Professional Development

LITA goes until noon on Sunday, and since the only return direct flight to Greensboro after the close of the conference isn’t until 7:25 pm this evening (sigh), I’ll spend the time before the shuttle comes to take me to the airport to wrap up.

This morning began at a breakfast of this year’s and next year’s LITA National Forum Planning Committee. There were lively discussions about what worked this time around and what could be done better or differently next year in Salt Lake City. Everyone agreed that this has been a successful Forum, but there are always new ideas generated and feedback received from attendees that can be considered to make the next conference even better.

Poster sessions were presented this morning during the breakfast hour. Most of the topics were about projects that are familiar topics at ZSR, so it was interesting to see how other institutions had approached things like viral marketing, open source applications (see Erik’s post), Google Analytics and using del.icio.us as bookmarks to create virtual reference.

There was one final round of concurrent sessions, so I attended “Illogical Students: don’t Blame ‘Em, Game ‘Em,” where librarian Marsh Spiegelman and mathematics professor Richard Glass from Nassau Community College shared their combined effort to incorporate information literacy into math/computer science courses. They were doing some interesting things with blogs, wikis and Second Life. Some of their ideas are shared in their wiki.

R. David Lankes, from the Information Institute of Syracuse and professor at the School of Information Studies, gave the final keynote presentation. His topic was “Obligation of Leadership.” He talked about the mentors in his life and what they taught him that applies to our profession:

• We can’t wait for leaders.
• We can’t wait for change.
• We must serve society through stewardship.

He was an inspiring speaker and was passionate as he urged the audience that “We can do better.”

Lankes believes:

• Knowledge is created through conversation.
• Libraries are in the Knowledge Business.
• Therefore, libraries are in the conversation business.

He sees librarianship as a noble profession, one where our power is not in the size of our collections, or forged by the items we catalog, but in our impact on the communities and societies we serve. And this power happens through our facilitation of the conversations taking place by our patrons and our communities.

It was a good send off after 3 days of interesting programs!

Today was the day for our presentation of a case study of our facebook LIB100 class last spring. We had submitted a proposal to do this way back in December, even before the class had taken place (Caroline was a collaborator, we were sorry she couldn’t be with us, as she was an important part of the project). We were allotted 70 minutes to share our findings, so were able to provide a fairly in-depth exploration of the history of the ZSR Library Information Literacy Program, the theoretical basis for designing the class the way we did, a detailed discussion of the actual components of the course and a summary of student reactions and perceptions.

We were pleased when we had over 70 people attend the session (which immediately followed a buffet lunch) and see them stay engaged with a high level of interest in our topic.

My other big event of the day was a meeting with the 2009 LITA National Forum Planning Committee. I’ll be working with a stellar group of colleagues to put together the conference that will be held next Oct. 1-4 in Salt Lake City. This will be my first experience in this type of committee and I look forward to the involvement.

The day had a great ending, with Erik leading the way to Mt. Adams which he discovered early this morning on a run. It was a quaint little town high above the city with shops and restaurants and a magnificent view of the Cincinnati skyline. The little town was bustling with activity and we found an excellent Thai restaurant to dine in.

An early direct flight (who knew they still exist?) landed Erik and me in Cincinnati before breakfast. The trip began with a most interesting shuttle trip from the airport where the driver (who was about 80), immediately took us off the interstate onto a scenic mountainous, winding, trecherous road that followed the Ohio River on the Kentucky side. We traveled through 5 different little river towns, and were treated to a running travelogue, complete with jokes. The conference didn’t start until after lunch, and neither of our rooms were ready, so we set off to explore the downtown Cincinnati area. We found a suspension bridge designed by the engineer who used it as a prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge, an unusually shaped condominum building designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect doing the World Trade Center, and a very lovely riverfront park at Sawyer Point.

After lunch, it was down to business, however, it was a bit disorienting to be at a techie conference that doesn’t provide any wireless options, free or otherwise. For the LITA bloggers they had a table set up at the rear of the room that was hard wired!

The opening keynote, by Tim Spaulding from LibraryThing was interesting mainly because I have never used or explored it. He has taken his product to a high level social experience with social cataloging. He told the audience that LibraryThing is now larger than LOC, but allowed that LOC doesn’t have 256 different JK Rowling titles (which is a prime example of the outcome of democracy of social cataloging to me). He spent quite awhile discussing the tagging in LibraryThing. There are 41 million tags now. There are tag mirrors (which shows what tags other people have placed on the books in your catalog), Tag Mash (which combines individual tags for a most exact hit on the meaning: ie romance zombies), and a common knowledge feature that captures things a tradition catalog wouldn’t: who are the most important characters in the book).

The first concurrent session I attended was given by two women (Gretchen Gueguen and Ann Hanlon) who worked with the digitization initiatives at University of Maryland (and knew Jennifer Roper). Neither is still at UMd and one of them (Gretchen) is now at East Carolina. Their talk was “Crowdsourcing Digitization: Harnessing Workflow to Increase Ouput.” They talked about the issues they faced getting Maryland’s large scale, decentralized scanning initiatives under control. They faced many of the types of decisions that we have been faced with in our Digital Forsyth project. The “crowdsourcing” idea speaks to their decision to go with the “wisdom of crowds”, in this case that of patrons and co-wokers. Utimately, they moved to a user driven model to direct their selection of what to digitize rather than preselecting “trophy” collections to showcase. This means they are digitizing those materials that are requested by patron researchers rather than digitizing and then hoping folks will use what they digitize. Now that Gretchen has moved to East Carolina, they are doing the same approach. She showed a screenshot of Joyner’s forthcoming newest collection that contains many of the same features you see in Digital Forsyth including tag clouds and facets. It would be worthwhile to plan a field trip to exchange ideas, don’t you all think?

I joined Erik for the second concurrent session on “Reswizzling the IT Enterprise for the Next Generation” where NC State’s Maurice York talked about how they have restructured their IT operation to be more effective to their customers (over 250 staff with over 700 computers to manage, plus all the servers, services etc. you might expect from NC State). We were both tickled to hear Maurice talk about instituting Service Level Agreements, much like our WFU friends in IS are doing. I wish him luck with that one. The main value of this session for me was that it affirmed that, even on our smaller scale operation, we face the same complexities and challenges to properly serve all of our customers and manage your expectations. There were some good ideas that Erik and his group might try as more and more projects and technologies come our way!

The day ended with a “vendor showcase” reception. LITA has a very small vendor presence compared to many other conferences (maybe 6-8 tables), but there was good conversation between colleagues and roasted veggies, mashed potatoes (a strange addition to an appetizer type party) and other good food.

Today, our presentation is right after lunch, so we’ll report back this evening on how that went!

In late July, early August I attended a three week e-learning course hosted by ACRL titled “Copyright and The Library, Part 1: The Basics Including Fair Use.” In addition to discussion board postings and online readings, class members participated in weekly homework and library assessment assignments, audio lectures, and question and answer AIM sessions. I have summarized the basics of the copyright law and sections that pertain to libraries below.

Summary

The copyright law and code is found under Title 17 of the United States Code and is broken into several sections that affect libraries and archives.

• Section 101: Definitions of terms commonly used throughout copyright law and sections
• Section 106: Exclusive Rights in Copyrighted Works
• Section 107: Limitations of Exclusive Rights, Fair Use
• Section 108: Limitations of Exclusive Rights, Reproductions by Libraries and Archives
• Section 109: Limitations of Exclusive Rights, Effect of Transfer of Particular Copy or Phonorecord
• Section 504(a)(b)(c): Remedies for Infringement and Damages

Categories of Works of Authorship include:

• Literary works (including computer programs)
• Musical works (non-dramatic)
• Dramatic works (including music)
• Pantomimes/Choreographic works
• Pictorial/graphic/sculptural
• Motion pictures and other AV materials
• Sound recordings
• Architectural works
• Compilations/collective and derivative works
• Three requirements for copyright to attach to a work:
• Must be original
• Work of Authorship
• Fixed in a tangible medium

Exclusive Rights:

The owner of a copyright has the exclusive rights to do and authorize the following:

• Reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords
• Distribute copies or phonorecords to the public by sale or transfer of ownership (by rental, lease, or lending)
• Prepare derivative works based on the original copyrighted work
• Perform the copyrighted work (in the case of literary, musical, pantomime, choreographic, motion picture, or any audio-visual work)
• Display the copyrighted work (in the case of literary, musical, pantomime, choreographic, motion picture, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, or any audio-visual work)
• Perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission (in the case of sound recordings)

Fair Use and the Four Factors:

A copyrighted work may be used without the permission of the copyright holder if its use meets the four factors of Fair Use.The Four Factors, that are mandatory, include:

1. The purpose of and character of the use of the copyrighted work is non-commercial vs. commercial, substitute/superseding vs. transformative.
   1. Is the use of the copyrighted work for commercial gain, to substitute paying for an original
2. The nature of the copyrighted work with regards to published/unpublished, thick/thin
   1. Unpublished works are still open to Fair Use but tend to be a little more protected by the Government through Orphan Works rights
   2. Thick/thin argument-if the work is a newspaper that is being used, Fair Use can be applied since the majority of a newspaper issues is factual information with a minor amount of “original work”
3. The amount and substantiality of the work taken
   1. Quantitative-how much of the copyrighted work is being used
   2. Qualitative-what is being used of the copyrighted work
   3. Will the amount of the work taken impact the quality of the work/will the amount taken impact the market?
4. The effect of the use of the work on potential markets or the value of the work is evaluated by primary, secondary, derivative and educational markets.
   1. While the use of a copyrighted work may not directly impact the primary market or value, misuse under Fair Use can affect secondary or derivative markets and values.
   2. Infringement of work may not directly affect a journal subscription but its use would affect the secondary market of individual article downloads offered by the journal publisher

Types of Copyright Infringement:

Direct Infringement (Primary Liability)

• Direct infringement must be established before secondary infringement can be determined
• “ignorance of the law” is not an excuse in defining direct infringement, but can be used when determining/setting penalties
• EXAMPLE: the student who knowingly photocopied a copyrighted material.

Contributory Infringement (Secondary Liability)

• definition based on CONDUCT
• Definition includes intermediary causes or substantially contributed to the direct infringement OR knows of the infringing nature of the copyrighted material
• Courts typically examine the guidelines of Fair Use before determining contributory infringement occurred.
• EXAMPLE: in academic settings, contributory infringers are students pirating movies, illegally downloading audio files, plagiarized text.

Vicarious Infringement (Secondary Liability)

• Definition based on RELATIONSHIP
• An intermediary has ability to control the conduct of the direct infringer AND receives direct financial gain from the activity of infringement.
• EXAMPLE: a faculty member has a student copy book chapters/journal articles for a workbook, then sells that workbook to his/her enrolled students.

Trials:

There are two types of trials for cases of copyright infringement and the type is established by copyright owner.Copyright cases can either be handled as a bench trial by a judge OR a jury trial of peers.

Damages:

Once the Court has determined and identified all actors of infringement and their liability roles, the next step is setting damages.Although you may be identified as a direct, contributory, or vicarious infringer, you can impact the amount or cost of damaged enforced.

Damages

• Actual financial damages suffered by the copyright holder (any profit made on part of the infringer)
• Ranges from $750.00 to $30,000.00 per infringing work, NOT per copy

Injunctive Relief

• Acts a probationary period before monetary damages are enforced; includes cease and desist orders, seizure and destruction of infringing material, and disabling access.
• If above actions are not taken or enforced, then monetary penalties will be set and imposed.

Fees

• Instead of damages or injunctive relief, courts may only impose court costs and attorney fees
• Fees are set at the discretion of the court, not by a jury or prosecutor
• Typically these fees are NOT cheap

Penalty Enhancement

• Court can enhance the penalties imposed for “willful violations” and “reckless disregard for the law” meaning ignoring cease and desist orders, infringement notices…etc.
• Enhancement fees enforced can be as high as $150,000.00

Miscellaneous-ness:

U.S.C. section 507: The statute of limitations for any copyright infringement is 3 years for civil actions and 5 years for criminal actions.Criminal actions are defined as “actual intent” of infringement such as bootlegging movies for profit.

U.S.C. section 408: Before a copyright lawsuit can be filed a work must be registered.However, registration is no longer required under law; it is permissive, not a prerequisite.

U.S.C. section 410(c): A work can be registered within 5 years of publication and the validity of copyright is considered “prima facie” evidence when used in copyright cases.

U.S.C. section 411 and 412: Registration.Although registration of a published work is no longer required, it is a prerequisite to infringement litigation.For unpublished works, registration must occur before infringement AND within 3 months of publication in order to gain statutory damages and/or attorney’s fees.

For additional readings:

Crews, Kenneth and Georgia Harper. “The Immunity Dilemma: Are State Colleges and Universities Still Liable for Copyright Infringements?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science. Vol. 50(1999): 1250-1352.

Burningham, Bradd. “Copyright Premissions: A Pilot Project to Determine Costs, Procedures, and Staffing Requirements.” Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Information Supply. Vol. 11(2000): 95-111.

Circular 21

Today the conference went until noon but you could see that many people had already headed for the airport. However, there was still a good deal of information conveyed to those of us who stuck it out (also door prizes at the final general session, must be present to win - no, I didn’t….)

Things started out early with several people presenting their projects via a poster session. Subjects ranged from adventures in digitization to turning technophobes into technophiles. As you might expect, the booths with the most action were the ones that were giving away candy!

There was only one set of concurrent sessions today, so I split my time between two of them. The first one reported on a locally developed Workflow Management System, designed to ingest metadata and digital objects into Fedora, Rutgers’ digital object repository. The speaker was Mary Beth Weber who leads the metadata work group for this IMLS grant-funded project that is charged with building a NJ statewide repository. The system will soon be open source (by 2008) and was of interest to me because it is the type of system that would be useful in Digital Forsyth. As we are doing through an Access database developed by Erik and Kevin, this system tracks the life of a digital objects from their birth (at scanning) to their ingestion into a digital management system. Whether it may have some future value to us, I can’t tell at this point, but we will keep an eye on how it progresses.

I caught the second half of a session by David Lindahl and Nancy Fried Foster from University of Rochester. She reported on user-centered research conducted at their institution. Some of the results have recently been published in an ACRL monograph titled: Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. Since I didn’t arrive until after her portion, I’m glad I’ll be able to see the results that are reported in the book. Lindahl talked about a grant-funded project to build The Extensible Catalog, an open source system that will be used as the front end to a library’s ILS (user interface).

The final closing session was given by Jeremy Frumkin from Oregon State University who talked about “In Our Cages with Golden Bars”. The overall theme was how we can think differently about how we pursue what we do with technology in libraries. We are often limited by our own traditions, expertise and experiences. He suggests that librarians can step outside (of their golden bar cages) without throwing away the things that libraries have always done. He used the same themes that we had heard throughout the weekend (all probably at every library conference any of us have attended in the past year): what has to be done to meet our next generation of users, still providing traditional services but remixing them in a way that will insure that libraries remain sticky (from www.2020systems.com: “A term used to describe a web site on which visitors stay at for longer than normal. This is often due to the variety of content and features offered to the visitor which prevents them from needing to go elsewhere for more information”). He talking specifically about a project his library is working on: LibraryFind. It’s a metasearch tool, one that they have prominently displayed from their website. He also presented two other main themes: He believes that our business model has to change to one where libraries and vendors work together to find a mutual advantage that works for both while giving users what they want/need. He also believes that we (as in libraries as a group) need to find a way to brand our services/product so that users can find consistency from one library to the next. He likened this to the fact that pre-automation, a library patron could learn to use the card catalog at one library and be assured that this knowledge was transferable at any other library that he might visit. That certainly isn’t the case today and it leaves users without a sense of the collective identity of “library.” The presentation combined some popular user-centered themes and future thinking along with a dab of practical applications. It was a good solid end to the conference.

I’m sitting in the Denver airport now, waiting to head home in about an hour. It’s been a packed 3 days that, overall, have been well worth coping with air travel these days (We’ll see if I still think that tomorrow morning).

The day’s general session was much more in line with my expectations. David King, Digital Branch and Services Manager at Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library in Kansas gave an engaging talk about “Change, Library 2.0, and Emerging Trends”. He identified what he considers the major transformations that have taken place in libraries since the advent of the web: commenting (old way: letter from a patron; new: blog replies from patrons), friending (old: no good parallel; new: facebook, myspace), content (old: printed pathfinders; new:staff and patron generated) , tagging (old: catalogers; new: user generated) and mashups (a new concept). He talked about why we should let go of the past and should jump on the bandwagon with these technologies. He doesn’t think that fear of learning new technology should be a reason to ignore these trends - sometimes we have to do something scary to remain relevant. Being relevant is essential to libraries’ futures; as we all know, if we aren’t our users will turn elsewhere. One of the many examples King cited during the talk had to do with a project conducted by the National Library of New Zealand where they asked conference participants to complete the sentence “In 2017 libraries will be……” and then posted the 200 responses on Flickr.

The conference provided lunch for everyone and this was a good opportunity to network with those sitting together. I ran into Andy Morton who is still at University of Richmond. He was with Nancy Woodall who I had never met but who I’ve talked with over the years when we’ve been doing various technology projects. They were also an Endeavor site and it was interesting to hear what their reaction has been to the migration to ExLibris. I also met a couple librarians from East Carolina who talked about their first gaming event (they had Giz come out and present to them on our gaming experience). They said that they had over 200 kids show up!

Just a brief note about Denver this weekend. It turns out that it is one of the busiest event weekends in their history. There was a Columbus Day Parade (83 protesters were arrested), the Colorado Rockies played (and won) against the Phillies to win an NCLS spot in the playoffs, Octoberfest, Denver Arts Weeks, the largest Susan B. Komen race (today), a Genesis concert….Well, you get the picture. This translated to an expected weekend downtown crowd of over 80,000 people. So it was a no-brainer to head to the 16th St. Mall (2 blocks away) to people watch after the day’s sessions ended.

There are sessions through noon today, so I’m off to see poster sessions, another concurrent session and a closing general session. Then off to the airport and home by midnight!

The 2007 LITA National Forum began with a keynote speech on global warming. What does this have to do with libraries and emerging technologies? As conference planning chair Mary LaMarca explained to a packed room, LITA has a tradition of opening its annual forum with a keynote by a local speaker. Jeffrey Kiehl is a senior scientist in the Climate Change Research section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. He spoke for an hour and a half about the history of climate change science, how the climate has changed (global warming) and how it will continue to change, how humans are involved in the whole issue and, what scientists can do to communicate what’s happening more effectively to the public. It was a talk full of facts and charts but Kiehl, who has an MA in psychology, focused the end of his speech on why people interact (or not) with the environment and why the public is reluctant to accept the fact of global warming. This is a hot topic (so to speak) in public discourse today, so was timely, if not exactly what I would have chosen to kick off a technology conference to get participants in the right frame of mind for the theme of the weekend.

Two sets of concurrent sessions took place for the rest of the afternoon. It’s hard to decide what’s going to be the most valuable session to attend when you have to select from six, not knowing much more than the titles and the speakers’ names. I planned to try to find sessions that might have the most applicability to our library, so started out at a SRO presentation about WorldCat Local. I managed to find an empty spot on the floor, settled in and after about 10 minutes was saying “this sounds so familiar”! It was almost like I knew what the speaker (Jennifer Ward from University of Washington Libraries) was going to say before she clicked to the next slide. I was having such deja vu, I started digging into my userdata files and found my notes from sessions I attended at ALA in June. Sure enough, I had sat through this before! I guess I didn’t even think about the fact that some presenters may apply to present on a topic to several conferences (and for LITA you have to apply 10 months prior to the conference - for 2008, proposals are due in Dec.). But Jennifer did update her talk to report on the progress of the beta project between OCLC and UWL). Patrons are becoming more comfortable with having Local Worlcat as their primary discovery tool. You can take a look at WorldCat: University of Washington. They have made changes as a result of extensive usability studies and the catalog now includes articles along with books and has the ability to display a proper citation of the item, export it to Endnote or Refworks. It links to local holdings and availability information. There are choices offered to “get it” (ILL), “save it” (bookmark it in your browser), “add to it” (write a review), and “share it” (link it to one or several social networking sites). This collaborative effort by these two partners is impressive.

I slipped out of this session and went down a couple doors to hear the end of a presentation by two of our colleagues from UNCG’s Jackson Library. Scott Rice and Amy Harris talked about the game they created to help teach information literacy. It’s called “The Information Literacy Game” and they’ve made it available for others to use and adapt to local needs. One question that gets asked often came up in this presentation also: have they done formal assessment to see if learning is occurring? To date, their belief that the game is useful comes from anecdotal feedback from students and library faculty. That appears to be fairly typical as it is difficult and time consuming to conduct a quantitative in-depth study along with everything else a librarian has to accomplish day-to-day.

For the second round of sessions, I decided to go to for one that was more a “high level” view of emerging technologies (plus I saw Andrew Pace heading in the room and figured he might be looking for future column topics). The session was titled “Library 2023: Provoked Discussion on the Future of Libraries.” It turned out to be more of an open discussion than a presentation. The moderator was Gregg Silvis from University of Delaware Library. He posed a number of questions in relation to his assumption for 2023: There are 100,000,000 digitized full text books freely available…

What would it mean?

• To be a research library, or for that matter, a library at all?
• For scholarship?
• For the general populace?
• For cataloging?
• For Kinko’s?

The session became an idea exchange forum. For the most part, what I heard were concepts we have been discussing over the past year in relation to our strategic planning: library as place, students who want things online and now, ownership vs. access, copyright, etc. I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t hear anything revolutionary that I could bring back and implement, but it was reassuring to leave the session thinking that we have been doing what needs to be done to head ZSR Library the right direction.

The afternoon sessions were followed by a sponsor reception. Free food, cash bar. What happened to vendors underwriting a librarian’s happy hour? Don’t they know we are on tight budgets? Really, it was a good chance to meet some of the folks attending LITA and I was happy to see one familiar face. I met up with Cindy Saylor, who is from the UNC Pembroke Library. I first became acquainted with Cindy way back when Roz Tedford went through the Master Trainer program and Cindy was one of her fellow master trainers. Since then Cindy went on to be Systems Librarian there and then was promoted to Assistant Dean of Systems and Public Services last year. We had a chance to catch up and then went on to view The Hollywood Librarian. I had heard somewhat harsh reviews on it from folks from ZSR who attended the UNCG screening last week, but thought I should form my own opinion. It was well done and did a mostly good job of illustrating why the typical portrayal of librarians in film short changes the profession. I did think they could have found more than one young librarian to interview (although the eyebrow ring was a nice touch). But it sort of lost me when they politicized the film through the detailed focus on the Salinas Libraries funding issue. I thought the film was about 1/2 hour too long (we were sitting in straightback conference room chairs, NOT theater stadium seating), and the desired point could have been made more succinctly. However, I was glad to have been given the chance to view this film that everyone in the profession has been talking about.

I’m in Denver to attend the 10th Annual LITA National Forum. It is “annual event for those whose work involves new and leading edge technologies in the library and information technology field.” I arrived early yesterday afternoon thanks to an early flight and a 2 hour time difference. This was a bonus as it gave me a nice chunk of time to explore the city and enjoy the beautiful Colorado weather.

The conference starts this afternoon (pre-conferences took place yesterday and take place again this morning). I was fortunate to receive a Career Enrichment Program Scholarship from the NC State Library that is helping fund my trip. Contrary to the common belief that these scholarships target new young librarians who haven’t attended conferences previously, they are also available to us seasoned librarians who would like to expand our attendance to a conference that we don’t normally have the funding to include in our annual travel budget.

In my case, I’ve only attended LITA one time previously, back when it took place in Raleigh either in 1999 or 2000. So it’s been a long time and I’m excited to have 3 days where I can focus on learning what other libraries are doing with emerging technologies. I expect to hear about Library 2.0, social software, the new OPAC and all the other hot topics in the field these days. There’s even a screening of the Hollywood Librarian this evening.

After a long and confusing telephone call with one of the conference Sheratons, I finally figured out where to head for my meeting with the LITA Program Planning Committee. My Interest Group wants to present a program at Annual 2008, and to do so we have to put something in this weekend.

Having NEVER done this, and having heard that ALA’s process is particularly daunting, we decided to meet with the PPC. Most people who go before the committee have a draft document of what they’d like to do and they get feedback. We went to learn about process, and it was really useful!

For those who might one day want to submit a program for ALA (LITA), here’s what we learned:

• All LITA programs must come through the LITA PPC (unless it’s a managed discussion)
• PPC understands the ALA programming plan, understands where there is potential overlap, and what divisions, etc, have what areas of expertise
• LITA PPC will represent a submitted program at the October tracking meeting for the desired track and and at time slot
• PPC helps Interest Groups flesh out their idea
• LITA board has final say in programming, but typically agrees with the PPC
• The final, official, no way it can work after this, deadline is the first week in July
• Changes can be made up until Midwinter

We discussed several ideas, and are planning to focus around the issue of “everyone is a distance patron” and how that impacts staffing. We’d like to pull together a panel including an administrator, distance learning librarian, and someone who isn’t working in academia but is working with these issues. We’ll submit tomorrow… hopefully this will go well!

Okay, is it saying something when a shy person says the best part of her day was spent in the exhibit hall?

Today I had my first interest group meeting as a co-chair. We had had some drama setting up the meeting of the Distance Learning Interest Group, thought we had fixed the issue, then today found there was no room for us. Our attendance really suffered, but it was still a productive meeting. We have big plans, so let’s hope we’re listed in the program and have a room next conference! I blogged the session for LITA, so you can read about it there.

After that, I grabbed my vegan friendly lunch of french fries & headed for the exhibit hall. I typically feel pretty uncomfortable there, but I am helping staff the Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship booth there.

Lots of people came by with questions or seemed interested, so I think my time was well spent. It was also relaxing: in between visitors there was time to check email, post a few pictures, and spend a few hours without my bag on my shoulder. I’ll be there a bunch over the coming days, so if ZSR folks are around, feel free to stop by. Really, there’s about a 50% chance I’ll be there! It’s booth 745.

Now I’m off to the WSS general membership meeting. This is where you find out the scoop on what’s going on in the area of Women and Gender Studies librarianship. I’ve been having really good talks with the WGS department at WFU, so it’ll be useful to see if folks at other places are doing some of the things we’re thinking about. I don’t have anything scheduled after that, so I’m planning on a walk past some famous monuments, a bite to eat, and the crazy commute home.