki) to complement the content. This was the first time I was introduced to the idea, and shortly thereafter I was asked to collaborate with some of my UNLV colleagues on a book chapter for Library 2.0 Initiatives in Academic Libraries using many of the same techniques.

While writing about Library 2.0 was exciting, it was equally as intriguing to be part of a new type of dynamic scholarship that involved not only research, writing and editing, but also continuing updates and status reports on projects that, at this minute, are evolving and growing. There were times in the past year that I admit I became burned out on Web 2.0. I felt like it was everywhere and un-escapable; a trend that was going to be worn out by the time the book hit the publisher. But, the beauty of the hybrid project is that the projects detailed in the various chapters are not confined to the print their authors composed last year! They can be modified and reported upon as they mutate into new initiatives, are evaluated and refined, and as they transform from experiments into integrated library services. This is the most exciting thing about the Library 2.0 project. The print publication is available from ALA and the wiki will follow the projects through the next two years.

This type of hybrid research presents all sorts of interesting challenges and opportunities for libraries. How do we assist with this new type of research (topics that are a moving target or require timeliness and nimbleness, collaboration and new technological tools)? How do we as consumers of information adapt (if we can't just wait for it to be printed, cataloged, shelved and circulated)? And how do we preserve this new type of information resource into the future (is it ever really "finished"...)? I, for one, find these two projects compelling as they seem to give life and vitality to the somewhat stodgy and oppressive "traditional" world of publishing and provoke all sorts of interesting discussions of "Librarianship 2.0".

Attention LIS Students!

2008-01-24T22:31:47Z

I am a member of the ALA New Members Roundtable Student Chapter of the Year Award and I am trying to get the word out about this award. Please forward to any interested students you might know. Thanks!

Applicants Sought for the NMRT Student Chapter of the Year Award

Deadline: February 29, 2008

Calling All Student Chapters!

Has your chapter had an outstanding year? Has membership in your chapter increased? Did your chapter develop and provide opportunities for members to participate in interesting and rewarding activities? Has your chapter received any awards? Do you have outstanding officers or members who should be recognized nationally?

Apply for the *New Members Round Table Student Chapter of the Year Award*! Applying for this award is a great way to highlight the time, energy and creativity that your chapter has put forward in planning activities and increasing student involvement. The Award is presented in recognition of a chapter’s outstanding contributions to the American Library Association, their library school, and the profession. A winner and runner-up will be selected for the award. The Student Chapter winner will receive $1,000.00 to help defray travel expenses to ALA Annual, and the winning chapter, along with the runner up, will each receive a certificate. Both will be recognized at the Student Reception at ALA Annual. All interested applicants must be accredited ALA Student Chapters.

Please visit the NMRT Student Chapter of the Year Award website for more award information and application forms.

Library of Congress Images on Flickr

2008-01-17T18:50:52Z

One of my co-workers sent me an e-mail about this project and I think it is a really interesting experiment showing how the general public interacts with image collections in what they perceive as a non-library environment. To start you may want to visit the collection and browse around.

The LOC has also posted a good FAQ list that covers a lot of what I wanted to know when I heard about the project.

It is pretty amazing to read the extensive comments, explore the tagging going on (lots of international users!) and see how users are enthusiastically interacting with the collections.

What do you think? Should we do this with some of our institution's lesser-described and popular collections? Are any of your digital collections in Flickr?

New Digital Collection Announced: John Muir Journals and Drawings

2007-12-06T21:46:00Z

Announced to the CONTENTdm-listserve this week:

The University of the Pacific Library is home to the papers of John Muir, who as a famed naturalist writer, founder of the Sierra Club, and forefather of the environmental movement, is a significant figure in California and American history. Digital images of all of John Muir's journals and drawings in the Library's Special Collections are now accessible online. The journals consist of 78 volumes and over 7,000 pages written between 1867 and 1913. The drawings consist of 371 images. The journals in particular demonstrate the usefulness of creating additional zoom levels in CONTENTdm.

Just another example of the power digitization has to free content for a larger audience. Enjoy!

New Yorker Article on Digitization

2007-11-13T22:30:15Z

Check out this very well-written article Future Reading: Digitization and Its
Discontents from the New Yorker that raises many important points about digitization and the chances of ever achieving one universal digital library.

The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating.

OHA and Reflections on the Oral History Digitization Landscape

2007-11-06T15:32:13Z

October 24-28, I attended the Oral History Association Annual Meeting in Oakland, California. For those like myself, who are new to the world of oral history, the association:

...seeks to bring together all persons interested in oral history as a way of collecting and interpreting human memories to foster knowledge and human dignity. With an international membership, the OHA serves a broad and diverse audience. Local historians, librarians and archivists, students, journalists, teachers, and academic scholars from many fields have found that the OHA provides both professional guidance and a collegial environment for sharing research.

I got involved with the conference through my participation on a panel with UNLV's Director of the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, Mary Palevsky, and History department doctoral student, Leisl Carr, who I am partnering with to create a digital archive of the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project. My paper was titled, "Managing the Transition from Large-Scale Oral History Research to Digital Archive: The Digital Librarian’s Perspective" and I talked mostly about what is involved in planning and building a digital collection from a collection of oral history research. Fortunately, my partners are very well-organized and appreciate the detailed work that goes into the process. It was not long before we realized that researchers and librarians have similar values and that the key to building a successful collection lay in creating good metadata from their rich research.

I also attended other sessions at the conference and got a true sense of the diversity of oral history research. What a wide range of voices, stories, and memories are being recorded by these researchers! For example I saw presentations and met researchers doing interviews with modern day mountain men, survivors of the Holocaust, local musicians, activists in local's women's movements, former POWs, and even histories from the Freedom to Read Foundation.

On occasion, some of the researchers made mention of archiving, but in many of the sessions the focus was on the interviewing methodology and research, not the process of making the research accessible. I attended the presentation, "From Secrecy to Accessibility: Bringing the Realities of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in from the Cold (War) ", which features content on nuclear history similar to our project. Susan Becker from the Boulder Public Library (CO) did a great job with their website to create a full-text searchable archive that even has a nifty way of syncing with the interview audio/transcript time stamps.

There was also a good session on "Successful Oral History Programs: Secrets to Success from those Who Know", which featured Susan Becker, the Japanese American Legacy Project, California State University, Fullerton, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and Texas Tech University. And I had hoped to attend the roundtable titled, "Revolutionizing the Repository: Accounts from Two Oral History Digitization Projects" with presenters from the UCLA Digital Library Program and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill/Carolina Digital Library. Unfortunately, the time for this program conflicted with my presentation (unlucky me!). I will be looking at the various web sites for oral history that I heard discussed during the conference. Obviously, this is a topic that is growing in interest within the community. Next years conference in Pittsburgh is being called, "A Convergence of Interests: Oral History in the Digital Age"! Sounds like it will be right up my alley!

Conference Report from LITA Forum 2007

2007-10-09T17:40:38Z

This was the first LITA Forum I have attended and overall I found the size and programming of the conference to be good. There were two preconferences, which I did not attend, but I went to a variety of sessions that deserve to be highlighted here.

DAY ONE
Opening General Session: The Scientific and Social Challenges of Global Warming by Jeffrey Kiehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research
Apparently LITA has a tradition of booking a local speaker to open the conference, and despite the gloomy subject this was an interesting talk. What made it special was that Mr. Kiehl not only spoke about the science of global warming, but also about the communication of the scientific data and how the way we present information can determine whether or not it has impact. He encouraged everyone in the audience to think about their own "personal global warming" story as a means of combating the apathy, numbness, and denial, that often meet scientific news on climate change.

David and Goliath Take on Social Tools by Genny Engle and Michelle Boule
This talk introduced the variety of social tools available and delved a bit into their popularity and potential library applications. I was pleased to note that UNLV is currently exploring (or has already implemented) most of these tools (IM chat, blogs, wikis, Facebook/MySpace, etc.) Maybe it is because we have already spent time on the subject, but at times it seems hard to imagine that anyone in the library world could still be oblivious to Web 2.0.

Real World Metadata Management with the University of North Texas Libraries' Metadata Analysis Tool by Mark Phillips
By far, one of the best sessions I attended! This talk centered around a custom tool that was created to perform maintenance, reporting functions, and other types of analysis of digital collections metadata. The tool was really great at providing multiple views of the metadata, which Mr. Phillips noted "is the key to analyzing metadata" (for everything from clean-up of spelling/punctuation to plural agreement and authority control). For instance, the metadata can be viewed in such forms as an A-Z list, by contributing institution, as a report/graph, or as word clouds. Queries could also be run to find null values in required metadata fields, which would definitely come in handy with the collections I administer. University of North Texas has rapidly grown their digital collections and with the help of tools like this, their metadata is equally as rich and valuable as the digital images. Great presentation.

DAY TWO
General Session:The Future is not out of Reach: Change, Library 2.0 and Emerging Trends by David Lee King of Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library
Mr. King was a very dynamic and exciting speaker, but I am afraid with all the time I have already spent on the subject of Web 2.0 that the "future" kind of seemed more like the present. Good presenter...less interesting topic.
Podcast available!

5 Minute Madness
This was one of my favorite sessions. Quick, interesting, and practical, 5 Minute Madness was a on-the-fly sign-up at the conference spontaneous session and each person had 5 minutes to cover their project/topic/or research. It was particularly interesting to hear about the need for a fast institutional repository following the Virgina Tech massacre to preserve the variety of gifts, letter, and tributes received. I also was introduced to two very creative tools (one for Easy Borrow- a single interface search for ILL and BYU's service of custom RSS feeds of new books).

Lunch (BTW: LITA had really good food and dessert at lunchtime. Yum.)

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Mass Digitization Project: A Grandeur in This View of Digital Libraries by Martin Kalfatovic and Suzanne Chernau Pilsk
Excellent session! This was an session introducing the very large-scale, high-impact digitization project that the Smithsonian (and others) are conducting to create a digital library of biodiversity information recorded in taxonomies and historic indexes of species names. The BHL will eventually also form part of the Encyclopedia of Life. Basically, this is the kind of session that leaves you in awe of the sheer amount of work involved in a mass digitization project, but also leaves you feeling that there really is impact and usefulness in digitization. Fascinating.

Facet Forward: Faceted Navigation of Federated Search Results for Cultural Heritage Materials by Danielle Cuniff Plumer, David Dorman, and Mark Phillips
While this session focused on metadata harvesting and federated searching (which we are not currently doing) it was interesting to hear how Texas Heritage Online was handling the need to aggregate materials. Mr. Dorman also presented the open source solution that Index Data provides. Something worth looking into if you are working on this type of project.

DAY THREE
Breakfast: Breakfast burritos at the continental breakfast (I am in heaven!)

Poster Sessions Well, because I was presenting my own poster session, I missed most of the others. There was one interesting poster on SFX usability, another on MySpace vs. Facebook (verdict: both!) and a very good poster by my table-neighbor on Converting Technophobes into Technophiles: Empowering Reluctant Library Staff (one example: forbid the phrase: "I'm not "techie" enough...")

I also missed the last concurrent session that ran during the posters, but heard really good things about the User-Centered Research and Library Technology by David Lindahl and Nancy Fried Foster where usability studies were done with three different groups. One interesting idea was cutting apart the pieces of a library web site and having students piece it back together where they thought things should be. Food for thought.

Closing Session In Our Cages With Golden Bars by Jeremy Frumkin of Oregon State University
This was a very good closing session that summed up some very pertinent take-aways More can be found at The Digital Librarian (Jeremy Frumkin's blog):

we should move away from the "next generation catalog" and stop imposing library culture and terms on a service. Instead, we should look at it from a business perspective and a user perspective.

We need to think about the whole process from Discovery to Delivery because this is the main mission of libraries. People should be able to find in one click and have the material delivered to them in another click.

Mr. Frumkin also stressed the importance of a diversity of viewpoints and mentioned the Code4Lib scholarships that address this need

Podcast available!
Handouts and presentation materials were provided on a flash drive, so if you would like more information on any of the session go to the LITA Blog or contact me for materials.