I'm in Denver for the the cleverly named 2007 LITA Forum. This is the first in a while that I have not been giving a talk at, which is nice. I can enjoy Denver, enjoy my colleagues, and begin my new role as "committee recruiter"...one of the first duties that comes along with being Vice President of the division.

So, yes, I am taking time out to talk up LITA a bit. It is one of the best conferences for IT networking that I know of (that's small 'n', lest you think I refer to the days of LAN and WAN administration and actually meeting to talk about it). Long breaks and a diverse crowd of administrators, managers, techies, and newbies make it a great setting. And for those who can't be there, almost every session is covered by an army of volunteer bloggers at the LITA blog.

My favorite session yesterday was from Gregg Silvis from Delaware, who opened the floor with "Library 2023: A Provoked Discussion on the Future of Libraries." Basically, he lit the fuse and got away to watch the fireworks, while ably guiding the discussion and keeping it civil. It was a frank discussion punctuated with just the right amount of contrariness.

Silvis posited that in 2023 there are 100,000,000 freely available texts; what does this mean for librarians, scholars, copyright, and even Kinkos? There was a lot of discussion about the library as a place for study (a third place) versus the warehouse of books. And way too much discussion—including by your's truly—about the value of metadata. It got me thinking about the library as place. Short of there being barista and XBox training in library school, I am struggling with the librarian's role in this 2023 library.

Quote of the day from UIUC's Michael Twidale:
"Public libraries are the gateway drug [to freely available content]."

Ron Gardner, Contentdm specialist for OCLC, made the point that libraries are getting a lot more involved in the creation that goes on in libraries. It got me thinking that we are still a little fixated on what comes into the library (metadata creation, organization, even the library website) rather than caring as much as we should about what goes out.

In a profession full of humanists and expert researchers, is it time for us to be thinking even more about what people produce in libraries, rather than simply finding them the right resources and leaving them to their best devices? Could the library profession be a key player in the quality of information that with or without our help is going to wind up available to millions through search and discovery mechanisms that are not of our own flawless (ahem) design? We're already playing a role in the production of mass digitization of our existing resources and the creation of digital portals for our unique resources. Isn't the next logical step to be the stewards of the things that are created from access to those things?

Maybe I'm just high....altitudinally speaking, that is.

After all this serious talk about the future of automation systems, I thought I would lighten the load with a little humor.

This was another take-away from my trip to Google that I did not mention in my more formal report. It's a picture from the restroom stall at Google. Now, I work at a state institution where we consider a toilet paper holder still attached to the wall quite a luxury. But this blows away (ahem) all the talk of free food, ping-pong, and jeans at work.

Like most Google user interfaces, the options are simple and intuitive, even if the results are somewhat shocking.

What does it say about us when the toilets of a search-engine giant are even more high-tech than some of libraries' search-and-retrieval technology?

I was flattered when Talis, a library systems and services company based in the U.K., asked me to be a judge in its very first "Mashing Up the Library" competition. Put simply, a mashup uses web services and data from two or more sources to create a new service.

John Blyberg took home the first prize with Go-Go--Google Gadget; Second Life Library from Alliance Library System took home second place. Rather than repeat it here, I will simply point to Teresa Koltzenburg’s excellent coverage of the winners on the ALA Techsource blog.

The flattery I felt in being asked was quickly overshadowed by the fantastic submissions to the mashup contestants. I found myself very distracted by the fact that I wanted to stop judging and start implementing! Though I have long been a proponent of "dis-integrated systems" and a fan of Talis putting the notion into action, the connection between "2.0" and "Mashups" to my notion of dismantled systems was not so clear to me until I saw what people entered into this competition--in many cases, the perfect blending of integrated library systems and services, third-party data, and good ol' ingenuity.

While I'm throwing around references left and right, I highly recommend Michael Stephen's latest publication in Library Technology Reports, "Web 2.0 & Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software." Geared toward social networking and its use in libraries, the report is an excellent primer for those just getting started with social network technology, and nice resource for 2.0 practitioners. I love LTR, and this issue is no exception. The Talis competition and this LTR are just two recent examples of 2.0 put into practice.

It seems like the hub-bub over "Library 2.0"--Is it a movement? Is it a bandwagon? Is it a fad?--has subsided to make way for actual technical advances in library services (hallelujah!). Judging the Talis competition helped convince me of that. I was honored to be a judge, and I'm happy that Paul Miller, technology evangelist for Talis, announced that the competition is already started up again.

I'm adding this one to my judging repertoire (after the Sirsi Building Better Communities competition), and I look forward to someone cooking up an opportunity for me to join Jaye P. Morgan and Jamie Farr for a Library Gong Show--now that would be fun.