Archive for October, 2006

It’s About Time, It’s About Place: Designing Interoperable Modular Web Applications for Delivering Online Library Instruction

October 31st, 2006 by Joy Weese Moll

Debra A. Riley-Huff, Web Services Librarian, University of Mississippi
The biggest cost for web-delivered library instruction is staff time. The software is cheap or free. Being able to use modules in different contexts (interoperability) or re-use structural pieces with new content (modularity) saves time and, therefore, money.
One of the things to know at the outset [...]

The Internet and the Experience Effect: A Closer Look

October 31st, 2006 by Joy Weese Moll

Rachel Kirk, Middle Tennessee State University
Steve Bales, University of Tennessee
The Pew Center Internet and American Life Project published a report in 2001 called “Getting Serious Online” that drew a conclusion that as Internet Users become more experienced, they engage in more serious pursuits on-line, moving from games to banking, for example. As a project for [...]

Improving Library Services with AJAX and RSS

October 31st, 2006 by Nikki Wright

Hongbin Liu, Web Services Librarian at Yale University
Win Shih, Head of Systems and Databases at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center.
As spokesperson for this session, Hongbin covered the background of Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, tagging, blogs and RSS, and demonstrated how library websites can meet the needs of web [...]

Web 2.0 - Becoming Library 2.0

October 31st, 2006 by Chad Haefele

Stephen Abram, VP of Innovation at SirsiDynix, closed out the 2006 LITA Forum on Sunday morning.
One of his first statistics was that libraries collectively ship and circulate more than Amazon.com every day. But we’re not like Amazon in a lot of other ways. We’ve decided we should be making decisions for [...]

Low threshold strategies for libraries to support “other” types of digital publishing

October 30th, 2006 by Chad Haefele

Robert H. McDonald and Shane Nackerud summarized two different aspects of low threshold digital publishing. Robert covered Florida State University’s program of various institutional repository tools, and Shane outlined the University of Minnesota’s UThink blogging platform.
One of the big advantages of an institutional repository program to FSU was that it gave them something to [...]

Developing Best Project Management Practices for IT Projects, Day 2

October 30th, 2006 by Rachel Vacek

The two presenters were:
Frank Cervone, Assistant University Librarian for Information Technology
Northwestern University
f-cervone@northwestern.edu

Grace Sines, Head, Information Technology Branch
USDA, ARS, National Agicultural Library
Gsines@nal.usda.gov
Day 2 continued with discussions on the 9 areas of knowledge within project management.
Having a work breakdown structure (WBS) can be helpful in time management. This is a decomposition of all the parts [...]

Developing Best Project Management Practices for IT Projects, Day 1

October 30th, 2006 by Rachel Vacek

The two presenters were:
Frank Cervone, Assistant University Librarian for Information Technology
Northwestern University
f-cervone@northwestern.edu
Grace Sines, Head, Information Technology Branch
USDA, ARS, National Agicultural Library
Gsines@nal.usda.gov
There were about 44 people in attendance, and there was an interesting breakdown from there:

30+ from academic libraries

0 from school libraries
2 from Tech processing areas
2 from collection development areas
1 from marketing

Day 1 began with [...]

Electronic Publishing Software for Libraries

October 29th, 2006 by bchawner

This concurrent session covered the background, purpose, and evolution of the DPubS (Digital Publishing Systems) open source software project, based at Cornell University Library, as well as a case study based on Pennsylvania State University Libraries’ use of the package. The audience left with an appreciation of the potential of electronic publishing software to allow [...]

Not So Different After All — Creating Access to Diverse Objects in Digital Repositories

October 29th, 2006 by Danielle Plumer

Speakers:
Gretchen Gueguen, Digital Collections Librarian, University of Maryland Libraries
Jennifer O’Brien Roper, Metadata Librarian, University of Maryland Libraries
PowerPoint presentation
Gretchen Gueguen began the session by giving an overview of the work done by the University of Maryland Libraries. UM has identified four basic types of digital collections:

Thematic collections, sometimes containing multiple types of digital objects, tightly [...]

Are There No Limits to What NCIP Can Do?

October 29th, 2006 by Roger Hiles

This session was subtitled “E-Commerce, Self-Service, Bindery, ILL, Statistics - New Applications for the NCIP Protocol”, and as the session began attendees got an answer to the question posed by the title, as presenter Ted Koppel of Ex Libris admitted that new applications for NCIP have not been as plentiful as was anticipated, so the [...]