K-State Libraries: Digital Initiatives

Overwhelmed by OPACs

Thanks once again to Dan Chudnov for blogging the most timely newsy-news at exactly the right moment. As we in DID contemplate an upgrade to Voyager 6.x, Dan points out that Casey Bisson has released the source code to Scriblio.

I am not up on the political shenanigans behind the debatable open-source street cred of Scriblio; I'm just interested in what this product could do for us. Simply put, Scriblio is a Word Press-based CMS and OPAC that presents libraries' bibliographic and other data in a format suited to the Web.

The irony is not lost on me that as Dan posted this announcement, we discussed the dis/advantages of upgrading to Voyager 6.x. Scriblio is not a replacement ILS by any means; it's a different way of presenting that ILS information to our users. It's a debate that our profession as a whole is facing - incremental modifications or sweeping, sudden changes. Stay tuned.

A new toy

Props to Dan Chudnov for blogging a new goody in a place where geeky librarians (like me) will see it. He points his faithful readers to Jing, a Web project from TechSmith, the makers of Camtasia Studio.

Having only read bits of the web site, but not downloaded the gadget, I can't give you a first-hand account of what Jing does. What TechSmith says it does is pretty cool. It captures a piece of whatever is happening on your screen that you'd like to share as either an image or a video. You then get a URL that you can paste to your IM buddy, email, blog post, forum, etc. The image or video is hosted on Screencast.com, another TechSmith product.

The most immediate application I see at K-State Libraries is the one Dan C. suggests - as a supplement to IM and other virtual reference services. I've had endless chats with IM patrons that go something like, "You should be looking at a small screen that says Get It @ K-State and has a Powercat. Do you see that?" So much more concrete to shoot them an image of what they should see, or a video of how to get from point A to point B.

Currently, Jing is a free download and service as TechSmith figures out what they're going to make of it. In the future, it will likely be a paid software and service. Bonus: the download works on both PCs and Macs. Go play.