Friday, October 16, 2009

LITA 2009, very quick thoughts – (Better late than never)

The LITA forum earlier this month was one of the best conferences I have ever attended for thought provoking presentations and terrific conversations between sessions and over meals. There were many presentations worthy of speaking about but I have pulled out two here which can be linked to for more information.

First is Kenning Arlitsch and Kristin Antelman on The Future of Libraries is IT (and some people just don’t get IT). They surveyed 240 future library leaders with 72% responding. At a very high level summary they found that these librarians prefer more flexible and externally focused culture. Those interviewed often felt thwarted by current organizational cultures in their academic libraries. The entire presentation is here.

Another very interesting lightening talk was by Jim Muir. He showed a new service he created called Carmen Library Link. Carmen is OSU's course management system. Library Link is a web service Jim created that allows librarians to easily create resource guides which are then linked to from specific courses. He plans to make this open source – more here

If the LITA forum continues to be this good more librarians need to add it to their must attend list.

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