The 13th annual LITA National Forum brought library and information technology professionals together in Atlanta September 30–October 3 to discuss projects and developments surrounding the conference theme, “The Crowd and the Cloud.” Expert speakers shared knowledge of, and experiences with, the leading trends and innovations in library technologies, including mobile, social, and web services. Keynoting this year’s forum were Amy Bruckman, associate professor, School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology; Roy Tennant, senior program officer, OCLC Research; and Ross Singer, interoperability and open standard champion, Talis Information.
Bruckman kicked off the conference with “How Wikipedia Really Works, and What This Means for the Nature of ‘Truth.’” She discussed the reliability and unreliability of Wikipedia, described who contributes to it and why, and concluded that we are now at a “teachable moment about the nature of truth.” Bruckman stated that there is a “crisis in epistemology,” wherein people don’t know what to believe and are asking critical questions. On one hand, “the world is only accessible through truly subjective perceptions,” Bruckman said, “but there’s a strange correlation between our perceptions. Our best guess at reality is what we agree is true.” Bruckman presented examples of how Wikipedia supports knowledge building discourse and concluded that an entry’s reliability depends on how many people are watching and editing it–“critiquing and refining knowledge together, iteratively.”
Concurrent conference sessions explored such trends and applications as social media, web-scale discovery, click-analytics, cloud technologies, library instruction, IT skills and management, next-gen catalogs, mobile services, user behavior, and website redesign. Chanitra Bishop, instruction and emerging technologies librarian at Indiana University in Bloomington, presented “What Can the Cloud Do for Your Teaching? Using Cloud Technologies in Library Instruction." According to Bishop, cloud technologies offer increased engagement with students, yet must be selected carefully and purposefully to enhance teaching. Among the services featured by Bishop were Poll Everywhere, Animoto, ScreenToaster, and Google Forms. Emily Morton-Owens of New York University Health Sciences Libraries described how her editorial training while working in the publishing industry helped her streamline the library’s website workflows in “Editorial and Technological Workflow Tools for a Busy Website.”
Beatrice Pulliam’s talk, “The Other IT Crowd: Managing and Developing Accidental Geeks in the Library,” outlined strategies for developing and enhancing the information technology skills of library staff. Pulliam, library commons librarian for technology and access at Providence (R.I.) College, advised on best practices and lessons learned, including making time to ensure workflows and systems are still functional, leveraging tools the library may already own, and encouraging staff to attend state and regional training sessions and to contribute technology ideas for experimentation. She added that the benefits of this effort have extended beyond technology skill enhancement, noting, “it has really helped people to become more change-ready.”
Holly Tomren of the University of California in Irvine and I presented “The Why Report: Tech Themes for Technical Services,” an up-to-date look at emerging technologies from a technical services perspective. Focusing on the themes of communication and mobility, we described why social media platforms and mobile-friendly cloud data are both valuable to know and important to understand in the current information environment and how technical services librarians are engaging with these new technologies.
In “Using the Cloud to Please the Crowd,” Roy Tennant described how “innovation can happen anywhere” thanks to the ubiquity and “limitless” scalability of cloud technologies. Tennant’s keynote set cloud computing in the context of information technology developments over the past 40–60 years, and demonstrated how these new tools have prompted a “huge paradigm shift.” To illustrate this point, he created a website as he spoke using cloud-based tools (Drupal and Amazon Web Services). Tennant also discussed the commoditization of computing power, available now “on demand, like electricity,” and highlighted some of the benefits to information professionals: outsourced infrastructure, greater flexibility, reduced barriers to innovation, and lower start-up investments.
Programs were offered in a variety of formats, which encouraged active participation from conference attendees. Lightning-talk speakers presented on improving repositories through metadata refinements (Marliese Thomas, Auburn University); customization of database URLs (Erin White, Virginia Commonwealth University); using open-source tools to create an IT department ticketing system (Nina McHale, University of Colorado in Denver), a demonstration of the website ScanGrants, which “connects people with the funding they need to advance the medical sciences” (Hope Leman, Samaritan Health Services); and a demonstration of the visual browser Web Seer (Ann Perbohner, Dartmouth College).
At Sunday’s closing keynote, Ross Singer explored the potential of linked data for libraries in “The Linked Library Data Cloud: It’s Time to Stop Thinking and Start Linking.” Singer presented examples of discrete library catalog entries on the same topics and illustrated how siloed information lacks the data connections that would facilitate findability. He talked about plans for the future of bibliographic control and provided examples of how linked data might be used. Singer outlined the four rules for linked data: 1.Use uniform resource identifiers as names for things; 2. Use HTTP URIs so people can look up those names; 3. When someone looks up the URI, provide useful information using the prescribed standards; and 4. Include links to other URIs, so they can discover more things.
“Once we know what data is out there, and what to do with it, we can do all sorts of things,” said Singer. “Let’s start identifying.”
The 14th annual LITA National Forum will be held in St. Louis, Missouri, September 29–October 2, 2011.