Friday, May 30, 2008

Northeast Chapter of Pennsylvania Library Association Spring Workshop

Yesterday I was the keynote speaker at the spring workshop (one-day conference) of the Northeast Chapter of the Pennsylvania Library Association. [If you are keeping track of my schedule, yes, I was in Potsdam, NY on Wednesday afternoon and in Scranton, PA on Thursday morning. They are five hours apart. Yes, I like to travel.]

I did not build any slides into my presentation on digitization, but did get asked during the Q&A about trends in digitization. One of the things I mentioned is that we tend to build silos of content, but that needs to change. The content from our digitization programs needs to be searchable along with the content that we have in other databases within our institutions. These databases need to be integrated or have a federated search product placed over them. We can't expect our users to be patient enough to search each database separately.

As a person who was born and raised in Pennsylvania, it was wonderful to be able to speak to a group of Pennsylvania librarians and library workers. I enjoyed hearing about their libraries and their association. I even got to meet one of the librarians from the Dauphin County Library System. They built a new main branch away from downtown and in an area that has become a large population center. There are also branch libraries in the city of Harrisburg.




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