LITA National Forum

Citation

Riggs, C. (2002), "LITA National Forum", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919aac.001

LITA National Forum

Colby Riggs

The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), held its Fourth National Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on October 11-14, 2001. The LITA National Forum is a three-day educational event that provides guidance and continuing education on current and future technologies for decision makers and practitioners in libraries and information organizations. The Forum is a relatively small conference with an attendance of around 450 persons. The Forums are held in locations around the USA once a year, usually in cities where ALA does not meet so LITA members who do not regularly attend ALA meetings can attend high quality and timely programs in their local region. The theme of this informative forum was "Integrating Innovation: IT in the Transformation of the Library."

The forum began with two preconferences, "Adaptive Technology for the Internet" presented by Barbara Mates and "Practical Digital Libraries Overview" presented by Dr Edward Fox. There were three thought-provoking general sessions: "What Technology is Good For ­ and How to Think About It" by Joseph Janes, "We Know What You Did: Privacy, Promotion and Public Records on the Internet" by Karen Coyle and "The Librarians' Index to the Internet, Past, Present and Future" by Karen Schneider.

There were over 30 programs in six concurrent sessions. A few of the general themes focused on:

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  privacy and policy issues;

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  electronic books;

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  inventory management;

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  e-learning; and

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  digital libraries.

The following are descriptions of the highlights from this year's LITA National Forum. A full listing of the programs including the papers and presentations are available on the LITA Web site at: http://www.lita.org/forum01/index.htm.

General Sessions

"We Know What You Did: Privacy, Promotion and Public Records on the Internet" was presented by Karen Coyle. Coyle currently works at the University of California in the California Digital Library (www.cdlib.org), an organization that develops the online access system used by libraries on the nine UC campuses. She is a recognized expert in technical issues, such as metadata and information retrieval, as well as social, political and policy issues.

Coyle spoke last year at the Forum on privacy. The program was highly regarded and well received. At this Forum, Coyle described how many things have changed in the world in terms of privacy since her last presentation. Some factors that have influenced the changes are the declines in e-commerce associated with the "dotcom" collapse and the tragic events of September 11 that have changed the widely held views regarding privacy in favor of the public interest and patriotism. Coyle described these influences of the past year in terms of the impact on libraries and our communities.

Coyle stated that the Internet was previously just about the sharing and exchanging of information, and now the new emerging model of the Internet has changed in character. The information is now about and based on you as an individual. Previously the Internet was made up of machines communicating with each other with no identity attached to the communication. The new focus emphasizes the gathering and retention of information about individuals and their habits on the Internet to maximize profits and marketability. The e-commerce concentration dictates a greater importance today than in the past.

The outmoded model of subscribing to the services of a Web site did not provide enough information about the individual for the advertisers and commercial vendors doing business on the Internet. This business population wanted to know about who they are reaching. Looking at Web logs and tracking a static IP address did not provide enough information.

In order to ascertain more information about the Internet users, browser "cookies" were developed so that a user's identity persisted beyond their temporary IP address. Cookies are embedded in the content flowing back and forth between the user's computer and the servers. They were initially implemented to allow user-side customization of Web information, such as an individual's viewing preferences or time zone. They accomplish this by requesting that the user's browser accept and retain a cookie that is to be presented back to the Web server during subsequent sessions. This essentially provides a means of uniquely identifying a particular user for the purposes of later recalling information about them. Because the browser cannot distinguish between the benevolent usage of cookies and usage that is intended for advertisers or others seeking to monitor usage habits, those seeking to track users quickly utilized cookies to develop databases of usage patterns across popular Web sites by embedding cookies in banner ads. Although the use of cookies can give Web publishers or advertisers some insight into who is viewing their pages, it has a substantial drawback of identifying the computer more than the individual user. For users, permitting cookies is a trade-off between increased anonymity and added convenience or features in their Web browsing. Unfortunately, most users are not well educated enough in the technology to make an informed decision about the use of cookies by Web publishers.

As Internet users, we might not think twice about personalized services offered to us on the Web. They provide very helpful customized information such as stock quotes, horoscopes and local branches of stores. In order to provide these services, the providers are gathering and storing very personal information about an individual that an individual might not be aware that they are revealing. For example, to obtain your horoscope you usually provide your full date of birth. To find a store location you provide your zip code, and by using zip codes the providers can infer demographics such as income, race and lifestyle. Information gathered from these two innocent examples provides a lot of personal information about a particular Internet user that one would not necessarily think is revealed.

Not only are these providers gathering personal information, but our national, state and local governments are making public records available on the Internet. It is not that public records are inherently bad, but the data can be used in the commercial sector to discover even more information about an individual. Database technology has reached a point where multiple sources can be merged to create and cross-reference information about individuals. This creates a growing privacy dilemma. Generally there are no clear laws about distributing information on the Internet. As a result many Web sites have privacy policy statements that are difficult to interpret and usually contain a disclaimer that they may change at any time.

What should we do to protect individuals from this undisclosed gathering of personal data? The answer for some is to use a "cookie cutter" program. These programs allow the individual to choose the provider they want to share a cookie with.

Coyle reminded the audience that in view of this developing privacy environment that libraries as defined by our ALA rules have privacy protection policies http://www.ala.org/work/freedom/lbr.html. Libraries remain unique relative to the Internet because of their protection of individual privacy, but this is likely to be scrutinized in the near future as public concerns focus on restricting access to potentially dangerous information. Determining when information is truly dangerous is a difficult question, said Coyle. We all know we do not want to limit access to knowledge. Coyle stressed that libraries need to develop policies that demonstrate to our users that we are not like e-commerce businesses where your personal information is stored. We need to let our communities know where we stand in terms of privacy.

Coyle recommended several excellent informational Web sites for further review. She suggested checking out your state and local laws and regulations regarding privacy and Internet use first. The ALA policy on Privacy and Confidentially of library resources http://www.ala.org/alaorg/oif/privacy.html and The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse http://www.privacyrights.org are two great sources of information.

General Sessions

E-books

The subject of e-books was well covered at this year's Forum. "The Continuing Saga ... and ebooks for all" by Mark Beatty, Phyllis Davis and Barbara Strauss was an update of Mark Beatty's session from the LITA Forum 2000. Beatty and his colleagues described the progress on a grant to introduce e-books to public libraries in Wisconsin. They spoke about the grant, the selection criteria, the catalog access and circulation, the OPAC display and item record issues. The presentation also included a summary of the current e-book marketplace and what really works for libraries and patron training.

Davis, the writer of the original grant, discussed how the consortium was formed to implement the grant to provide e-book resources statewide. She outlined the primary goals of the project. These included providing access to a collection of electronically published books in a wide range of subjects, increasing the awareness about the availability and advantages of e-books, determining the electronic reading device preferences, developing training programs by library staff so they could help library patrons to use e-books and establishing a decision-making model for public library cooperation that would allow libraries to work together to explore new information technologies by sharing costs as well as knowledge and resources.

Davis described some of the problems the consortium encountered in implementing the grant. The consortium chose the netLibrary collection of e-books for the initial implementation phase. A number of problems were associated with the netLibrary program. The process of identifying titles was awkward for selectors. The materials in some subject areas were not current. There were a limited number of non-English titles available.

There were many successes in the implementation that strongly balanced out the disadvantages. The ability to perform full text searching made the e-books excellent reference tools. The dictionary features embedded in the e-books made reading easier for ESL and new readers. Illustrations in e-books were very easy to find and were often in full color. A key indicator of the success of the grant was the fact that statistics were high for e-books and growing.

Strauss continued the discussion of the grant implementation. She spoke more about the details and the mechanics of the implementation. She described the selection criteria of e-books. This included the need to be useful to the largest number of people, provide access to the highest quality and most up-to-date content, and to select titles especially suited for advanced information retrieval. The access to the e-books in this grant was available via a number of different types of local library systems. The participants jointly agreed that the access and display of the e-books would be as similar as possible for patrons among the participating libraries. An interesting event in the implementation was that a few of the libraries in the grant had purchased e-book readers, specifically the REB 1100 readers, which were already obsolete at the time of the presentation. It was determined that in view of the rapid changes in technology and the industry no more readers will be purchased for the grant project.

Beatty concluded the session by providing an analysis of the current e-book marketplace. He described the various products that are out in the marketplace now.

Project Gutenberg ­ (http://www.gutenberg.net. He began his descriptions of the marketplace by starting with the initial project to create digital text files, Project Gutenberg. As of today there are over 3,000 titles that are available for free. These "classic" titles have become the backbone of free offerings available from commercial vendors.

Peanut Press ­ http://peanutpress.com. Peanut Press, was recently acquired by Palm. This acquisition by Palm places this competitor with the largest market share of devices, with over 12 million PDAs in use. Peanut Press offers versions of books for reading on PDAs, especially the Palm format but also for Windows CE devices. The software reader is a freely available downloadable from the Net. You can also get free e-books that have been formatted to work with the Peanut Reader or you can buy new titles, using the standard bookstore model.

RCA REB1100 ­ http://ebook-gemstar.com. This is another player in the marketplace which supports a dedicated reading device, instead of multi-use device such as a PDA. The RCA REB 1100 has replaced the Rocket e-Book Reader. There were two hardware devices in the marketplace: Rocket e-Book and the SoftBook Reader. Gemstar has acquired both of these devices. These devices are the size of a paperback book and can store between 20-30 novels. There are many free and for purchase titles available. The Rocket e-Book is linked to a particular PC you designate for obtaining, loading and organizing your e-books on your reader. The new Gemstar readers are more proprietary. They have built-incommunication devices that link directly to the Gemstar Web site. The device Gemstar has fewer titles for sale than the older Rocket e-Book. There are no public domain titles available.

Beatty spoke of some new entrants to the e-book marketplace ­ Questia http://www.questa.com, Glassbook http://www.glassbook.com and Ebrary http://www.ebrary.com to name a few. He stated that there are large numbers of new vendors with new products that claim they are going to create the perfect format, device or system for providing books at a very low cost. To date these claims appear to be "vaporware." The economic models for these newcomers all involve direct billing to the users. Therefore, these new developments to date have not developed any product that works well for libraries.

For the future Beatty observes that many people will be talking about digital paper, or e-paper or some kind of device that is more like a newspaper or magazine but the content is dynamic. He described two major projects worth noting as a guide for future developments, the Xerox PARC Gyricon project http://parc.xerox.com/dhl/projects/gyricon and a company called E Ink that is using technology developed at the MIT Media Labs to create digital paper http://www.eink.com.

Inventory Management with RFID

An interesting presentation on a new and upcoming technology, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) titled "Pushing the Library Productivity Envelope: Automating Item Identification and Inventory Management with RFID" was given by Deveron Milne, Director of the Information Systems Division of VTLS. Milne described RFID as an emerging valuable productivity tool to automate workflow processes. The technology allows staff to avoid performing low-level activities and offers them the time to focus on customer service. RFID is a technology that allows materials to be tagged with a small device that embeds a unique number that can be read from a distance using a reader.

Milne described several general uses of RFID technology and the core components of the technology: tags, readers/couplers and antennas. Antennas are used to emit and detect the radio frequency signals from RFID tags. A variety of antennas can be deployed depending on the application, with larger antennas typically being used to read tags from a greater distance. Because of the flexibility of RFID capabilities, some examples of its uses include the reading of materials stacked on shelves, automation of borrowing stations and bookdrops, and theft detection systems.

He described the state of standards development in terms of RFID. There is a worldwide group that is developing the standards for this technology and VTLS is associated with one of the primary members TAGSYS. The standards will be announced at the end of 2001 or early 2002.

Current library problems that this technology can solve are physical and ergonomic related to environmental health and safety, such as strain, stress and carpal tunnel syndrome.

He described the other system components such as tagging and verification stations, stacks management, book sorting stations, book drop, re-shelving of books, patron borrowing station, theft detection and administrative customer service. He described the direct benefits of RFID in each to the eight components. For example, the borrowing station can perform a multitude of tasks with one transaction: online updating of the library catalog, disarming of a theft system, linking of a security cameras to the transaction and the issuance of a receipt. The book drop process can also combine multiple tasks into one. By simply placing the book in the book drop the system can quickly check-in multiple items of any media and in any physical orientation. This can immediately update the library catalog. In a stacks maintenance system, there is no need to handle the books, rather a scanner is passed across the spines using a hand held device attached to a wand. The stacks maintenance system provides an entire snapshot of what is in the physical collection.

There are many approaches to converting library collections to RFID. The tags can be applied offsite by a vendor or the library. Onsite the tagging can be done in a back office or directly in the stacks and more equipment can be loaned for bulk conversions.

A typical installation of RFID includes an Electronic Antenna Station ("EAS") gate, the placement of self-checkout stations and the installation of a RFID station at the book drop. The largest costs are the RFID tags. Each tag lists for about $1.00 per tag. The hardware costs for two self-checkout stations, two book drops, shelving stations and an administrative station cost around $45,000. The software costs to support the hardware are about $25,000, averaging about $1.60 per book.

Milne provided some suggestions for reducing the cost. The critical suggestion was to plan the tagging process. Critical elements include defining and documenting the process in detail, selecting the location of the tag on the book (typically the tag is placed close to the property label or the back cover of the book) and planning for an adequate number of stations.

Conclusion

The Forum offered a full range of programs on a variety of information technologies used in libraries which appealed to both technically-oriented attendees and to librarians who wanted a general knowledge of the upcoming applications and their uses. The next LITA National Forum will be held October 10-13, 2002 at the Westin Galleria and Westin Oaks in Houston, Texas. The theme is "Making Connections", and in coming months information will be available at www.lita.org, as information technology in libraries today is all about making connections ­ technical/physical ones, connections among resources, connections between users and resources, and connections with peers working on these important issues.

Colby Riggs(cmriggs@lib.uci.edu ) is a Systems Librarian at the University of California, Irvine and is co-editor of LTHN.