2008

Top Tech Trends for ALA (Summer '08)

Here is a non-exhaustive list of Top Technology Trends for the American Library Association Annual Meeting (Summer, 2008). These Trends represent general directions regarding computing in libraries — short-term future directions where, from my perspective, things are or could be going. They are listed in no priority order. “Bling” in your website – I hate to admit it, but it seems increasingly necessary to make sure your institution’s website be aesthetically appealing. This might seem obvious to you, but considering the fact we all think “content is king” we might have to reconsider. Whether we like it or not, people do judge a book by its cover, and people do judge other’s on their appearance. Websites aren’t very much different. While librarians are great at organizing information bibliographically, we stink when it comes to organizing things visually. Think graphic design. Break down and hire a graphic designer, and temper their…

2007

It's Up and Running, Now What? Strategies for Building Content in an Institutional Repository

Speaker: Catherine M. Jannik, Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center Program blurb: In August 2004, Georgia Tech Library launched SMARTech with approximately 2,500 legacy items. In the beginning, we focused on authors self-archiving pre-prints and postprints, research and technical reports, and electronic theses and dissertations. As interest in archiving other materials increased and we realized that our faculty was not properly motivated to submit their own work, we changed our approach to collecting materials for our institutional repository and added a dark archive for strictly archival material. We have launched an electronic publishing service, Epage @ Tech, to support the creation and capture of e-journals, conferences, and lecture series to facilitate scholarly communication. As we provide these tools to faculty to accomplish their goals and they in turn become more aware of the need for repositories, we are more likely to convince them to deposit their personal materials….