WML Tech Updates

On October 26-29, 2006, I attended the 2006 LITA National Forum in Nashville, TN. The theme was NetVille in Nashville: Web services as library services. It was a wonderful conference this year! Dale Poulter in LITS here at Vanderbilt was the Chair of the Forum Planning Committee, and I think he and the rest of that committee did a great job! (Even the food was awesome!)

I went to a preconference on Developing Best Project Management Practices for IT Projects and you can read my summary and comments from Day 1 and Day 2 on the LITA blog. After the preconference, I attended a variety of sessions and heard lots of great speakers! Below are the sessions I attended.

General Sessions (with links going to summaries on LITA blog)

Save America’s Treasures: Preservation of Rare Acetate and Vinyl Recording Transcriptions
Alan Stoker, Recorded Sound and Moving Image Curator, and Steve Maer, Recorded Sound Archivist, Country Music Hall of Fame

Libraries and Public Interest Entertainment
Thom Gillespie, Indiana University

Web 2.0 and the Library 2.0 in Our Future
Stephen Abram, VP Innovation, SirsiDynix

Concurrent Sessions (with links going to summaries on LITA blog)

Adding Bells and Whistles to the Web: The Blog and the Pod

Improving Library Services with Ajax and RSS

Archiving & Preserving the Web

Unbundling the ILS @ NCSU

Multimedia Tutorials for Remote Users

Low Threshold Strategies for Libraries to Support “Other” Types of Digital Publishing

Also on Saturday evening, I walked with a bunch of LITA bloggers to the Flying Saucer for some dinner and liquid refreshments. They took pictures and blogged it, naturally.

Overall, the conference left me energized and eager to get back to work and play with the new technologies I was introduced to, and to implement some of the strategies and project management tools I learned.

Next year, the LITA National Forum will be in Colorado! Woo hoo!