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…

2006

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…