American Libraries

Dale Poulter: The committee wanted to make sure to really express the coming together of technology and the use of technology in libraries to create information communities.

Michael Porter: Hi-Fi-Sci-Fi Library. That is about high fidelity—fidelity meaning honest, true, hard working, that sort of the fidelity, loyal, those sorts of good qualities. So there's the hi-fi. The sci-fi is taken from science fiction and some of the inspirations that science fiction can give us as information professionals, right now and as we go forward. And then the library, well the library is everyone's destination of choice.

Dinah Sanders: The library metadata is fantastic and our problem with it is not the metadata itself, but how we've been presenting it. So the tag cloud has already proven very good, even before adding the community tags in. Community tagging, then, lets you start to augment that environment of formal subject headings with emerging and specialized and informal vocabulary.

Tim Spalding: I wanted to focus in on social cataloging because I think that the real vital center of Library 2.0 is the sort of thing that a library does, it's getting at the actual stuff.

Dale Poulter: Even in Star Trek—the prime example where science fiction speculates on the future of information access—the two things that are best at information access, these new life forms, the photonic and android. Both of them aspire to be more human—that's the biggest goal that they have, is to be more human. I would say that considering that and all the thought that went into developing the interface and speculation that went into how the future might be, that actually we've attained that already. And as long as we can harness technology appropriately and use it, it's just a tool for us to further—well libraries do: the content, the community, the humanity. And libraries lift humanity up with those things and I think we have a bright future doing that.

Nicholas Schiller: Libraries can pull at information from gaming in a number of ways. There's a lot of the collaborative learning and communication aspects to games that libraries can use in the classroom. When teaching people information literacy we can put people in groups and allow them to rely on each other as resources. But also another area that games can really reflect on library service is in usability and interface design.

Tim Spaulding: I think the general idea there of making yourself or buying something that brings patrons into your catalog in a more engaged way and in a way that they really interact with what you’re doing and express themselves is really something I want to see libraries do.

Dale Poulter: On Star Trek there's a computer that people interface with, the LCARS system. “L” in LCARS is library and it's the way people access and retrieve information. So Star Trek has a group of scientists and intellectuals that actually work on speculating about what the future will be like. And that's interesting that they've put the library in everyone's everyday life.

Andrew Pace: One of the things we often hear about LITA Forum is that's it's really hard to get a proposal in on time. So the LITA Forum that will be happening next year, with the committee that I appointed in Salt Lake City, Utah, we've actually extended the dead line. So I think that we'll see some really great presentations next year and some really great keynoters again.