I went to ALA Midwinter this past weekend, and it was a pretty good conference. There is starting to be a lot of interesting content about institutional repositories and digital libraries, including quite a few actual case studies about live projects. University of Oregon has a very thoughtful DSpace implementation, policy-wise, even though they are using the technology right out of the box, and it sounds like Washington State is working on some ambitious projects that are highly interactive. I’m really hoping to get some of that going here, because there is so much exciting work to be done and you don’t have to be MIT or the University of California to do it (though it helps).I’m also excited about the prospect of redesigning the ALCTS website – there is certainly a lot to be done there. At the planning meeting I found myself evangelizing for more “action” options at the section level. Right now the section pages are basically an archive of old documents and references to past events. But the sections actually do stuff too – there are programs, continuing education opportunities, publication opportunities, and so on, but you can’t find them. I’d like the site to reflect less of the organization’s bureaucracy and more of its activities.
The one distressing aspect of this conference was the number of people who attended participatory meetings about timely and interesting topics, then either sat there silently or left the room when their input was solicited. I brought this up with a colleague who said I was about the fourth person to mention this occurrence to her. This is incredible to me – I suspect that many people just want to look to someone ahead of them and be told what the next big thing will be and not have to think of it themselves.
Library Web Chic has interesting things to say about political demarcations, and I feel her pain about the growing deficit of communication and innovation. MPOW is obsessed with equal representation. For example, Department X has a thoughtful, creative, committed candidate for the web committee, but we will only consider representatives from Department Y. At the same time, I have major issues about performing primary work functions across departments. I used to be a big cheerleader for the cross-training concept, but lately I have started thinking otherwise. I figure my job is to know about and work with metadata, and to innovate and make good decisions in this arena. For me to do this well takes time, lots of it. I can’t just hole up in my office with a pile of standards – digital projects are interconnected with many areas of the library – but for me to spend a couple of hours a week on the reference desk enhances neither our reference services nor our metadata services. I’d like to work on opening up communication within the organization and getting people with the right expertise involved in critical projects without everyone doing everyone else’s job.
