Check out this video review of the LITA 2008 National Forum, “Technology and Community: Building the Techno Community Library”, held October 17-19 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Included are general session speakers Michael Porter and Tim Spalding, session presenters Dinah Sanders and Nicholas Schiller, Conference Chair Dale Poulter, and LITA President Andrew Pace.
Ah, Holdings Statements!
In a former life, I spent a lot of time with holdings standards, so the one below took me back a bit to those thorny issues of display. Cindy Hepfer, our ALA Voting Representative to NISO, has forwarded yet another systematic review for us to consider: ISO 10324:1997, Information and documentation — Holdings statements — Summary level (1st edition). This is not the NISO standard, but is being balloted by ISO, which means that ALA is not voting on the standard itself but rather is providing feedback to NISO as to whether to approve or disapprove the standard. Vote options are Confirm (as is), Revise/Amend, Withdraw (the standard), or Abstain (from the vote). Comments are required for all votes other than Confirm. The scope note for the standard states: “This International Standard specifies display requirements for holdings Statements at the summary level for serial and non-serial items, to promote consistency…
Guidelines for Bibliographic References and Citations
We have another standard out for ballot, forwarded for our comments by Cindy Hepfer, ALA Voting representative to NISO. This one is for the Draft International Standard version of edition 3 of ISO/DIS 690, Guidelines for bibliographic references and citations to information resources. The scope note in the draft standard reads as follows: “This International Standard makes recommendations for the preparation of references and citations in Latin scripts in works that are not themselves primarily bibliographical. It applies to references and citations to all kinds of information resource, such as monographs, serials, contributions, patents, cartographic materials, electronic information resources (including computer software and data bases), music, recorded sound, prints, photographs, graphic and audiovisual works, and moving images. It does not apply to machine-parsable citations. This document does not prescribe a particular style of reference or citation. The examples used in this document are not prescriptive as to style and punctuation….
NISO Voting Pools, part 2
As a follow-on to my earlier message, here is the second group of standards coming up for voting pool formation for which our ALA Voting Representative to NISO, Cindy Hepfer, has requested feedback. Again, I think the best strategy is to quote the gist of Cindy’s message in full. Group 2: Formation of Voting Pools for CCM Standard Reaffirmations This is the second group of standards due for five-year reviews for which NISO will be issuing ballots. In accordance with NISO procedures, we are offering you the option of joining the voting pool for five standards that are under the responsibility of the Content and Collection Management (CCM) Topic Committee. This is NOT the reaffirmation ballot — the current ballot is only to form the voting pools. ALA may choose any or all of the standards listed below. Joining the voting pool will allow ALA to vote on the standard…
NISO Voting Pools, Should ALA Participate?
Cindy Hepfer, the ALA Voting Representative to NISO, has informed us that a new ballot has been presented to NISO Voting Members. Because of the importance of this message, I’m going to quote Cindy’s message in full. The text of this ballot is as follows: ‘Group 1: Formation of Voting Pools for CCM Standard Reaffirmations’ NISO periodically issues ballots for a number of NISO standards that are due for five-year reviews. In accordance with NISO procedures, they are offering voting members the option of joining the voting pool for five of those standards, that are under the responsibility of the Content and Collection Management (CCM) Topic Committee. [Full disclosure: I’m a member of the CCM Topic Committee–Diane]. This is NOT the reaffirmation ballot — the current ballot is only to form the voting pools. ALA may choose any or all of the standards listed below. Joining the voting pool will…
Course Management Systems: Integrating Library Content, Panel Discussion
Elizabeth Black, Ohio State University Don Kim, Murray State University Kim Duckett and Jason Casden, North Carolina State University Session Summary: A great sampling of creative tools and solutions! Anyone looking to find innovative ways to push library content through course management systems will find great ideas from these presentations. Note: any reference in this post to “CMS” indications “course management system,” NOT “content management system” (i.e., Drupal). Elizabeth Black, Ohio State University: The CMS in use at Ohio State is called Desire2Learn. It’s made by a Canadian vendor, and as at many institutions, the course management system is run by a University IT department (educational technologists). It was important that the project was a true collaboration between campus IT and the library; commitment and maintenance were very important, with mutual authority and accountability given and expected from both parties. The project was designed by a cross-departmental team. The team…
Institutional Repositories: Design and Development, Panel Discussion
Developing and Institutional Repository: Implementation of DigiTool at Colorado State University Libraries Shu Liu, Colorado State University Yongli Zhou, Colorado State University The first panelists, Shu Liu and Yongli Zhou, describe implementing a IR through DigiTool, exLibris’s Digital Repository software and their talk focuses on using an out of the box product. Colorado State used contentdm from 01-present, but will migrate to digitool (which they’ve also been using since 07) by 09. Digitool has a series of web based client for the user and staff to interface with the the database. There are also access and maintenance components.Aspects of the digitool product can be customized, the icons, menu, header and footer, etc. They also did do some work customizing the metadata display and there were automated and manual ways to do these functions. They also implemented handles for their documents, though it was a bit difficult to implement and took…
2008 National Forum: Don't make me choose!
During the second concurrent session, Jean Rainwater and Bonnie Buzzell from Brown University talked about the challenges involved in borrowing materials not located in their own collections. In “Don’t Make Me Choose! (or, Just Get What I Need!),†they showed how it took 33 clicks to borrow an item from another library within the multiple consortia they belong to, which is 9-10 times the number of clicks the typical user will put up with. Rather than waiting for vendors to come up with a solution, they decided to develop one in-house, even if it was only a partial solution. When a new University Librarian (i.e., head of the library) was hired, this person made simplifying the borrowing process a priority, and put together a team with different, complementary skill sets to do the job. The “guiding principles†for this project were that the system they developed had to be: Simplicity…
2008 National Forum: A Homegrown CMS
With all the commerical and open source content management systems on the market, why would a library still choose to build their own? In 2006, the University of Houston Libraries did just that. Rachel Vacek discussed their rationale and effort in Putting the Library Website in Their Hands: The Advantages and Challenges of a Homegrown Content Management System. (Note: Rachel indicated her slides will be available on rachelvacek.com, but were not there as of this writing, or I didn’t go deep enough into her site.) UHL chose to develop their own CMS primarily because they wanted a system based on their vision of what a CMS is and should do, rather than modifying someone else’s. UHL feels that the CMS should be a growing and changing system. They felt that by building their own system their staff would be able to fix problems and incorporate customer feedback more quickly. They felt that by building their…
Participation and Power: Combining Community Features with Existing metadata in NextGen Public Interfaces
Participation and Power: Combining Community Features with Existing metadata in NextGen Public Interfaces Dinah Sanders, Innovative Interface Kelly M. Vickery, University of Kentucky Instead of just talking about encore, Dinah will discuss how metadata is exposed for patrons to leverage, how is it extended to cover gaps in controlled vocabulary. The majority of Americans use the interwebs everyday. This means they are coming in with savvy web skills and we can leverage metadata to give them tools that are powerful and that users recognize. They are trying to bring these patron skills together with the library strengths of good metadata. However, there are limits, particularly as was mentioned in the opening session “cookery†is not a common term. Encore tries to bring together the formal controlled vocabulary and folksonomies to rectify these problems. Searching can be done across library metadata and user-supplied tags. Early attempts at this like penntags, sopac,…