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...since half (okay, maybe not half) of our staff are at ACRL this week, I thought I'd provide a link to some info. StevenB over at ACRLog has posted a bit on ACRL's opening keynote and some other little tidbits. Interesting stuff!
KANSAS? Like the State!? was one of the questions we received as we attended this regional conference in New England, but folks were great! Check out the CHAT blog for some humorous posts describing our adventures! Read on to discover a bit about what they call MASHUPS.
Continue reading "Mashups Are Not Potatoes: Implementing Powerful Web 1.0 Tools" »
Better late than never, right?
One of the more compelling technologies I saw at ALA in Seattle was LibLime's version of Koha. Koha is an open-source integrated library system that has caught the library world's attention. What LibLime does is offer value-added services, interface development, and packaging that allow a wider range of libraries to make use of Koha. Their KohaZoom interface just flat-out rocks. It does the whole library catalog/Amazon mashup thing right out of the box. They showed me the Web-based staff client, too, and it was predictably snappy and logical. Check out the demos.
Presenter: Michael Whang, Head of Web and Internet Services
Western Michigan University Libraries
In various presentations during the conference, there was an emphasis on using "business intelligence" in the libraries. The last day Keynote speaker, Jane Burke, also made a point about this in her speech. Parallel to that, this presentation was a good example of what libraries can learn from businesses.
This presentation was also a good example of how libraries can turn their "strategic plan" into "strategic action".
The purpose is to increase content awareness and make the content discoverable. The presentation outline was:
Why do we use banners to promote library services?
How we measure success? ("if you can't measure it, you can't manage it")
What's this success for?
How we're funneling users to our site?
Sample banner ads, http://www.wmich.edu/library/ , and sample analytics for last few months.
The Transfer Initiative: Creating Best Practice guidelines for the transfer of journal titles between publishers.
Elizabeth Winter - Georgia Tech
Each year numerous scholarly journals transfer from one publisher to another. These transfers tend to create a variety of problems for libraries, publishers, and everyone else. Project Transfer is sponsored by the United Kingdom Serials Group and began in April 2006. Members in the group include vendors, publishers, librarians, software providers such as CrossRef and scholarly publishing groups. The purpose was to help the publishers get communication into a standard form that can be provided to all users.
Continue reading "Electronic Resources & Libraries : Project Transfer" »
Paving the ERM Highway: Expanding role of ERM systems and the drive to streamline their data population.
Tina Fieck - Swets and Deberah England - Wright State Univ.
Tina and Deberah shared ways the library and vendor can help each other in preparation of populating an ERM. Tina spoke of the information the vendor can provide. She spoke of the amount of information the vendor has and how one journal title may have over 1000 different prices based on who the user is, where they are, tier, # of users, publisher packages, etc. She also spoke emphatically about the need to have standards and how the librarian must help promote this to the publishers.
Deberah talked about their experience in populating their new ERM with information about their 256 databases. At this time they have not entered any journal information. Challenges ahead include discussions about the use of the ERM, standards to follow, the inoperability between products from different vendors, what is relevant e-data, will the ERM replace the bib or acquisitions records? While some of this sounds extremely revolutionary, until we see the ERM in action we simply don't know what it really is capable of doing.
Licensing, Copyright, Fair Use and Technological Protection Measures in Electronic Resources.
Nathan Roberson - Univ. of Maryland Law Library
Kristin Eschenfelder - Univ. of WI, Madison
Beginning with a discussion of copyright, this quickly moved on to a study done by Ms. Eschenfelder at the library school. Her topic covered the technological protection measures in place and broke them into two categories. Hard TPM are the tools that strictly control or disallow certain uses, while she defined soft TPM as the tools that discourage certain uses. Soft TPM means that a workaround can usually be found, but it may be complicated it is not worth the effort.
Continue reading "Electronic Resources & Libraries: Licensing, Copyright, Fair Use " »
Although we are already in an e-only world one of the issues causing the most anxiety to librarians is the long-term sustainability of e-resources. License agreements terms of archiving are often inadequate, and many are not covered at all. Technical tools are needed to enforce archiving arrangements found in licenses.
Continue reading "Electronic Resources & Libraries: E-journal Archiving" »
Rick Luce is the Vice-Provost and Director of Libraries at Emory University. Before coming to Emory, he was the Research Library director at Los Alamos National Laboratory for 15 years.
While it seems like a stretch to compare libraries and science, if you consider how the computer affects each by adding new information to our world daily and complicating how you can find it, you see a clear connection. Luce spoke of the need for librarians to take greater control of serving up the content (information)to the users, but looking for ways to use the proven web ideas and tools to design, tweak and then push out the information that our users are looking for. He suggested using more graphical displays and interactive mapping as a way of cutting back on the text that we as librarians cling to. He states that it is all about "integrating everything." Luce states that we should focus on "working the puzzle" rather than the puzzle pieces. We need to look at how technology will influence how our users will behave and what they will expect, then we should refine and re-define our own roles by asking "dangerous" questions. We need to continuously look for ways to make renewal an integral part of our organization.
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