Speaker sessions and discussions

Creating an Organizational Culture to Support Digital Library Initiatives

Presented by Deanna Marcum

Digital Initiatives define the library of the 21st century. This opening presentation examines changes that will be needed to integrate digital projects with our legacy collections. Starting with a vision for what the future library should be, the speaker will then move to preparing staff for new roles, building meaningful collaborations, and finding the resources.

Five Organizational Stages of Digital Preservation

Presented by Anne Kenney

This session begins with an exploration of ten key reasons NOT to do digital preservation, and their role in dampening the development of viable digital preservation programs across the country. The speaker introduces an organizational model for digital preservation based on five developmental stages that institutions pass through in responding to the digital preservation challenge. Managerial, technical, and resource implications of digital curation will be explored and the results of an institutional readiness survey completed by over one hundred cultural heritage institutions will be presented.

Why Is IT So Hard to Do?

Presented by Paul Conway

Organizational change in the library IT environment may seem like changing the tires on a moving automobile. In a world that seems increasingly driven by information technology, everybody claims a stake. The pervasiveness of IT programs and services in libraries challenges our notions of vision, leadership, and management style and generates new mindsets and competencies that don?t always fit well with traditional organizational structures and cultures. This plenary address will explore the tension between developing a viable and sustainable technology infrastructure and delivering new digital services and content to end users (staff and public), as well as the apparent disconnect between the digital dreams that we all seem to share and the reality that technology is so technical, still. Drawing on his experience at Duke and the insights of colleagues in libraries large and small, the speaker will ruminate on how organizational change appears through the IT lens.

The Cutting Edge: The Next Generation Digital Library

Presented by G. Sayeed Choudhury

Predicting the next generation digital library may seem unrealistic given that there is great debate regarding the definition of current digital libraries. Rather than trying to predict the future of digital libraries, this presentation offers a definition of digital libraries that offers a framework for examining the cutting edge trends that might define the future. By considering this framework in the context of behaviors of the so-called net generation, and developing movements such as serious games, this presentation will outline the possible stresses and strains that libraries might face--and how libraries might be prepared to deal with them. As an initial point for consideration, this speaker will offer an argument that the Google Print initiative with Michigan, Stanford, NYPL, Harvard and Oxford will simply be a bump on the long road ahead.

Pattern Recognition: Trends, Forecasts, and Fragments of a Future

A round table discussion

Members of the panel will attempt to bring closure to the day's discussion by focusing on the situation of libraries in an age of what we might hesitantly call interactive literacy. Indeed, as Steve Johnson has recently argued in Everything Bad is Good for You, the productions of popular culture and entertainment – ranging from the multithreaded plots of a television show like The Sopranos to the elaborately crafted virtual worlds of online games – are now exercising many of the same cognitive skills traditionally (and neurologically) associated with reading. To that end the panel will combine a focus on the next generation of readers and library patrons – the InterGenerational Design Challenge, and the International Children's Digital Library – with a more general discussion of interface and visualization and how to "read" these strange new forms alongside the more familiar interface of the printed page.

Panelists will include:

• Matt Kirschenbaum, Chair
  Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland
• Ben Bederson
  Director, Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland
• Allison Druin
  Assistant Professor, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland
• Stuart Moulthrop
  Professor, School of Information Arts and Technologies, University of Baltimore
• Jennifer Preece
  Professor and Dean, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland