Forro, 'LITA Midwinter Report, 2', LITA Newsletter v15n02 URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/lita/lita-v15n02-forro-lita V15N2.MIDREP2 LITANEWS ------------------------------------ [LITA Midwinter Report, 2] Leadership Development Committee THE LITA LEADERSHIP Development Committee met during Midwinter to discuss future training sessions for LITA leaders. The next Midwinter session will be on Monday afternoon (2-5:30 p.m.) in Philadelphia. The session will consist of two parts. The first part will offer basic information on being an Interest Group Chair, including program planning, deadlines, bylaws and cosponsorship, presented by LITA staff and experienced IG Chairs. The second part will feature a presentation on a selected topic of interest related to issues of leadership. These plans will be developed further during the 1994 ALA Annual Conference and more information will be available later. New IG Chairs, IG Vice Chairs, other interested IG members and LITA officers are encouraged to attend the training sessions at Midwinter. This Committee is committed to the support of the LITA mission and to provide information and leadership development to LITA committees and interest groups.--Denise Forro, Michigan State Legislation and Regulation Committee THE COMMITTEE'S MAJOR focus this Midwinter was the recently published ALA pamphlet Principles for the Development of the National Information Infrastructure. This draft document emerged from a Telecommunications Policy Forum, cosponsored by ALA, CLR and numerous other national library organizations, and held in Washington, D.C., in September 1993. LITA was one of the primary sponsors of the forum. It was the hope of forum participants that the draft principles would be presented to ALA membership at Midwinter, with an eye toward adoption at Annual. However, as often happens, events caused this schedule to accelerate. Upon learning of the introduction of Sen. Holling's major telecommunications bill (S. 1822) two days before Midwinter, the Legislation and Regulation Committee recommended that the Board officially endorse the principles in time for Council to consider adoption the following Wednesday. The Committee Chair also worked with the ALA Legislation Assembly and the chairs of other divisional legislation committees to advocate endorsement of the principles. ALA Council voted that endorsement during its final Midwinter 1994 session. The Committee met with representatives of the ALA Washington Office to continue work on a resource file of LITA members willing to work on demand with the Washington Office in reading legislation, giving opinions and testifying before House and Senate Committees on matters specifically related to technology. The file should be finished and turned over to the Washington Office by the 1994 Annual Conference.--Patrick Flannery Membership Committee LITA'S MEMBERSHIP COMMITTEE continues to try to find ways to promote membership in LITA and to diversify its membership. As always, having a LITA presence at conferences is a major activity for this Committee. In addition to the LITA booth at the ALA Annual conference, the Membership Committee will have a LITA booth at the PLA conference in Atlanta in March. There will be another raffle at the ALA Annual booth, and a raffle for a LITA membership at the PLA conference. If you are a LITA member attending the PLA conference and would be willing to spend some time at the LITA booth, please contact Rob Carlson at the LITA Office. Also, if you belong to an Interest Group ahd you would like to promote a project at the LITA booth this summer in Miami, don't hesitate to contact Billie Peterson (petersonb@baylor.ccis. baylor.edu). Belated congratulations are due to Keith Morgan and Harold Schleifer, who won the raffle held at the LITA booth last summer in New Orleans. Last Fall letters and LITA membership forms were mailed to many library school deans and presidents of library school student associations. Some 30 students responded by joining LITA. From those who responded, the names of two students will be drawn, and LITA will pay their ALA registration cost. That drawing will take place in the spring and the winning students will be notified. The Membership Committee arranged for a "LITA Happy Hour" at McCormick and Schmick's during the Midwinter meeting in Los Angeles. LITA members had an opportunity to meet and mix in an informal setting, and a good time was had by all. As was done last year at the summer conference, the Committee will also make arrangements for three LITA Lunches and one LITA dinner in Miami. Watch for the next issue of the LITA Newsletter for more details about this opportunity. Finally, the Membership Committee is making renewed efforts to diversify further LITA membership by intensifying its promotional efforts with the following groups of people: network and vendor employees who work with librarians and are often librarians themselves; non-librarian, computer-oriented staff who work increasingly with libraries; international librarians; and library school students. The Committee is also planning to focus on new LITA members and first-time ALA conference attendees who are LITA members.--Billie Peterson, Baylor University Microcomputers in Technical Services Interest Group (LITA/ALCTS) CHERYL C. COOK AND Bruce Chr. Johnson (Library of Congress) presented an overview and demonstration of a new tool scheduled to be available in May 1994: The Cataloger's Desktop on CD-ROM. This tool makes available in electronic form many cataloging tools produced by the Library of Congress, with hypertext links, personalizable notes and links and many other features. Tools currently included are Library of Congress Rule Interpretations, Subject Cataloging Manual, USMARC Concise Formats, USMARC code lists for languages, countries, geographic areas, relators, sources and description conventions. Their presentation was followed by brief discussions of future meeting topics, meeting times and innovative microcomputer uses at various sites. We will seek to schedule future meetings at a less congested time. Future discussion topics may include ergonomic workstation equipment for technical services and microcomputers in acquisitions operations. There was a suggestion for a new listserv to discuss technical services workstations and an archive for profiles of technical setups at various institutions, to provide information and contacts for software developers, workstation managers and technical services supervisors.--Betsy Gamble, Cornell University Online Catalog Interest Group MORE THAN THIRTY participants attended the OCIG discussion during Midwinter to discuss topics related to the development and use of online catalogs, past, present and future. The future of the catalog was the primary focus. Issues raised included: *The changing nature of the catalog with the addition of resources such as indexes and encyclopedias *Expansion of the OPAC beyond the locally held collection *Application of natural language searching and relevance ranking to the online catalog *Redesign of screen interfaces for a changing OPAC environment *Z39.50 and the catalog The last topic will be the focus of the OCIG's joint program with TESLA this summer in Miami, and the program plans were reviewed. If you are interested in joining our OCIG planning group please contact the Vice Chair/Chair-elect, Laurie A. Preston, Carrier Library, James Madison University, Harrisonburg VA 22807; (703) 568-6907; fac_lpreston@vax1.acs.jmu.edu (Internet) or fac_lpreston@jmuvax (BITNET).--Laurie A. Preston Optical Information Systems Interest Group AUDIO ON YOUR PC--What Do You Need and What Are Your Choices? That was the title of Norman Desmarais' (editor of CD-ROM World) discussion of audio and its importance in multimedia presentations. Norman began by noting that of all the multimedia programs he'd worked with, only the audio components posed significant implementation problems. Such problems are frequently due to the nature of audio cards developed before the MPC (Multimedia PC) standard and those whose IRQ channel and DMA (Direct Memory Access) settings can vary, be set to specific proprietary addresses, and can also conflict with other PC settings (for a printer, for example). Norman discussed some solutions. The varying types of audio that can be implemented in the PC environment were also described: waveform audio (synthesized), wavetable audio (digitized recordings of actual instruments) and MIDI (computer-generated audio). The file sizes of each type vary with the sampling frequency, depth of sample in each channel and the number of channels used, with MIDI being the smallest file size. Norman noted that within the Windows environment both waveform and MIDI audio types are supported and easy to implement. Within libraries, the usual use of audio would be to enhance patron instructions with audio "clip art." The availability of authoring tools such as Macromind Director, and the Windows recording and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) functions that allow OLE objects to be attached to a document, should encourage libraries to experiment with audio, including foreign language instruction. The remainder of the meeting focused on the packet on digital imaging technology that will be distributed during this summer's program (Access to Digital Images: see "LITA News" in this issue). As presently developed, the packet will contain an imaging bibliography, an inventory of current imaging projects in libraries, an imaging glossary, selected articles on imaging and sample issues of imaging journals. We are working with members from the cosponsoring groups to construct this significant beginning to what will eventually become a LITA publication. Cosponsoring groups include LITA's Emerging Technologies IG, the ALCTS Electronic Imaging Technologies Committee and Preservation Microfilming Committee and PLA's Technology in Public Libraries Committee. We have agreed to joint publicity for our respective cosponsored programs and preconferences, all of which relate to imaging technology. Anyone interested in imaging technologies and their implementation will find these programs informative, thought provoking and, we hope, even inspirational.--Pamela Mason, National Agriculture Library