Conference Reports

Access 2008: Closing Keynote

Bob Young, founder/CEO of lulu.com

His philosophy in building companies: brains will always trump experience, so he built his firms by seeking out the best people. He did point out that this didn't work so well with the football team he owns (the Hamilton Tiger Cats of the CFL), but, as he put it, football is a world unto itself with its own dynamics.

Access 2008: Synergies 1.5

Mary Westell, U of Calgary
Lynn Copeland, Simon Fraser U
Rea Devakos, U of Toronto

Idea was born of the notion that Canada needed its own JSTOR. It morphed into Synergies, which is a push to move social sciences and humanities research away from print to the Internet. Copeland was using a lot of Canadian acronyms, which I've gotten better at recognizing, but I missed some of her references.

One thing I do believe I caught is that there is an $11 million grant behind the project, from the CFI (Canadian Foundation for Innovation?).

Access 2008: VuFind

Andrew Nagy, Villanova

VuFind is an open source library discovery portal. Nagy dislikes the term "catalog," since it has so many negative connotations, so phrases such as "next generation catalog" are to be avoided. We need a discovery tool that works like people expect it to.

Access 2008: Consortial Discovery Layer

Allan Bell, U of Waterloo
Greg Sennema, Wilfrid Laurier U

Bell started with a humorous romp through library Web pages from the 1990s, showing egregious examples of bad presentation. This was to set up their topic, which is why Primo? In a nuthsell, they want to have an interface that addresses the expectations of modern Web users.

One reason for using Primo was that they wanted to include other metadata types in their search tool, i.e.- choices beyond MARC.

Access 2008: FADIS (Fine Art Digital Imaging System)

Gordon Belray, University of Toronto

FADIS was developed at Toronto as a "learning management and courseware system developed for image based teaching of art and architecture" (from their Website). It is perhaps not a reach to say that it reminded me a lot of ARTstor, since it's really doing the same thing in many ways. He did point out that they differ from ARTstor, not least in price, but also that the content the faculty need for a class isn't in ARTstor (perhaps 50-60% of it's there, at best). Their system can quickly add the content people need for classes, and faculty can upload their own files, as well.

Access 2008: WorldCat Grid Services

Roy Tennant, OCLC

[It's just wouldn't be Access without Roy, who's now at his tenth consecutive Access.]

What are grid services? Fancy name for a bunch of APIs: xISBN, xISSN, Institution Registry, experimental services (Terminologies, Metadata Crosswalk), and the WorldCat Search API.

He collects a lot of API information (theirs and others) on techessence.info.

Access 2008: Evergreen / Conifer

John Fink, McMaster University
Dan Scott, Laurentian University

Started with an intro to Evergreen, which I won't repeat, since you can read it here. Executive summary: it's an open-source ILS already in use in a wide range of libraries, including academic libraries. He did note that the install isn't as easy as it should be (but is getting better) and there's a bit of a learning curve, since it does things in new ways. Well worth the work, he assures us.

Access 2008: Mashing up the library Website

Karen Coombs, University of Houston

When she arrived a bit over three years ago, she inherited a large site (>1500 pages) where all changes were centralized. [Sound familiar?] She wanted to get away from this, but these are the issues faced by a library Website:

• a wide range of staff content owners
• incorporating info from other systems
• some info is repeated in various places on the site
• users what info where they are (i.e.- not on the library Website)
• the library should be integrated into the curriculum

Access 2008: Hackfest Reports, II

Teach LibX to speak French (four people) - Known issue with LibX is lack of internationalization. Their main challenge was that they didn't know anything about LibX or Mozilla plug-ins, but figured that out eventually. Internationalization is already built in, but there just needs to be content. They eventually found the place to put the translation, and made use of the locale switcher tool to define another locale, so with their edition the user can toggle locale. Very nice work!

Access 2008: Thunder Talks

Can't say much about these, since I was foolish enough to pile stress upon stress and signed up to give a Thunder Talk. You get 4.5 minutes and I have to hook up my laptop and speak all in that window. Woohoo!