2008

Next Generation Catalog Interest Group Meeting

Monday, June 30th, 2008 Anaheim Convention Center Sharon M. Shafer, Vice Chair, welcomed everyone to the 3rd meeting of the Next Generation Catalog Interest Group. The program panelists included Karen G. Schneider, Equinox Software, Sara Davidson, University of California, Merced, and Amy Kautzman, University of California, Davis, “Running a Free and Open Source Software ILS does Not Equate to a Tightrope Act with No Net” Karen G. Schneider began her talk with a definition of open source software from Wikipedia. Karen explained that open source software is free to use, free to download, and free to modify. Support is also available from the open source community or from a vendor. Karen further stated that “development” happens out in the “wild,” occurring on IRC, listservs, etc. It is important that development no longer take place in silos. With open source software problems can be quickly resolved. There is no need to…

General information

Keeping Your Computers Running Session

In the one of the last session slots of the ALA Conference was a gem of a program geared toward smallish public libraries who have either no IT Department or a very small one. Diane Neal, North Carolina Central University, Brenda Hough, MaintainIT Project and Jennifer Lee Peterson, WebJunction were the panelists for the presentation. The session went from specific things that librarians can do to keep their technology running to a broader look at what resources are out there for troubleshooting specific issues, finding “best practices” and using free tools to plan and maintain your technology at a higher (library-wide, as opposed to a single machine) level. It started off with Diane giving a very nuts-and-bolts presentation about basic PC, printer and network troubleshooting. She went through the basic troubleshooting steps for your PC (reboot, check cables, discover “where it hurts” on the machine…) and then did the same…

2008

Open Source Open Services – Emerging Technology Interest Group

Joe Ford convened the Emerging Technology Interest group managed discussion on “Open Source, Open Services” Darrell Gunter began by discussing Collexis research projects and applications for libraries. Fascinating work is being undertaken on computationally derived ontology, what Collexis refers to as Fingerprinting. [Bibliographic ontology (like FRBR or FRAD not getting any play in the semantic portion of the presentation). ] Screenshots of tools (presentation slides to be posted to the LITA wiki) included the Knowledge Dashboard, which is being used for Hypothesis Generation by scientists. Biomedexperts.com discussed as a Collexis partner with tools for researchers including expert visualization, social network graphs of who is publishing with whom. Asklepios Group discussed as a user of collexis tools which utilizes mobile technology for patient-side consultation and comparison of relevant treatments. I would characterize Collexis methodology as relying on computationally derived indexing for data visualization (btw-the intellectual foundations of LIS exist (partly) in…

2008

Drupal4Lib BoF at ALA Anaheim

We got a great crowd of around 20 people for our Drupal ‘Birds of a Feather’. The above is a shot of everybody in the BIGWIG Bloggers’ room — just before we got kicked out by some group from YALSA (bums, we’ll get even)! (We then proceeded to the next available empty room and had our get-together there.) First up on the agenda was setting up the Drupal IG, making sure we have enough signatures and asking for volunteers to serve as Chair and Co-Chair. For the first year, Leo Klein (i.e. me) graciously volunteered to serve as chair and Ian Chan as co-chair. The name for the IG is ‘Drupal4Lib’ and our purpose is “to promote the use and understanding of the content management system, Drupal, by libraries and librarians”. Next on the agenda was the true meat-and-potatoes of the BoF: shooting the breeze about Drupal and demonstrating a…

2008

LITA Public Libraries Technology Interest Group Meeting

The PLTIG business meeting focused on further developing our program idea for Annual 2009. The program looks at how various libraries and consortia have used technology to bring their summer reading programs “online”–from patron front-ends to backends for creating statistical and tracking reports. (How many repeat customers did your summer reading program have this year?) Discussion focused on speaker selection, developing guidelines for speakers, preparing a resource list for attendees, and publicity options. The group also discussed plans for Midwinter. Instead of hosting a managed discussion as we have done in the past, we decided simply to hold a business meeting. We’ll work further on the 2009 program at Midwinter as well as begin the process of planning for Annual 2010. As part of the Midwinter discussion, we also touched on the perennial topic of “what’s the purpose of this IG?” We concluded that our purpose was to provide programming…

2008

Electronic Resources Management IG Meeting in Anaheim

Please join us at the Electronic Resources Management Interest Group (ALCTS/LITA) meeting otherwise known as the “Friday Night Meeting”. When: Friday, June 27th 6:30-8:00pm Where: Anaheim Convention Center Room 203 A Agenda: 1. IG Business (5 Minutes) 2. SUSHI- Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Open Forum – Adam Chandler and friends. Adam will be presenting the results of a SUSHI survey he is conducting of COUNTER members and then using that as a lead-off for a discussion about what the challenges and opportunities related to SUSHI implementation are. (30 minutes) http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi 3. CORE-Cost of Resources Exchange update – Ted Koppel and/or Jeff Aipperspach (15-20 minutes) http://www.niso.org/workrooms/core 4. KBART-Knowledge Base and Related Tools Working Group – Nettie Lagace (15-20 minutes) http://www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart 5. Update report on the ONIX family (Licensing Terms, Books and Serials) – Brian Green (5-10 minutes) http://www.editeur.org/onix_licensing.html 6. NISO Update – Todd Carpenter (10-15 minutes) http://www.niso.org We look…

2008

NGCIG Meeting at Annual: Next Steps in Next Generation Catalogs

The LITA Next Generation Catalog Interest Group will meet on Monday, June 30, 10:30 a.m. – Noon. Anaheim Convention Center, 213 C We will have presentations and discussion about two examples of recent next generation catalog endeavors. Karen Schneider (Evangelist for Equinox’s Evergreen support) will share what she does as an Evangelist by giving some real world, grounded information on how “Running a Free and Open Source Software ILS does Not Equate to a Tightrope Act with No Net”. Sara Davidson and Amy Kautzman (Members of UC/OCLC Pilot Implementation Team) will present “Launching a Next-Generation Consortial Catalog”. What can you produce when you bring together 10 University of California campuses, the California Digital Library (CDL), an existing union catalog, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), multiple task groups and the efforts of numerous individuals? In our case, the result is the Next-Generation Melvyl pilot which draws together content from UC’s existing…