The Top Tech Trends session at ALA MidWinter in Seattle

I'm quite honored to have been ask by LITA to help organize and moderate this year's Top Technology Trends at ALA Midwinter in Seattle.  LITA leadership decided to change the format of the session this year and together we worked to:

1. Make it a discussion rather than a panel. Towards that end, it will not feature people lined up behind tables, or formal presentations but instead people sitting in chairs in a semi-circle so they can easily see each other to facilitate the discussion and the exchange of thoughts and ideas in response to the questions posed about the topic.
2. Bring to the forefront some newer, but clearly leading and promising people among the LITA membership.  We also worked to make sure that while doing this we increased the representation of women on the panel so as to more accurately reflect the larger profession.
3. Provide a mix of backgrounds to address the topic as represented by people from for-profit, non-profit, standards and library backgrounds.

As a result, we have confirmed a group of amazing and knowledgable people:

Mackenzie Smith, University Librarian, University of California, Davis.
Bess Sadler, Information Systems Project Manager, Stanford University
Julie Speer, Associate Dean for Research and Informatics, Virginia Tech University Libraries
John Law, Vice President Discovery Solutions, Serial Solutions
Todd Carpenter, Executive Director, NISO
Roy Tennant, Senior Program Officer, OCLC

As noted above, I will be acting as the moderator of the panel.  In part, this is because the panel is focused on the topic of: "If Data I Created Resides in a Cloud Environment, Is it Still Mine?" which was sparked by a blog post I did about library data ownership.  (If you have questions you want me to consider asking this panel, please send them to me!)

This topic is really timely and has tremendous number of implications for libraries, all of which we'll try to explore during the course of this session.  I think you'll find it well worth your time and I hope you'll support the changes we've made to the session by showing up (in mass!) and then by giving us your feedback.  So please put it on your schedule by clicking on this link which will give you additional information including date/time and a link to automatically add it to your calendar.

The twitter hashtag for this event will be #alamwttt

See you there.  Join in and learn about the topic of library data ownership!