Mita Williams    

Keynote Wednesday: Mita Williams

Mita Williams at Library Technology Conference 2014

Mita Williams is the User Experience Librarian at the Leddy Library at University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. She’s also a founding member and sits on the Board of the Directors of Hackforge, a community-minded hackerspace that’s located in the Windsor Public Library.

She is not a futurist but in 2008 she played SuperStruct which was a “massively multiplayer forecasting game” designed by Jane McGonigal and sponsored by The Institute for the Future. She played along with more than 8000 fellow citizen future-forecasters and not only won the “Gold Pandora Award” but her earned her place in the SEHI 19 as a recognized Super Empowered Hopeful Individual.

Mita has written about the future and the future of libraries on her blog New Jack Almanac and you can follow her on Twitter and other social networks as @copystar.
Barbara_Fister



Keynote Thursday: Barbara Fister

Barbara Fister at Library Technology Conference 2014

Barbara Fister has coordinated instruction at the Gustavus Adolphus College library in St. Peter, Minnesota, for over 25 years, but is still learning how to help students (and faculty) learn. She has studied students’ research processes, examined the relationship between writing and research, and teaches an upper division course on how information works.

She has written widely on open access to scholarship and is interested in the future of publishing of all kinds. Popular literacy practices and the ways reading communities form online is the subject of her upcoming sabbatical research. She also is a writer of fiction, having published three mysteries. She is on the board of the non-profit organization, Sisters in Crime, and coordinates a project to monitor gender patterns in reviews and awards within the crime genre.

You can follow Barbara’s generalist tendencies on Twitter (@bfister) and through Library Journal’s Peer to Peer Review or the Library Babel Fish blog at Inside Higher Ed.

Barbara Fister’s photo provided courtesy of Mark Coggins.

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