2006

Forum 06 poster sessions

Sadly, I only had an hour between meetings, so I didn’t get to every poster session, but here at last are the notes I do have. A PDF of the session descriptions is available on the LITA web site. There was a good range of topics and library types represented.

Instructional Media and Library Online Tutorials

Li Zhang – Mississippi State University

  • Online tutorials require far more than just duplicating print materials to the web. They currently have a large project to develop tutorials for both distance students and on-campus students. They’re trying to develop a single set of online tutorials that works for all of their audiences.
  • Too many bells and whistles distract rather than inform. Their web committee found that including audio or video for too many pieces of a tutorial makes it unusable for people using older computers or dialup Internet access.

Integrating Library Services: An application proposal to enable federation of information and user services

Erik Mitchell – Wake Forest University
Article to be published in Internet Reference Services Quarterly, February 2007

  • A “point-of-need approach is contrasted with the point-of-service approach utilized in traditional library systems.” Instead of creating a federated search, Eric is working on a sort of federated service. It will combine multiple data sources, and will also provide useful user services like item renewal — without the user having to step out of the interface into a separate OPAC/ILS interface. To this end, he is using an OpenURL link resolver + web services.
  • RSS, relevance ranking, renewals: He’d like to reindex using, e.g., Google, for relevance ranking. He’d also like people to be able to subscribe, say, to an RSS feed of what they have out, and be able to one-click renew. Reindexing is the easy part; adding the circulation data is harder; and enabling the system to update live circulation data is the really hard part. He wanted to use NCIP for this, but it wasn’t supported yet by the ILS vendor (he may have to resort to a little screen scraping).

Information on the Go: A journey of incorporating portable media players into library technology

Amy Landon, Larisa Hart – Ozarks Technical Community College

  • “Can’t take the lab home? Now you can.” They started putting course reserve materials onto iPods for students to check out. Their library has an interesting variety of materials for different course lab work — like a collection of rocks for one class. They decided to start adding pictures of these rocks, etc., to the iPods. This way students can study the rock pictures at their leisure. Since each iPod holds way more data than they have content available, they are putting everything on there including “How to study” DVD content.
  • One iPod per thousand students: They have about 10,000 students total; they currently have 6 video iPods and 4 iPod Nano that circulate for a couple of days at a time. They’re ordering a few more iPods, but so far the number available is keeping up with the demand.

Scanning the Past: Central Florida Memory

Lee Dotson, Selma K. Jaskowski, Joel Lavoie, Doug Dunlop – University of Central Florida

  • A “virtual place where visitors can discover what Central Florida was like before theme parks and the space program.” Central Florida Memory is a collaborative project of the University, the county library system, the regional oral history center, and other partners. The project started under an IMLS grant and they’re seeking new funding sources to sustain it.
  • Digitization Spec Kit details their software, equipment, and procedures. See more about their project and browse their current digital collections at www.cfmemory.org.

Using Web Services to Advertise New Library Holdings: RSS library feeds in the campus CMS

Edward Corrado, Heather L. Moulaison – College of New Jersey

  • Design decisions included:
    • What is a “new” item?
    • How to group feeds?
    • What data to display in feeds?
  • About the only feed people actually add to their aggregators is the list of New DVDs 🙂 The feed is created by a Perl script. One click from the feed takes the user to the OPAC. Feeds get incorporated by faculty into the course management system (the student doesn’t have to know that a list of new titles there is actually an RSS feed).
  • See the October 2006 CIL and the College’s library web site for more info.