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Library Conferencing and the VALE OLS 2006 October 30

Over the last week I went to two different library technology related conferences. One of them was the Palinet conference in Harrisburg, PA and the other one was LITA (Library Information Technology Association) in Nashville TN. The main reason why I went to both of them was to give presentations. At the Palinet conference, I gave a presentation with Jim Robertson of NJIT on Social Software and Libraries (PDF). The presentation was well attended and seemed to be well-received. At LITA I gave a poster presentation on our New Books RSS project – and more specifically on how to use it to get library content via RSS into a course management system. The poster session lasted 2 hours and I didn’t get a chance to catch my breath with all of he people stopping by to ask me about the project. I need to thank Heather Moulaison for preparing the poster with me with even though she couldn’t make it to Nashville to present it with me. I did a poster session once before and wasn’t very happy about how it turned out for a number of reasons, but this one was great and in some ways more rewarding then a regular session. The two main reasons why this one was better was 1) LITA had the posters set up in the main ball room where breakfast was served and there was room for people to look at the sessions and to talk with the presenters, and 2) Heather and I invested a lot of time into making the poster look good aesthetically. I should also thank Gregory Haase for his help creating the poster in Inkscape.

Neither conference was super-techy. I wasn’t that surprised about Palinet, but I though LITA would be more techy. That is not to say LITA wasn’t useful, it just wasn’t focused on hard core techy stuff. If people that have some tech skills but don’t consider themselves a techy have avoided LITA in the past because they were afraid it would be too techy, I think they should give it a try.

Most of the more memorable sessions at LITA focused on the future of the library catalog. For example, Emily Lynema and Andrew Pace talked about the Endeca powered catalog at NCSU, Gregg Silvis discussed his vision for the demise of the local OPAC, and David Lindahl and Jeff Suszczyanski discussed CUIPID 4 and the eXtensible Catalog that they are working on at the University of Rochester. These sessions, being on the Endeavor Users Group board, the Next Generation Catalog mailing list, and other recent readings and conferences have really made me think a lot about the future of library catalogs. At this point, I don’t where we are going for sure, but I am sure the current way most libraries (and library vendors) are dealing with the ILS is not sustainable. One day when I have more time I’ll have to write a long post on where I think we are likely to go, where I’d like to see us go, and what are the reasons for my vision.

Talking about my vision, early today the short A Vision for VALE paper Jim Robertson and I wrote for VALE was discussed at a meeting where approximately 23 New Jersey academic libraries sent representatives. The paper was about Jim and mine’s vision for the VALE Open Library System. I don’t know when this vision will be launched, or if it even will, but it is clear that their is a lot of interest in this idea in the NJ academic library community. There are still a lot of hurdles that will need to be cleared, but this was a good second baby step. (the first being the paper being discussed at the VALE planning retreat over the summer). A little bit of news, to me at least, was that through the NJ State Library, there has been some talk of using an Open source catalog for some smaller public libraries. I don’t really know how serious these talks are, but I found it interesting news and something I want to pay attention to in the future.