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This is my first ALA Midwinter conference! I’m fortunate to be serving on LITA 2012 National Forum Planning Committee chaired by Susan Smith. As an ALA Midwinter “newbie”, I’ve depended on my colleagues to steer me in the right direction and show me the ropes, and as usual they have come through for me! The different format of midwinter, focusing on meetings and discussion groups, is a nice change from fever pitch pace of ALA annual.

I began Saturday running a WebEx session for LITA’s Top Technology Trends Committee meeting on which Susan serves. By using the WFU installation of WebEx we were able to allow three additional committee members to virtually attend the meeting. I’m learning more and more about WebEx and discovering it helps to have a person dedicated to manage the WebEx meeting rather than depending on the person running the face to face meeting to also run the WebEx meeting. By focusing on the WebEx meeting I was able to ensure the video and audio were up to par add that the video always focused on the speaker.

While I enjoyed the EBSCO lunch on Saturday, the Alexander Street Press breakfast on Sunday was just amazing! Some of the new video products they are releasing are very impressive, including Anthropology Online and a second volume of Classical Scores Library ! The guest speaker was acclaimed filmaker Lynn Novick. She discussed the filmmaking process and her latest work “Prohibition“.

Mary Beth already gave an excellent recap of theLLAMA Interiors Discussion Group, all I can add is my favorite quote from the group “Libraries need to think of furniture as an operating expense, not a capital expense!” I thought this was a great way to re-think furniture expense to allow for more flexibility and frequent change! (I also fell in love with AGATI furniture!)

Rosalind and I attended a session on Reference Technologies and I was impressed to learn that Springshare, maker of LibGuides, also makes offers SMS/Texting tools in their LibAnswers product that the Library at Purchase College is using for text reference. I was surprised to learn that about 60% of their text reference questions come from users already in the Library!

As always, the LITA Top Technology Trends program was amazing! But my main focus for attending the event this time was to learn as much as possible about streaming video in order to stream the keynotes at the LITA 2012 National Forum! I learned streaming is not easy, but with some practice and equipment I hope we will be able to pull it off as successfully as Maurice York and Jason Griffey have in the past!

Some of the Top Technology Trends included: Frictionless transactions, Enterprise IT staffing, Death of the ILS (and what will replace it), Tools that free up librarians from service desks, personal curation services (think “GoodReads”), and 3D printing and scanning.

Now I’m off to an Alexander Street Press discussion group on “Gay and Lesbian Thought and Culture” and a discussion group on “Creative Learning Commons”. Tomorrow morning I’ll be running another WebEx meeting for the LITA 2012 National Forum Planning Committee!