President’s Message Thomas Dowling 
 

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND LIBRARIES | DECEMBER 2015   

 doi: 10.6017/ital.v34i4.9150 

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The LITA Governing Board has had a productive autumn, and I wanted to share a few highlights. 
Keeping an eye on how better to understand and improve the member experience, we have a 
couple of new groups getting down to work. 

LITA Local Task Force 

I'm writing this shortly after returning from LITA Forum 2015, which was a fantastic meeting. I'm 
glad that so many people were able to attend, and I hope even more will come to Forum 2016. But 
we know many members cannot regularly travel to national meetings, and even the best online 
experience can lack the serendipitous benefits that so often come from face-to-face meetings. 

The new LITA Local Task Force will be responsible for creating a toolkit to facilitate local groups’ 
ability to host events, including information on event planning, accessibility, and ensuring an 
inclusive culture at meetings.  So you’ll be able to host a LITA event in your own backyard! (If your 
backyard has a couple of meeting rooms and good wireless.) 

Forum Assessment and Alternatives Task Force 

As we begin work on LITA Local events, we are also turning our eyes to our national 
meeting.  Planning the next LITA Forum is essentially a year-round process.  We assess the work 
we’ve done on previous forums, of course, but the annual schedule often doesn’t afford an 
opportunity to strategically rethink what Forum is and how it can best serve the members.  To 
address that issue, we’re convening another new task force, on Forum Assessment and 
Alternatives. 

This group will look critically at how Forum advances our strategic priorities, and will also look at 
other library technology conferences to help identify how Forum can continue to distinguish itself 
in a rapidly changing environment. 

LITA Personas Task Force 

Finally, as I write this, the board is in the final stages of creating a Personas Task Force as a tool for 
better understanding our current and potential new members.  A well-constructed set of personas, 
representing both people who are LITA members and people who aren’t—but who could be or 
should be—will become a valuable tool for membership development, programming, 
communications, assessment, and other purposes. 

Each of these task forces will work throughout 2016 and deliver their results by Midwinter 
2017.  It is worth noting that we could only convene these groups because we have a strong list of 
volunteers on tap.  If you haven’t filled out a LITA volunteer form recently, please considering 
doing so at http://www.ala.org/lita/about/committees. 

 

 

Thomas Dowling (dowlintp@wfu.edu) is LITA President 2015-16 and Director of Technologies, 
Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 

http://www.ala.org/lita/about/committees
mailto:dowlintp@wfu.edu

	LITA Local Task Force
	Forum Assessment and Alternatives Task Force
	LITA Personas Task Force