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Al Gore Video Feed

The Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture at this year’s ALA Midwinter Conference was presented by Al Gore. What would such a famous speaker and activist say? How would he connect the crisis of global warming to libraries? I had high hopes.

“If you want a book to be signed, you have to buy them over there before the lecture!” This was my greeting outside the convention center ballroom as staffers gesticulated towards a bookstand. The tone was set, and the room filled quickly.

Gore started his lecture by acknowledging the suffering and destruction in Haiti. Empathy, he explained, is one of the most powerful emotions tying humans together. He asked us to empathize with future generations and consider the kinds of destruction they will inevitably face if we don’t act decisively to save the environment.

“Save libraries!” I was thinking. “Prevent global warming and the destruction of libraries!” What kind of world would this be without libraries?

Gore outlined our options for prevention, covering each chapter of his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, except the one chapter that was relevant to libraries and librarians.

Surely, the majority of the people in that room had already seen An Inconvenient Truth. The lecture did not stray very far from the same information. What if he had paid the most attention to the one chapter he skipped? Wouldn’t that have been inspiring and energizing?

I left the lecture feeling frustrated and dismayed. This presentation was another symptom of what I feel is a larger problem with ALA conferences. Bonnie Swoger wrote in the Undergraduate Science Librarian that “there is a disconnect between the library world and the research world.” I feel that a similar gap exists between libraryland and the technology, design, and marketing worlds.

Getting such big names as Al Gore to speak at our conferences is awesome, but let’s make it even better by inviting them to talk about their ideas relating to our profession. Let’s take the opportunity to hear something new.

We need to hear from our users, as Bonnie suggests, but we also need to hear from experts outside the library world to help us move forward and keep up with the ever-changing landscape our libraries are part of. We need futurists, philosophers, economists, designers, and technologists to speak at our conferences. We need to hear it from the horse’s mouth — what will effect us.

I still think librarians are a great source for programming at ALA, but I want diversity of thought. I don’t want canned presentations or recycled discussions. I think the change would help us keep up and maybe even change our general image from “behind the times” to “in the know.”

Thanks, Erin, for including me in your list of Happy 101 Award winners! Thank you for reminding me to think of what I have and how lucky I am. Erin Dorney, of course, is a rockstar librarian working at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. I met Erin while coincidentally interning where she worked (Rochester Institute of Technology) and taking an online class with her through Syracuse University. Just recently out of grad school, she has already mentored handfuls of MSLIS students and new librarians. On top of that, she’s a graphic design whiz, making libraries look hip, exciting, and polished. I can’t say enough nice things about Erin, so you should go and read her blog! But first…

Happy 101 Award!

Ten things that have made me happy recently:

1. My fiancé, Joe
2. Getting to see my family this Christmas, including my older brother who I hadn’t seen in over a year (!)
3. My always inspiring and brilliant cousin Sarah
4. Getting to see libraryland friends while in Boston, both old and new
5. A delicious pot of Genmaicha (also known as “popcorn tea”) on a cold Winter’s day
6. Getting to see Amy Millan (of Stars and Broken Social Scene) perform in Silverlake at an intimate venue
7. Being able to exchange ideas and make things with my partner, including an owl made of tiny painted canvases
8. Broken Social Scene, my favorite band, and being able to read a (signed!) book about them
9. Owls! New ones!
10. Cooking: I’m slowly but surely getting better at it

Ten (of the many) bloggers I enjoy:

1. Philippe at The LiS Kid
2. Heather at Flex Your Info
3. Bohyun at Library Hat
4. Ivy at From the catalogs of babes
5. Meredith Farkas at Information Wants To Be Free
6. Sarah at Gender Agenda
7. Tea Austin at Tea & Cookies
8. Lucy Knisley at ArtJournal
9. Minimal Mac
10. My Owl Barn

This is too happy of a meme; I hope it continues!

Earlier today at the Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey, CA, Michael Porter and David Lee King unveiled their highly anticipated Library 101 video and website. I watched live from home via the ILlive UStream (and you can still watch the unveiling and presentation of the video here).

The Library 101 site is awesome. Not only is the video easy to access, the site also offers Essays on Library 101, full of inspiring insights from library superstars, and 101 Resources & Things to Know.

What a fantastic project! I can’t wait to hear the next song Michael Porter and David Lee King come up with.

Yesterday, I was complaining to Joe about how I wish Google Docs had a batch export feature. A few hours later, he sent me a link to Google’s Data Liberation Front, a project to help get data out of Google. (The Data Liberation Front claims to want us to want to use Google products, not to corner us into it.)

Today, I found out that Read Write Web published a post yesterday entitled All Your Docs Belong to You: Google Docs Now Exportable. My wish came true!

As of today, several bloggers have reported seeing this new feature, which allows users to grab all their Google Docs and batch export them as a zip file. Files can be exported in a number of formats, including Microsoft Office and Open Office formats.

I tried it and it worked. Hooray for backups!

See also: Data Liberation Front Blog’s Liberating Google Docs.

The LITA Program Planning Committee (PPC) is the committee that collects, reviews, and schedules LITA-sponsored programs for the ALA Annual Conference. The illustrious Jason Griffey is the chair of the committee for the 2008-2010 term. I was lucky to be appointed to the committee this year, at a time of significant transition for the program planning process.

For the upcoming ALA Annual Conference 2010, Jason Griffey and the LITA Program Planning Committee decided to switch the program proposal process from a paper form and in-person interview to an electronic exchange: a Google Form and email correspondence this year, and hopefully a conference planning system by next year. (The PPC ProgramProcess TaskForce recommends the Open Conference System, an open source application from the Public Knowledge Project.)

With generous help from Ranti Junus, Systems Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries, a senior member of the committee, and Chair of the PPC ProgramProcess TaskForce, I learned that the process used to be very involved:

1. The chair, co-chair, or vice chair of the Interest Group (IG) sponsoring the program would fill out the paper form and make many copies for each PPC member to read. (The information requested on the paper form was exactly the same as that requested on the Google Form this year.)
2. The IG would arrange an appointment and meet with the PPC for 20-30 minutes.
3. Feedback from the PPC was immediate: clarifications, potential audience, etc. PPC sometimes suggested the IG collaborate with other IGs within LITA or with other divisions. Typical collaboration usually entailed asking the other IG/division to co-sponsor to share information about the program with their own members. Time slots were also discussed. (Usually, the PPC chair had the timetable with her so she could check with the conflicts.)
4. The PPC would then come to a consensus.
5. A PPC liaison who was assigned to the IG would take over communication to the IG proposing the program after ALA Annual. The liaison was the go-to person for the IG for all PPC-related communications and was responsible for making sure that the IG would get the information they needed in a timely manner. Liaisons were also responsible for reminding the IGs about turning in other information such as the names of the speakers, communicating PPC discussions related to the respective IGs, and informing PPC about the IG’s progress preparing the program.

This year, with the use of Google Docs, Griffey was able to set up a Google Form for program proposals. The information from the Google Form was funneled into a Google Spreadsheet shared by all the members of the PPC. This was the process so far this year: Read the rest of this entry »