K-State Libraries: Conference Reports

Entrepreneurship at K-State

This is a somewhat unstructured report from a presentation on the topic above from Friday, October 26. Lori G asked if I would be interested in attending; I believe she and other deans had been asked by the provost to have a few people from their organizations there. I'm morbidly curious when terms like entrepreneurship are used in the academy, so I agreed to attend.

The unstructured part has a couple of causes. First, I arrived a few minutes late and missed the intro for the first set of co-presenters. They had no slides, so all I caught was their first names; if you know who they are, by all means leave a comment with that information. Then, it ran over its time slot, so I had to leave before it ended. Last, it's a somewhat loose concept, so I didn't take a lot of notes, but have a lot of impressions in my head.

Now that those are out of the way, on with the summary ...

Thunder Talks : Access 2007

There were 6 in all. 

1. Open Journal Systems (OJS) by Kevin Stranack , Simon Fraser University.

OJS is an open access publishing platform with journal management functions built-in. It supports the journal publishing life cycle starting from creation, to assigning reviewers, to content editing and finally publishing. Its a product of the Public Knowledge Project that has released other products including Open Conference System (OCS). The speaker described how OJS was having a local impact (libraries can do this, they are the local publishers on their campus), national impact (different universities are hosting open access journals using OJS) and global impact (250+ journals online, internationally?). Its based on php/mysql and they are looking for php ninjas.

Hackfest roundup : Access 2007

Out of 24 suggestions received for hackfest this year, 8 were picked up. The final presentations for all selected projects are linked next to the suggestions. All the projects were interesting but I'll summarize the top 3 for me here, very briefly.

Alouette Canada Update: Access 2007

Brian Bell
Mark Jordan
Walter Lewis

AlouetteCanada is intended to be a national heritage site. It's supported by CARL (Canadian ARL), not federally, other than a grant provided to create the toolset.

METS is used for document import and export. Descriptive metadata uses DC, MODS, and/or EAD. They may add to this list as more organizations join the project and begin submitting data.

They plan to open source the toolset they are developing (for ingest and metadata handling, among other tasks) using the Lesser GNU public license.

Darth Vader, Open Access, and Digital Libraries: Access 2007

Shawn Martin
University of Michigan, TCP (Text Creation Partnership)

Char would have been disappointed by this talk, since he really didn't do a good job using Vader as a motif or trope.

He opened by discussing the typical binary dichotomy one finds in libraries/academia: open access is good, licensed is bad. In his opinion, the commercially published model is flawed and doomed since it is not sustainable. Similarly, grant-funded open access projects are doomed. Glorious, but doomed. TCP strives to find a middle ground, where vendors work together with academic institutions to create the underlying textual objects in their products, such as EEBO, ECCO, Evans, etc.

Repository Redux: Access 2007

Mark Leggott
University of Prince Edward Island

Leggott moved to UPEI in 2006, forever altering the Canadian library landscape. Either you were at Access and/or know Leggott and get the joke, or you have no idea what I'm saying. For my part, I always find listening to Leggott to be worth my while. He has both an effective manner of communicating and a lot of challenging ideas.

He gave an overview of UPEI and the library reorganization he led when he took over. He added two departments--Outreach and Communications & Data and Research Services--the latter of which is central to his talk. For K-State's purposes, the lessons he lays out that relate to Data and Research Services have import for our Repository Services initiatives. What he's doing differs fundamentally from our approach, as will be seen below, and I think a close look at what he's done could be valuable for us.

Scholarly Reading Interface: Access 2007

Ray Siemens
University of Victoria

The full title of his talk was "A Scholarly Reading Interface for a Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) and a Professional Reading Environment (PReE)." I simply wanted to avoid a post with an overly long title. Did I mention that Siemens is an English professor? With a title like that, it's likely obvious. It also means that is presentation was textually rich (much came from a prepared text, I believe), so it was difficult to both listen and take notes.

The Talis Platform: A Semantic Library Platform: Access 2007

Richard Wallis
Talis

Knowing the context of the user allows a retrieval system to provide better results, e.g.- a student in a given course may understand a term in ways that differ from others. A platform should pull together all of the contextual information, namely, what others elsewhere do in similar situations. We're not there yet, of course.

Open Source Software as a Service: Access 2007

Joshua Ferraro
LibLime

One of his main points was to address why one might need commercial support for open source software in libraries. Mr. Ferraro worked at the Athens County Public Library, the first (US?) library to go with Koha, an open-source ILS. Showed that OPAC to start the talk. LibLime uses the Zebra indexing backend, so relevance ranking is pretty slick. Koha has a templating system, which means the interface is quite malleable.

Searching the OPAC: The State of Play: Access 2007

Peter Binkley
U of Alberta

Addressing five areas of functionality: clumping, ordering, exploiting, contributing, deploying. Gave an overview of innovations over the last six or seven years, showing some good ideas and some odd ideas (e.g.- antarcti.ca, a visualized catalog from 1999 now gone). He notes that visualization is no longer a hot topic, and it appears to have waned as a means for presenting an OPAC. Vendors have attempted to react, such as Ex Libris with Primo, III's Encore, etc. Evergreen emerges as a viable OS alternative, too.

He asked if we know what we really want from our next gen OPAC, which strikes me as a key question. He thinks we don't know, and are much less advanced in our thinking than we think we are. He then turned to the five areas he mentioned at the outset.

Data Cyberinfrastructure Collaboration at UCSD: Access 2007

Luc Declerck
Declan Fleming
UCSD

By cyberinfrastructure, Mr. Declerck means the aggregation of software, hardware, and other technologies, as well as human expertise, required to support current and future discoveries in science and engineering (paraphrasing Fran Berman from the SD Supercomputing Center). What are the common characteristics of large research projects (e.g.- NEPTUNE, NEON, etc.)? Data - petabytes worth of it.

Genius Loci: Libraries in Transition: Access 2007

Martha Whitehead
Queen's University
John Durno
University of Victoria

Mr. Durno pointed out that he's speaking of library as organization, not the library as building, I think. Showed pictures of libraries--BL, Seattle Public, etc.--and asked if they were libraries. One bases the answer, typically, on certain features being present: reading room, books, desks, shelving, etc. His argument: when libraries no longer have any unique space requirements, they will cease to exist.

Hackfest Reports: Access 2007

Rather than even try to keep up with the pace of these talks, I'll just point to the reports. Note that not all suggestions were picked up at Hackfest, so many will have no report. My suggestion on Facebook was picked up, and I gave the presentation on it. Alas, the resulting Facebook app has a rather grave flaw currently, so I can't show anyone how it works.

Thunder Talks: Access 2007

Thunder Talks are brief, 6-7 minute ad hoc talks that people sign up to give no more than a day's notice.

Kevin Stranack
Simon Fraser University

Introduction to Open Journal Systems, OJS, an open access publishing platform. Creates a site for a journal, but also manages the full workflow of the journal. OJS currently is translated into 11 languages and hosts over 1,000 journals worldwide. Based in php/mysql, and uses a plug-in architecture, which allows extensibility. OJS now has a theme gallery. He spoke briefly about SFU, noting that the library there is now a publisher for journals from their campus, and they've been very successful. OJS wants php coders, so if you have php skills, get involved.

Image Markup and Web Applications: Access 2007

Martin Holmes
Chris Petter
John Durno
University of Victoria

Demonstrated a project to digitally present the diary of Robert Graves from 1935-1939. One of the challenges his diary presented was the number of objects--pictures, ticket stubs, other ephemera--pasted into the pages. Beyond that, there were diagrams he drew by hand. Representing those in transcription is possible, so they sought a meaningful way to annotate them.

Open ILS, Web 2.0 and Multitype Provincial Library Initiatives in BC: Access 2007

Ben Hyman
BC Libraries
Beth Jefferson
Bibliocommons

BC has the goal of a common ILS for their public libraries. Using a $1 million grant, they brought together 53 BC public libraries that had envisioned a migration to Horizon 8, 11 more which face a major migration in the next few years. Interesting in reining in their ILS chaos (over a dozen systems currently in use) and implementing Evergreen.

ILS Options for Academic Libraries: Access 2007

Allan Bell
Susan Cleyle
Slavko Manojlovich
Brian Owen
All AULs at Canadian universities

Disclaimer: all comments are those of the individuals, not their institutions.

• Started by reviewing developments in 2006-2007 in the ILS market:
• Francisco Partners buying both Ex Libris and Endeavor
• Vista Equity Partners buys SirsiDynix
• SirsiDynix announces one platform (Rome)

Endeca makeover for an OPAC @ McMaster: Access 2007

Amanda Etches-Johnson
McMaster University

McMaster opted to go the NC State route and contract with Endeca to makeover their OPAC and add faceted browsing. This move was based on their dissatisfaction with their existing catalog, backed up by LibQual results. Known-item searching was fine, but noodling around on a topic was hard.

VENUS & NEPTUNE Canada Data Archive: Access 2007

Benoit Pirenne
NEPTUNE Canada
University of Victoria

Venus and Neptune are ocean observatories, which monitor the sea floor via cabled connections. Provide realtime data to the surface from instruments on the ocean floor. This, of course, generates massive data sets. In order to get around the limitations of seasons and weather, the goal is now to extend the Internet underwater and use those protocols remotely to gather realtime data yearround. Currently they are testing lines (VENUS) in the Saanich Inlet and the Strait of Georgia. NEPTUNE will be an 800km loop west of Vancouver Island, currently in the installation phase.

Opening Keynote: Access 2007

Jessamyn West
Librarian about Vermont and the world

As per usual with Ms. West, taking notes is a bit of a reach. Lovely talk, but short on structure and points to record. It is worth mentioning that much of what she spoke about was taking advantage of OS and simple tools to solve the IT problem at hand. Lack of scalability in this approach concerns her.

Riffing on a t-shirt slogan she likes--"I will replace you with a small script"--she spoke for a bit about making technologies a little friendlier to appeal to users. Examples she gave are the 18 pt font WordPress uses for its login box (great for the older set) and the little AJAX lookup Yahoo does when you're picking a username for an account (tells you if your choice is taken and suggests alternatives). It's a neat notion: one need not fix everything, just enough to make it a little nicer and more approachable, gaining the good will of the user.