2016 ALA Midwinter Meeting; Day 2 Highlights

The second day of the 2016 ALA Midwinter Meeting included two meetings of great interest to me. The first was the LITA Publications Committee meeting. Only four committee members, including the chair, were able to attend Midwinter, so we had an abbreviated discussion of the agenda and made plans to hold a virtual meeting after we get back. The agenda included the idea that Publications Committee members could provide an additional level of review for the LITA Guides series of publication, currently published by Rowman & Littlefield. We also discussed the role of the LITA Guides Acquisitions Editor, how Information Technology and Libraries fits into the mix of LITA publications, and how the LITA blog works. Other agenda items that we were not able to address included revenue generation, executive director's reports, marketing, and new topics for LITA Guides.

The meeting that is a highlight of every Midwinter Meeting for me was the Cataloging & Classification Quarterly (CCQ) Editorial Board business meeting and dinner. We discussed topics that might be appropriate for theme issues as well as the possibility of doing a general call for submissions. Such calls are generally more successful for theme issues than for general issues. CCQ editor Sandy Roe reported that Barbara Tillett has resigned from the Board. She asked for Board members to send her suggestions for potential future members of the Board. Taylor & Francis staff reported that CCQ is the most downloaded of all of its library and information science journals with approximately 62,000 downloads in the past year. We reviewed the CCQ publishers' report, including the top 10 downloaded articles.

In addition to these two meetings, I attended two publisher presentations of new books. The first was the HarperCollins presentation of new titles for the spring; I wrote about this meeting here. The second was the AAP LibraryReads Best in Debut Authors, which I discussed here. I collected a number of advance reading copies for review. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday at conference!