Librarian Way

Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science has reasonably priced online workshops in many technology subjects: Workshops and Costs. (Via DIG_REF@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU e-list.) There are classes on digital reference, weblogs and RSS, creating web-based tutorials, and others. The courses offered are hot topics in libraries.

On Wednesday, January 28, 2004, Cynthia Hill, President of Special Libraries Association (SLA), will be speaking at the SLA, San Diego Chapter. Her topic is The Future of our profession, the future of our organization.

Not much to report. I went to the LITA “Top Technology Trends,” and someone is going to post the minutes to the LITA Web site. It was an interesting format: The first two hours are a discussion among the members of the committee on all sorts of philosophical and technical issues related to implementing technology in information service organizations. They sit at a table and discuss, and the audience looks on, takes notes, and prepares questions. See Walt Crawford’s special Midwinter 2004 issue of Cites & Insights for some of the issues discussed. (Yes, I finally got his autograph on his new book.) The philosophical issues have to do with privacy for both patrons and library staff, so that they cannot be profiled. A missing committee members sent his list of top trends and suggested that XML is a “Tower of Babel.” I could not catch his name and I am familiar with only two of the group: Crawford and Roy Tennant. There was only one woman in the group: I expect this will change as more females in the profession become familiar with technology. The last part of the session is open for questions from the audience. It looked to me like there were over one hundred people in the audience; there were seven present on the committee.

I went back to the exhibition hall and sat in on a couple of the sessions given by the Library of Congress (LC). They handed out a free CD about the LC at the end of the talk. I also picked up a free coffee mug from them. In the afternoon I attended a LITA/ALCTS joint program on authority control in the online environment, which was over my head because I haven’t taken cataloging yet.