This is the briefest of travelogues describing my experience at the 2010 ALA Annual Meeting in Washington (DC).
Pat Lawton and I gave a presentation at the White House Four Points Hotel on the “Catholic Portal“. Essentially it was a status report. We shared the podium with Jon Miller (University of Southern California) who described the International Mission Photography Archive — an extensive collection of photographs taken by missionaries from many denominations.
I then took the opportunity to visit my mother in Pennsylvania, but the significant point is the way I got out of town. I had lost my maps, and my iPad came to the rescue. The Google Maps application was very, very useful.
On Monday I shared a podium with John Blyberg (Darien Library) and Tim Spalding (LibraryThing) as a part of a Next-Generation Library Catalog Special Interest Group presentation. John provided an overview of the latest and greatest features of SOPAC. He emphasized a lot of user-centered design. Tim described library content and services as not (really) being a part of the Web. In many ways I agree with him. I outlined how a few digital humanities computing techniques could be incorporated into library collections and services in a presentation I called “The Next Next-Generation Library Catalog“. That afternoon I participated in a VUFind users-group meeting, and I learned that I am pretty much on target in regards to the features of this “discovery system”. Afterwards a number of us from the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) listened to folks from Crivella West describe their vision of librarianship. The presentation was very interesting because they described how they have taken many collections of content and mined them for answers to questions. This is digital humanities to the extreme. Their software — the Knowledge Kiosk — is being used to analyze the content of John Henry Newman at the Newman Institute.
Tuesday morning was spent more with the CRRA. We ratified next year’s strategic plan. In the afternoon I visited a few of my friends at the Library of Congress (LOC). There I learned a bit how the LOC may be storing and archiving Twitter feeds. Interesting.
Tags: ALA