Jason Griffey of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga presented a brief, bright and breezy look at the basics of wikis and their use in libraries to an attentive group of about 60 attendees at the end of day two of the 2006 LITA National Forum. The basic appeal of the wiki is that it is a modern day example of “Many people make for light workâ€. Wikis are designed to allow contributors to add to and revise the information on the site, so that the shape and scope do not have to be predetermined. In fact, wikis are a good choice when the shape and scope cannot be predetermined, and they can grow organically as new facts are added. They are good for dealing with “fringe“ items. Potential problems with wikis stem from the lack of control. Duplication, lack of cross references, and eventual entropy can make mature wikis…
Author: Roger Hiles
The Spin on Thin : Thin Clients in Academic Libraries
On the final day of the 2006 LITA National Forum, Helene Gold, electronic services librarian at Eckerd College (St. Petersburg, Florida) described how thin clients are being integrated into the computing environment in the college’s new library. The 25 people who braved Forum-fatigue to attend were not disappointed by Helene’s engaging and accessible presentation. When Eckerd College decided to build a new library, it also decided to house the campus ITS department in the new building. The ITS department in turn decided to use the opportunity to install thin clients in the new facility to showcase the technology. This had both positive and negative ramifications– while the ITS staff was committed to making the project work, “buy in†by the library staff came more slowly. Thin clients Thin clients are relatively simple and durable devices that have no storage or computing power of their own but which can be used…
The impending demise of the local OPAC
Gregg Silvis presented his view of the not-so-rosy future of the local OPAC to a capacity crowd on the first day of the 2006 LITA National Forum. Reviewing the origins of today’s OPACs in the card catalogs of yore, he focused on the duplication of effort that has always been a part of the tradition of the local catalog, in both card and electronic form. The development of cooperative cataloging greatly reduced this duplication, but the advent of local automated systems caused libraries to migrate redundant physical processes to electronic form and decades later, in a very different technological environment, libraries still largely operate the same way. Each library follows similar or identical steps to locate, load, and index copies of the same records, separately perform identical authority control steps, independently maintain, upgrade and backup thousands of servers to host their OPACs, devote massive amounts of staff resources to the…