LITA National Forum, 2003

The LITA National Forum 2003 was a 3-day conference session held in Norfolk Virginia from 3–5 October. The keynote speakers were:

R. David Lankes, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
Digital Reference: The First Mature Digital Library Service

Liz Bishoff, Colorado Digitization Program
Digital Dreaming, Digital Promise — Getting Ready, Getting There

David Seaman, Digital Library Federation
From Isolation to Integration: Major Trends in Digital Libraries

Concurrent sessions covered a range of topics, with 3 main themes emerging:

Metasearching: several different speakers discussed in-house development of metasearch (or cross-database search) facilities, generally using open source tools such as Perl or PHP in combination with Z39.50; a poster session covered implementing Encompass at a university library

Open Source: as well as using open source tools, several of the metasearch projects will be released to other organisations under an open source license

XML and metadata: topics ranged from using XML search engines with a digital library to generating automatic broad subject categories from catalogue records to using XML and XSLT to provide access to networked electronic resources

Most of the speakers came from academic libraries, but conference attendees were from all types of libraries.

I attended a preconference on using open source software in libraries, given by Eric Lease Morgan of MyLibrary fame — it included lots of hands on practice in installing and running a range of open source applications for libraries, including the very useful MARC::Record, a Perl application that can extract specific fields from MARC records, or generate a MARC record from prompted input.

Please feel free to get in touch with me if you would like more information about the LITA National Forum 2003.

Brenda Chawner brenda.chawner@vuw.ac.nz

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