General information

Cil 2006 – Future of Catalogs

Roy Tennant, California Digital Library Andrew Pace, North carolina State University (NCSU) Packed house which was to be expected. It’s like E.F. Hutton when Roy and Andrew speak. (Do you remember that commercial?) And on top of that, everyone has an interest in OPACs – reference librarians, access services librarians, catalog librarians, etc. Lots of energy and opinions in the room. Roy Tennant Hoping to kill off the word OPAC. It harkens back to public access as an afterthought. What catalogs do well: (I’m just talking about a finding tool) 1. Inventory control 2. Known item searching 3. Location searching(within four walls) What they don’t do well: 1. Any search beyond known item 2. Searching anything beyond books 3. Displaying results by logical groupings(FRBR) – show complextiy when needed 4. No faceted browsing 5. Relevance Ranking 6. No recommendation services How did we get here? Automation began in back room…

General information

CIL 2006 – Dead and Emerging Technologies

I’ve been reticent about posting my reaction to this late night session. It’s usually lots of fun and you can get a good sense of library technology trends on the bleeding edge. More of the same this year. The theme was library 1.0 versus Library 2.0. It’s all fair game, but I have to agree that some of this 2.0 stuff is pretty familiar. I’ll let you be the judge. Read on for commentary after the brain dump… Michael Stephens Provided a quick look at current 2.0 trends Gamers are entering our workspace Remix Culture – Remixing library data 37% of library have blogs – “Our work is not done.” Dream, plan for your users and have fun. Amanda Etches-Johnson Presented a survey of old library technology plans; a fun juxtapostion because the old stuff reads like the new library 2.0 evangelism “It’s nothing new; it’s an evolution – new…

General information

CIL 2006 – Structured data, Web 2.0, Libraries

Lorcan Dempsey Second day of the conference and my first post… It’s been busy, but exhilirating. This was a good session that really worked to bring together the possibilities of web 2.0 for libraries. Lorcan began by emphasizing the need to make bib data work harder; of releasing the value from Library Marc and IsO markup. Lorcan framed the conversation by using the definition of web 2.0 from Tim O’Reilly. Web 2.0 is: flat applications – apis and mashups, rss, web services; lightweight service composition rich interaction – AJAX, smooth applications within browser data is new functionality – collection, exploitation of metadata and bib data participation – social networking, social tagging Lorcan walked through how these web2.o features are appearing in OCLC research applications. Lightweight Service Composition Example audience level grease monkey script – algorithm ranks book according to worldcat holdings (library holdings indicate type of audience – children, adolescent,…

2005

E-Matrix: NCSU Library Eresources Management System

A great session with the bigger picture of eResource management in mind. Useful for any librarian looking to manage a dispersed and disparate set of library data. Andrew and Stephen have got their mind around what it means to administer records of database subscriptions, ejournals and print journals while at the same time managing access and display issues for librarians and the users we work for. It’s an all encompassing system that reworks how we can manage our growing eResources and it will involve ALL departments in the library.

2005

Utilizing the Benefits of Native XML Database Technologies

Alan Cornish – Systems Librarian, Washington State University Libraries Another take on the session… You should also check Karen’s earlier post. What’s a Native XML database exactly? Alan defines Native XML as a document storage and retrieval model where an XML doc is considered the basic unit of storage, the database is DTD or schema independent, and an XML-specific query language is used to manage, retrieve and display data. No relational databases or SQL here, kids. Alan gave a nice, brief overview of XML, DTDs and then introduced the software used for his project. Textml is XML server software from Ixiasoft. He also mentioned Cooktop – some freeware that actually worked as a pretty robust XML editor. Alan demoed how Textml works, showed query syntax and drew comparisons with SQL statements. Those of us used to SQL syntax (SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE keyword = things) This native XML stuff…