Meeting attended by

2006 ALA Midwinter Meeting, San Antonio

Meeting Report
January 21, 2006

Committee Chair: Tara Lee Dirst

Minutes by: Gwendolyn Reece
Meeting attended by: Shelley Almgren, Tara Dirst, Connie Haley, Gwendolyn Reece, Barbara Spivey, Rob Spragg, Cristin Frodella (guest), Mandy Havert (guest)
Announcements: LITA Town meeting. The topic will be education. Gwendolyn is planning on attending.
LITA Clearinghouse Website:

1. 
   We need to find ways to get more content on the website.
   
   1. 
      We can add listservs, blogs, and RSS feeds
      
   2. 
      We should create a form that would allow people to make suggestions for additions
      
   3. 
      Each person who is responsible for checking the links should aim to add 5 new sites
      
2. 
   Each member should look at the clearinghouse again and see if there are any new sections we should add
   
   1. 
      We think there should probably be a new section on blogs and RSS
      
3. 
   Tara is going to ask Ellen to link the clearinghouse from the middle of our committee’s page rather than just being on the side
   
4. 
   We still would like to see this be a database driven site.
   

Regional Institutes are declining. Most LITA members don’t go to annual. Webcasting is a possibility. The LITA leadership wants us to be thinking of topics. ALA has webCT

• 
  Gwendolyn will find out what TLT used for the webcast she attended and will alert the listserv
  
• 
  WebCT does have the ability for asynchronous education, which may better suit the needs of a larger section.
  
• 
  We recognize two different segments of our population that need to be addressed in programming/education
  

1. 
   The accidental systems people
   
2. 
   Those who are superadvanced
   

• 
  Currently we are not offering advanced enough training. We believe we should be offering more advanced programming with a specific library focus.
  
• 
  We want to highly recommend to LITA that they should do some serious assessment, both qualitative and quantitative, of what needs are not being met and how people believe they would best be met. We should not only focus on current LITA members, but should also search for information from those who would be target members for us. We should do some competitive intelligence with ASIS&T, Educause, and computer conferences.
  
• 
  Online options would be great for offering both introductory and advanced materials as well as theoretical and practical.
  
• 
  For regional conferences, they need to be very practical and hands on. The problem with them is that they require travel money and you would have to locate sufficient people to work on a specific implementation project in a particular region. This may not be the best model any longer.
  

Our program at annual is set for Saturday 1:30 – 3:30. Some additional questions for our speakers: How do we insure collaboration with IT people and the library? How do we keep up with trends for planning? In the program description, we should eliminate the section where we are giving recommendations about particular certifications. LAMA and APA are co-sponsoring us. Tara talked to the Digital Library Interest Group. We’ll use them for advertising.