TLA – Thursday, sessions and exhibits
TLA stands for Texas Library Association. Their annual conference was April 15-18. Electronic handouts exist for most presentations. Handouts will be added to those presently posted.
Thursday, April 17th in between the exhibits I was able to see two sessions and the general session. All were about future of Libraries (my choice). First, I saw Roy Tennant talk about the Future of Catalogs. I like what I heard about not using the term OPAC. Roy suggests we call it the catalog. The Library jargon for the catalog is the ILS or Integrated Library System. Roy says that he does not see us replacing the ILS with open source stuff yet, however he does see us adding a Discovery System (a friendly user interface) on top of the ILS. He talked about VuFind (a resource portal developed for Libraries) and Scriblio (with facetted searching). Roy also talked about LibraryFind (a one-stop search service) and WorldCat Identities (a great biography 2.0 resource). And he said look at Penn State to see what new things they have done.
Next was Joyce Valenza about designing virtual Library Spaces. Joyce’s, Library web page needs to be explored. It is overwhelming. Where we have a list of 3 or 4 image generators, she has 33!
The second General Session had a panel discussion. What I heard most is that we Librarians have to understand what our patrons and potential patrons want and need and then provide our resources in a way that the patrons can see the benefit to themselves. The panelists where Stephen Abram (Stephen’s Lighthouse), Joe Janes, and Karen Schneider (Free Range Librarian). The format worked well with these three.
