Conference Reports

ALA Midwinter, ALCTS Scholarly Communications Discussion Group

This well attended session featured Dan Hazen from Harvard University discussing the nuts and bolts of Harvard's open access policy. Unlike K-State's K-Rex, Harvard's institutional repository began first with faculty papers and is only now starting to address ETDRs. A

And now for some fascinating background that I was unaware of until the discussion. Harvard Libraries are comprised of 10 faculty libraries that function as separately funded entities not beholden to the larger Harvard Universities umbrella.

ALA Midwinter, ALCTS PARS Intellectual Access to Preservation Metadata Interest Group

Lisa Schmidt, the electronic records archivist at Michigan State University on “Digital Curation Planning at Michigan State University.” MSU has 33,000 cubic feet of MSU records in their archives and actively works with various campus departments to gain their content. The archives at MSU are a unit separate from the libraries. Funded by a grant, the archives sought to create a plan for digital curation of content.

ALA Midwinter, ALCTS Metadata Interest Group

Jennifer Bowen, University of Rochester
Jennifer presented of the eXtensible catalog's metadata services toolkit which is now available for release in modules.

The project is completely open source and a non-profit eXtensible Cataloging Organization is being created to support the products. The project has a new interface that is FRBR-ized, faceted browse, totally customizable and based on a Drupal framework.

ELSUG: Voyager 7 Tomcat WebVoyage Interface for Dummies, or, What Will It Take to Customize Our New User Interface and Remain Sane?

Voyager 7 Tomcat WebVoyage Interface for Dummies, or, What Will It Take to Customize Our New User Interface and Remain Sane?
Laura Guy

The last session I attended was one given by Laura Guy of the Colorado School of Mines. Laura had served as a beta tester for Tomcat OPAC and as she put it, is not a programmer. Much of the presentation dealt with CSS files, XML/XSL and webvoyage.properties (similar to what was called opac.ini and requires work each upgrade). The order of the CSS files and which file trumps what were discussed. The take away here was all changes are doable, just be deliberate as one error can ruin multiple pages.

ELSUG 2009: Voyager—What the Heck Do I Do With It?

Voyager—What the Heck Do I Do With It?
Lesli Moore

Initially, I was not quite sure whether or not this session would be too basic, but I was pleasantly surprised. The presenter is a former ExLibris trainer and provided an explanation of options on circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, systems and reporter modules. Armed with screen shots, I am much better prepared to answer questions for folks with a much firmer working knowledge of the module than I. Often I am just a set of fresh eyes looking at a problem and these handouts will help make me better informed. In fact, there are a few options in some modules I do not believe we are using and should be in order to streamline the mundane.

ELSUG 2009: Panel Discussion

Panel Discussion
The panel discussion was new this year and gave conference goers the chance to exchange ideas and solutions. Michael Doran, Laura Guy and Elizabeth Jones sat on the panel. After spending a good deal of time in sessions on Tomcat, the new OPAC interface, I was very interested in hearing why folks had decided to move to Tomcat or why folks were planning to stick with classic WebVoyage. All of those who answered my question were either already on Tomcat or planning to move there with a future upgrade.

Reasons others migrated to Tomcat:

• Usability research went into the design of Tomcat, unlike classic Webvoyage
• ExLibris is not fixing bugs on classic, but Tomcat bugs are being fixed
• Did not require major changes on the back end, but wanted to take advantage of the visual changes on Tomcat
• Improved results page
• Tomcat allows for the use of screen readers
• Tomcat follows various Web standards

Those in the audience ranged from small academic libraries to large research libraries. Everyone in the audience who migrated to Voyager7 is using the Tomcat interface.

ELSUG 2009: Extreme Makeover: Tomcat WebVoyage Edition

Extreme Makeover: Tomcat WebVoyage Edition
Michael Doran

The presenter spoke of his experience moving to the new Tomcat interface. A copy of the UT-Arlington skin is available through EL Commons. The comment was made that Tomcat WebVoyage is a much better out-of-the-box interface than before, incorporates more usability in the design and looks more current and has better accessibility.

One change made that I have heard about a number of times is making the GKEY* the default search. The GKEY* is more Google-like and is a better fit with user expectations. UT-Arlington catalog re-arranged default tabs, altered the dynamic search tips, created a journal/article search integrated with SFX, improved the course reserves look-up to include a link to course abbreviations (who remembers these anyway?), added branch filters, social bookmarking links, Google book covers and a permanent “link to this page” URL feature. The result is a much simpler interface. Feedback will help determine the makeover success.

ELSUG 2009: Making Tomcat Purr

Making Tomcat Purr
Elizabeth Jones, Oklahoma City University

This presentation focused on how one goes about branding the OPAC for the Tomcat interface. It was also the second time in one morning I had heard glowing reviews of Firefox's Firebug application for working with WebVoyage 7. With the Tomcat interface, the model has changed for the files. Previously, customizations occurred in the opac.ini file. Now data is stored across multiple files. This makes having the right Web editing and file management tools crucial.

ELSUG 2009: CSS and JavaScript Tips and Tricks for WebVoyage 7

This year's ELSUG (ExLibris Southcentral Users Group) conference was held at Midwestern State University in Midwest Falls, Texas. Two tracks throughout the conference were running better reports and how-to customize one's Tomcat OPAC interface. In order to maximize the number of sessions attended, a colleague and I divided the program and I attended mostly sessions on Tomcat.

NEKLS Tech Day 2009 - keynote

I didn't attempt to live blog yesterday because my typing on my ASUS Eee can be a bit iffy given the tiny keyboard. I've cleaned this up a bit but essentially what you are getting are the highlights of the session rather than a lovely, clean summary:

Amy Begg de Groff - keynote speaker from Howard County Library (HCL) in Maryland - her experiences as director of information technology:  how many $$ might be saved using Open Source software.

HCL overview: 6 branches, 6million items circulated annually; 316 public computer (using Ubuntu platform); 400 staff comp (65% running on Ubuntu, which is a Linux software)