2005 LITA National Forum Preconferences

Open Source Communication and Collaboration Tools

Thursday, September 29, 2005 , 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

May Chang, Web Development Librarian, North Carolina State University

 

There has been a tremendous growth in web-based applications particularly in the areas of communication and collaboration.    These applications include discussion forums, weblogs/RSS, wikis, and instant messaging systems.    This pre-conference workshop will focus on these lightweight and practical tools which are readily available as open source software, and can be easily implemented in libraries as part of public and staff services.    Current developments such as podcasting and photo blogging will also be highlighted.   The session draws on the experience of current implementations and will cover the applications and technology, best use cases, and the installation and implementation process.

Building Digital Library Collections with the Greenstone Librarian Interface

Thursday, September 29, 2005, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Friday, September 30, 2005, 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon

Ian Witten, Professor, University of Waikato

 

The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive system for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet. This pre-conference workshop shows how digital library collections can be created and customized with the new Greenstone Librarian Interface. The basic features of the interface allow users to add documents and metadata to collections, create new collections whose structure mirrors existing ones, and build collections and put them in place so for users to view. More advanced users can design and customize new collection structures. At the most advanced level, the Librarian Interface gives expert users interactive access to the full power of Greenstone, which could formerly be tapped only by running Perl scripts manually.

 

This tutorial is a practical, hands-on, laboratory-style workshop in which attendees build their own digital library collections using the Greenstone digital library software.    Attendees will learn enough to install the software, set up a digital library system, build their own collections, and customize them. Those with programming skills should be able to extend and tailor the system extensively. Moreover, all attendees will be equipped with extensive software and course material that is freely redistributable.

 

 

Moving Image Collections

Thursday, September 29, 2005, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Friday, September 30, 2005, 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon

Grace Agnew, AUL for Digital Library Systems, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

Jane Johnson, MIC Project Manager, Library of Congress

 

An overview with technical information about Moving Image Collections (MIC), a collaboration of the Library of Congress and the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA).   MIC integrates a union catalog, archive directory, and informational resources in a portal structure delivering customized information on archival moving images, their preservation, and the images themselves to a number of diverse constituencies.

 

Originally designed to address the crisis in film preservation, MIC now serves a clientele beyond archivists and is poised to explore the leading edge of non-textual indexing, digital rights management, and educational use, all the while continuing to meet the daily needs of archivists by supporting collaborative preservation, access, digitization, education, and metadata initiatives.

 

We are committed to the use of standards-based interoperability protocols to provide an integrated and easy to use portal for digital educational resources.    MIC's union catalog incorporates both open-source Z39.50 capabilities and support for the Open Archives Initiative.    MIC's extensible format-independent metadata design accommodates searching, export and display in multiple schemas, including MARC21, Dublin Core, MPEG-7, and organizations' own.   We are currently testing a mapping utility that allows repositories to map their own schema to the MIC Core Registry of Data Elements to expedite ingest into the MIC Union Catalog.

 

This preconference will explore best practices for describing and preserving moving images and digital video using metadata, as well as MIC's extensible metadata strategy for making digital resources accessible and useful to different audiences.