I’m at AALL in New Orleans as part of a program organized by June Liptay and Alan Keely, speaking with U of R’s David Lindahl and NCSU’s Emily Lynema. From the description (see page 5 in the program):

Traditional library online catalogs are being marginalized in an increasingly complex information landscape. …Better methods are needed for mining the wealth of information in library systems and presenting it clearly and concisely.

My slides are online (PDF version) and I’ll be posting a textual version of my presentation later (as usual, my slides are nearly meaningless without my spoken presentation).

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I’m honored to join Katie Bauer, of Yale University Library, in a program coordinated by Mary Jane Kelsey, of Yale Law’s Lillian Goldman Library.

The full title of our program is Technology Scouts: how to keep your library and ILS current in the IT world (H-4, 4PM Tuesday, room 274). My portion of the presentation will focus on how we’re fixing up our catalogs, with a big emphasis on how APIs can be used to continuously reinvent the way we look at — and thus understand and use — the information we have. The big idea here is that as we separate the systems that store and manage our data from the applications that display and manipulate it, we open the door to faster, cheaper development — and make room for a bunch of new ideas along the way.

Because it’s a short program, I’ll only be able to gloss over some of the discussion of what’s wrong with our catalogs and how we’re fixing them, and while there’s a lot to say about WPopac, I’ll have to leave it to Jenny Levine to explain most of it.

My slides are online. As usual, all the underlined text is hotlinked along with all the screenshots, so click them for more information and detail.

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Amusing. One one side of the world is Jenny Levine, the original library RSS bigot, pushing libraries to adopt new technologies from the bottom up, and here on the other side of the world is NewsGator offering their products for top-down adoption.

Why are law libraries interested in NewsGator? Could it be that social software increases productivity? Might it offer some competitive advantage? Do they just make it easier to communicate (and keep track of our communications) in today’s web-driven world? Well, that was all part of the sales pitch.

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Nicole Engard last month posted about The State of our ILS, describing the systems as:

I’d say it’s a like the crazy cousin you have to deal with because he’s family! It doesn’t fit, we are a very open IT environment, we have applications all over that need to talk to each other nicely and the [ILS] is a brick wall preventing us from getting the information we need and sending the information we’d like.

Nicole’s point about interoperability is well put, and the post is part of her preparation for conversation and discussion she hopes will go on at the American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting in July.

Coincidentally, I’ll be at AALL next month. My presentation will focus on the things we can do once we overcome the problems Nicole describes, but my concordance with her point should be clear (see previous posts one, two, three).

Extra: When will people who want to improve things not feel as though the ILS is against them, as in this post by Steve Lawson?

update: I keep forgetting to link to this public example of how bad our OPACs/ILSs are. Thanks go to David Walker for making me ROTFL.

AALL, American Association of Law Libraries, future libraries, ILS, interoperability, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, Nicole Engard, standards, Steve Lawson