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ALA Annual 2005
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ALA Annual 2005
1:33 PM EDT 7/11/05
This was my first ALA conference, annual or otherwise, and it was bigger than any conference I have previously attended by a magnitude of 10! Which is why I am finally motivated to get this forum up and running. There was so much going on at ALA that I felt like I was missing about 97% of it.

My personal highlights of ALA included:
--hearing Barak Obama recite the opening lines of Good Night Moon (he's memorized the whole book)
--attending the WJ Members' Reception and the [url http://webjunction.lishost.org/?p=59 ]OCLC Blogger's Party[/url], connecting names with faces, faces with blogs
--attending sessions on [url http://litablog.org/?p=63 ]"The Googleization of Everything"[/url] and [url http://litablog.org/?p=75 ]LITA's Top Ten Technology Trends[/url]. It was music to my ears to hear Karen Schneider (lii and publib) identify as a top trend that "Information is in the conversation" to emphasize the social nature of information exchange. Here on All Aboard, conversation is information, as we all share what we know and build a knowledge base from the ground up.
-- being in the fabulous city of Chicago and swimming in big blue Lake Michigan!

So what did you learn and who did you meet? Help me fill in the 97% that I didn't get to experience.
Re: ALA Annual 2005
12:37 PM EDT 7/7/05 as a reply to Betha Gutsche.
As a follow-up to a wonderful conversation I had with Marti Smith, Associate Professor with the Drexel distance learning program, I explored some websites that she recommended.

[url http://www.cocacola.com/flashIndex1.html ]CocaCola[/url] (!)
As an example of customization tailored to reflect local cultures all around the world while retaining a strong and coherent brand/image, this site may spark some ideas for the growing WebJunction community of partners and programs. CocaCola relies on some key branding icons --the name, the classic bottle shape, the wave/swoosh-- which they deploy in creative ways around the local variations.

[url http://hub.ebay.com/community?ssPageName=h:h:over:US ]ebay Community pages[/url]
Who knew that ebay has discussion boards, mentoring groups to "receive help from another eBay member on how to use eBay," an answer center to "get quick help from other members," and chat rooms? Check it out.
Re: ALA Annual 2005
12:59 PM EDT 7/7/05 as a reply to Betha Gutsche.
It was fun and inspiring to meet Laura of http://lisdom.blogspot.com/. Laura is one of those people who bring the energy, passion, and openness to our work that keep me excited about the possibilities of libraries!
Re: ALA Annual 2005
3:13 PM EDT 7/7/05 as a reply to Steve DelVecchio.
I'm not sure I can help Betha with her other 97%, since we overlapped quite a bit, but here are some of mine:

I enjoyed talking with Meredith at the blogger's bash about her best practices wiki. There may be some ways that we can collaborate on this project, which would be really, really cool.

I also talked with folks at Library Journal about their new Web site. Apparently they are going to host Web exclusive content with each publication cycle. I'm looking forward to seeing what that's all about, but haven't had a chance to check it out in any detail yet.

I also talked for a while with Susan McGlammery about building a digital reference community of interest and best practices through her new role at OCLC with QuestionPoint/24/7. Susan has very exciting ideas and I can't wait to see how this plays out.

Cool idea for a forum, BTW. I love it!!
Re: ALA Annual 2005
9:02 AM EDT 7/11/05 as a reply to Chrystie Hill.
I'm glad you like the forum! Keep telling people about it when you attend conferences - that way we'll really get the conversation going!!

Max
Re: ALA Annual 2005
1:16 PM EDT 7/11/05 as a reply to Max Anderson.
It seems like there are two ALA conferences: the one with all the great presentations and papers and best-practice sharing, and the one with the smoke-filled-room wheeling and dealing. I was sucked into a bit too much of the latter this time, but along the way I met some great people, which led to the spawning of some really interesting ideas about WJ in particular:
- Hosting a lightweight library automation system for small libraries on WebJunction
- Making published/licensed library practice e-content available on WebJunction
- Using WJ as a place for working on projects launched regionally but generally relevant
(not many details for publication on all of this, but the conference is the place where things like this can be conceived--gestation and birth always seem to take awhile, hmm).
It was also interesting to learn about www.lstatoolkit.com, which has a lot of parallels with TechAtlas (http://webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=1001).

Just a few tidbits from a very rich rendezvous (where grizzled trappers come in from the woods to trade furs, gossip, and as I'm told, drink quite a bit).
Re: ALA Annual 2005
12:11 PM EDT 7/18/05 as a reply to Joe Anderson.
I posted this message on the Emerging Tech. forum under Tech Planning.


I organized a panel discussion at ALA on institutional repositories. About 200 people attended this session and had lots of questions of the various speakers, who explained how they went about implementing these repositories at their universities. They mentioned challenges with implementation such as such as developing policies, getting faculty to submit documents, how to provide federated searching, etc. The PowerPoints and resource from this session have just been added to the Emerging Tech. Interest Group page at: http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/emergingtechnol/programs.htm
Although only academics seem to be implementing these digital repositories right now, it might be something to take a look at if you are a public library and implementing other digitization projects. Might spur some creative ideas...

Rose
Re: ALA Annual 2005
2:17 PM EDT 7/18/05 as a reply to Rose Nelson.
This reminds me that I would have liked to go to a presentation about [url http://www.greenstone.org/cgi-bin/library ]Greenstone[/url], the open source software for creating digitization projects, but I wasn't able to fit it in. Did anyone attend and was it interesting?

Creating a digital project is a somewhat different emphasis from my notion of an institutional repository and it is something that public libraries of all sizes have undertaken. It is a wonderful way to emphasize [url http://digitalwa.statelib.wa.gov/wscollections.htm ]unique, local assets and history[/url].

Has anyone actually used Greenstone?
Re: ALA Annual 2005
11:05 AM EDT 7/26/05 as a reply to Betha Gutsche.
While it seems so long ago already, the ALA Conference was just last month. My conference this year started with the Long Tail and seemed to stick with that theme. I attended the OCLC Symposium "Mining the Long Tail" and got a lot out of it. The Symposium is not available for online viewing at <a href="http://www.oclc.org/education/conferences/presentations/#launch">
http://www.oclc.org/education/conferences/presentations/#launch</a>.

For me, the Long Tail is all about resource sharing. Who better than libraries to provide access to all that wonderful content in the long tail? Some other thoughts on this can be found at <a href="http://www.lili.org/blog/?p=11">The Idaho State Library blog</a>.

My conference continued with a resource sharing theme. Since that's part of what I do, it makes perfect sense. But I find that, more and more, I can link resource sharing to anything we do in libraries. It's like the 6-degrees of ILL, and this year ALA showed that to me.
Re: ALA Annual 2005
11:12 AM EDT 7/26/05 as a reply to Gina Persichini.
Hey Gina!

Thanks for posting!!! I now wish I had gone to ALA - it sounds like a lot of people got some good stuff out of it. Grrr. Next year.

Max