photo: sfo bart
In the list of things I should have done a month ago is an item about making my hotel reservations for Library Camp East 2006. Fortunately, John Blyberg notes that Alan Gray has arranged for a special rate Doubletree Hotel in Norwalk, not far from the site of the event.
camp, darien public library, lib20, libraries, [...]
Library Camp East 2006 is set for September 25 at Darien Public Library in Darien CT.
It’s an unconference, so the content is determined by the participants, and judging from the names on the signup page (John Blyberg and Jessamyn sound excited), there will be a lot of good discussion.
camp, darien public library, lib20, libraries, library, [...]
I’ve re-thought the contents of the record and summary displays in WPopac. After some experimentation and a lot of listening, it became clear that people needed specific information when looking at a search result or a catalog record.
So now, when searching for Cantonese slang, for instance, the summary displays show the title, year, format, [...]
Arthur Schopenhauer is suggested to have said:
Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is violently opposed, in the third is regarded as self-evident.
If the reaction to Karen Calhoun’s report to the Library of Congress on The Changing Nature of the Catalog and [...]
I was honored to join the conversation yesterday for the latest Talis Library 2.0 Gang podcast, this one on folksonomies and tags. The MP3 is already posted and, as usual, it makes me wonder if I really sound like that. Still, listen to the other participants, they had some great things to say and made [...]
Not A Pretty Librarian has kicked things off well with a first post titled “It Is Not A Tool,” covering an argument about which has more value to a teenager: a car or a computer.
On one side is the notion that “She can’t drive herself to work with a computer.” While, on the other side [...]
WPopac, a project I started on my nights and weekends, is now officially one of my day-job projects too.
We’ve been using our WPopac-based catalog as a prototype since February 2006, but the change not only allocates a portion of my work time specifically to the development of the project, but also reflects the library’s decision [...]
OpenSearch is a standard way of querying a database for content and returning the results.
The official docs note simply: “Any website that has a search feature can make their results available in OpenSearch format,” then adds: “Publishing your search results in OpenSearch™ format will draw more people to your content, by exposing it to a [...]
I recently submitted my proposal for the 2006 NELINET Information Technology Conference.
It’s about WPopac, of course, but the excitement now is that the presentation would be the story of the first library outside PSU to implement it.
WPopac is an open source replacement for a library’s online catalog that improves the usability, findability, and remixability of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Point A: John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights.
Point B: Dan Chudnov’s The problem with the “ILS Bill of Rights”
Response: John Blyberg’s OPACs in the frying pan, Vendors in the fire
While there’s some disagreement between John and Dan, I can’t help but see a strong concordance between their posts: Both are an attempt to educate potential customers. [...]
I’m not going to ALA/NO so I’m hoping those who are will blog it. Two events I’m especially interested in:
On Sunday, June 25:
Catalog Transformed: From Traditional to Emerging Models of Use
This program, co-sponsored by the MARS User Access to Services Committee and RUSA’s Reference Services Section (RSS, formerly MOUSS), deals with changes in library catalogs [...]
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 [...]
It’s hard to know how Fuzzyfruit found the WPopac catalog page for A Baby Sister for Frances (though it is ranked fifth in a Google search for the title), but what matters is that she did find it, and she was able to link to it by simply copying the URL from her browser’s location [...]
