Sean Fitzpatrick's blog

If I learned one thing at LITA Forum this year, it’s that if you put a bunch of techie librarians together in one hotel for a whole weekend, they’re going to spend a lot of time dishing on IT. No single session encompassed the overarching theme of the casual break-time conversations better than Kenning Arlitsch (University of Utah) and Kristen Antelman’s (North Carolina State University) talk, “The Future of Libraries is IT (and some people just don’t get IT).”

When David Weinberger, author and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society talks, I listen up. So his opening the presentation by saying that “the Age of Information is pretty much over” was tough news to take first thing on a Saturday morning.

The last concurrent session at LITA Form 2009 will be the first one I’ve written about so far (but more will come, to be sure). Sunday morning Will Kurt from the University of Nevada in Reno talked about his new library (lots of cool technology there) and how they’re actively looking toward the future. It’s not just the cloud we need to think about, he said. The future will also bring more integration of computers into our physical environment–ubiquitous computing.

After yesterday’s opening keynote session at LITA National Forum, Past President Andrew Pace told me that there’s a lot of work involved in diversifying the keynote topics, which are set up to be “fact, fun, or fancy.” The Coalition for Networked Information Associate Director Joan Lippincott’s keynote was fraught cold, hard “fact” to support libraries’ need to go mobile.

At the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase July 13, eight presenters gave brief talks on trends in social software in a “speed-dating” format, where each presenter had 10 minutes to talk to a roving audience. I was most interested in hearing Jason Griffey’s talk on Google Wave, a product that, I admit, I hadn’t paid much attention to until his presentation.

ALA’s Social Responsibilities Round Table celebrated its 40^th anniversary July 13 at the Alternative Media Reception co-organized with the Alternative Press Center. The party, held at Hyde Park’s funky Experimental Station, included a Mediterranean food buffet, impromptu speeches, jazz from the three-piece combo Brian Sandstrom and Friends, three kinds of vegan cake, and some far left publisher types.

A packed meeting room awaited a panel of techie librarians to address the question of whether Library 2.0 has lived up to its promise at July 14 LITA and the Internet Resources Services Interest Group session “The Ultimate Debate: Has Library 2.0 fulfilled its promise?” The panel couldn’t exactly agree on what Library 2.0 was, let alone whether it’s fulfilled its promise, but traditional ways of thinking may not even be sufficient to judge Lib2.0 effectiveness.

LITA’s tenth year of Top Tech Trends July 12 was likely its best attended ever–thanks to free wi-fi in the room, live streaming video from Shanachies, and a live blog to aggregate tweets from attendees (real an

Three weeks into a pilot campaign aimed at moving OCLC’s 2008 study From Awareness to Funding from theory to practice, OCLC hosted a session July 11 to talk about where the study has taken them since its publication one year ago and to discuss their new campaign: Geek the Library.

ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels made two announcments to staff this morning regarding the availablility of WiFi during the ALA Annual Conference here in Chicago, July 9-15.