2009

Open Library Environment Project (OLE) ALA session

I attended this session on Saturday morning. For those not familiar with OLE it is a project to build an open ILS using service oriented architecture and business modelling. The presenters were Robert H. McDonald (Indiana Univ.), Carlen Ruschoff (Univ. of Maryland), Beth Forrest-Warner (Univ. of Kansas), and John Little (Duke Univ.). The project is just finishing its planning phase and its draft document can be accessed at their website oleproject.org While the end product hopes to be an open source ILS right now the project is formed as a community source entity – like an open source but with members that have made committments and thus formed a community dedicated to the project, unlike an open source where one main player hopes others will join in and form a community. It seems to me that the community source approach ensures something will come out of the project. Some of…

2007

Poster Sessions

LITA 2007 offers ten poster sessions covering a wide variety of topics. I will try to give you a glimpse of each of the offerings present. While ten were listed not all were present. Take your online services to the next level: audio, video and more! By Michelle Jeske (Denver Public Library) really showed how you could add visual and audio interest to your library’s virtual presence. Virtual storytime with a children’s librarian reading the book while the illustrations are shown was especially interesting, as was the ability to put audio instructions for using the web site in either English or Spanish. SFX usability testing at ASU by Tammy Allgood and Jenna Amani (Arizona State University) showed immediate applications to improving their pages. They observed users going through set tasks and began making changes immediately based on what they learned, cleaning up the pages and converting to more natural language….