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For the record, ALA Midwinter can slog on through one of Chicago’s top five all-time snow storms. But there should be an honor roll of people who made it to LITA Happy Hour on Sunday night. With the confluence of Linus and Left Shark, it was a strange evening.

This is the beginning of a period that will be very heavy on organization business for me. By my count, I totalled over 16 hours in board meetings, board development, Deep Thinking about budgets and membership numbers, and all-around LITA and ALA strategery. Any of which I’ll be happy to share offline, but which doesn’t make for fun reading. Important takeaways: we’re looking at a generational change in the number of librarians coming into the profession and their level of participation in professional associations.

I did manage to get to LITA’s showcase for the leading edge, Top Tech Trends. For me, the eye opener was a discussion about Bluetooth Beacons. Like many new technologies, the potential here is both cool and creepy. Beacons can locate your mobile device to within inches and deliver very specifically target content. The first commercial application is to deliver promotional material to shoppers in a store, about the products they’re actually standing next to (so you get soup coupons in the soup aisle, dog food coupons in the dog food aisle, etc.). Museums are already working on content for self-guided tours. There’s an open question about how libraries can make use of this technology, though it’s easy to foresee wayfinders that take you to the right book stack, a “what’s scheduled for this room?” function, or “how do I work these projectors and lights?”, all delivered to your mobile device.

The good news is that Beacons are an opt-in technology, but they’re new enough that we probably haven’t seen the first wave of bugs, security holes, or hacks that game the system to hand over some very private data to persons unknown. So, there’s that.

And let me point out that [someone at] ALA decided to scan the conference IDs of everyone attending Top Tech Trends; the people tactually doing the scanning were employees of some external contractor who were given no information about what information was actually being stored, or who it was being shared with, and they weren’t told what to do when an attendee declined to be scanned. C’mon, ALA, we need better than that.

Monday morning, I led the LITA Town Meeting. This is our divisional bacon fest, community get-together, and discussion forum. We had a very good session with questions designed to generate ideas about possible changes to LITA’s membership and benefits and our annual National Forum. I’ll be typing those responses up for the LITA Board and a handful of committee chairs.

Now for the Blue Line back to O’Hare and back home.