LITA Forum 2018, Minneapolis

I’m in snowy Minneapolis at the LITA Forum! I attended this conference two years ago in Texas and had a great time nerding out with my other technology library folks and I’m very excited to be back this year. Nancy Sims was the opening keynote talking about copyright and risk-taking in libraries. There are some excellent collaborative notes up about the keynote. The LITA forum keynotes are always well-selected and Nancy’s was very awesome:

Next I attended a discussion session with two presentations. The first was Gender Equity in Library Technology: How Do We Get There? presented by Melissa Prescott, Robin Ewing, and Mary O’Dea all from St. Cloud State University. The second presentation was Technological Microaggressions: How to Notice Them, How to Undo Them presented by Ray Lockman, Amy McNally, and Chip Gehring from Hennepin County Library. This presentation centered on microaggressions related to gender expression.

Next I attended Escape From The Dark by David Naughton. Slides for that presentation are up here. Then I attended Towards an Ethics of Data Visualization by Megan Ozeran from the University of Illinois. Finally, I caught part of Topher Lawton‘s presentation on expertise and instructional technology.

On Friday morning, I attended a session building digital strategies from by bottom up by Margaret Heller and Hong Ma from Loyola University. Their ideas are very aligned with mine in developing different leadership strategies in library technology. They conceptualized this process as leading from the bottom, or taking grassroots ideas to develop institution-wide goals. After that I presented my session:

I think it went well! Due to some technical difficulties with the other presentation in the session, we didn’t have much time for a full group discussion, but it seemed like people had good small group discussions. Next I attended an update on DPLA by John Bracken. I didn’t realize when I joined this session that I just saw John Bracken at OCLC two weeks ago, but it was still interesting! (Particularly interesting was the difference in the tone of the crowds at the two conferences!) The last session I attended was Maintaining Standards for Research Guides Without Making People Hate You with Ashley Lierman from Rowan University.

The LITA Forum was fantastic as always. I liked the new design of the conference and the different types of sessions. I felt like it was a lot more participatory than most conferences and it’s a great opportunity to network with other library tech people. There’s a lot of expertise at this conference and it was fun to tap into it!