Selling change @ your librarylibraries, our digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 6/8/2005 with Comments Off on Selling change @ your library

Aaron at Walking Paper recently wrote a great post entitled Letting Go. In it, he encouraged librarians to let go of rules that really serve librarians rather than patrons (and often are barriers to patrons getting what they need from the library). Other than those rules preserving basic etiquette and safety, the rules should exist …

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Dumb down the catalog? Yes, let’s!libraries, our digital future, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 5/13/2005 with 5 comments

I recently had an interesting discussion with a librarian regarding the usability of OPACs. I, as usual, was arguing that there are lessons to be learned from Google, RedLightGreen, and Amazon in how information retrieval systems should be designed. He replied, “at some point don’t you think the responsibility should rest on the students? How …

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Oh Canada!libraries, our digital future, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 5/8/2005 with 7 comments

I’ve never really been “up” on Canada. For one, I’ve never been there (not that I wouldn’t like to, but the opportunity has not presented itself yet). Two, I, like many Americans, sadly know very little about Canadian geography, politics, history, culture etc. But I’ve become very enchanted with Canada over the past few months …

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Jybe: Take Tworeference, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 4/28/2005 with Comments Off on Jybe: Take Two

I still have not been able to install the Jybe extension in Firefox without my computer melting down, but I have been successful in getting it to work in IE (not that I really want to be using IE). Yesterday, I did a test run of Jybe with Stephen Francoeur, The Teaching Librarian. We co-browsed …

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The Failure of Middleware, Part 7: OAI and Google Scholarlibraries, our digital future, search

by Meredith Farkas on 4/7/2005 with 2 comments

The Open Archives Initiative develops interoperability standards with the goal of developing easy ways to access digital content and improve scholarly communication. They have developed a protocol for harvesting XML-formatted metadata from text repositories. If all e-content providers used open metadata standards, libraries could harvest metadata from a variety of places so that it could …

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The Failure of Middleware, Part 5: The Unintegrated Library System & Federated Searchlibraries, our digital future, search

by Meredith Farkas on 4/7/2005 with 1 comment

Sorry for the delay in posting the rest of this, but we were flying to Florida yesterday to visit family. Nice to be in consistently warm weather for a few days. 🙂 When library catalogs were first developed, all of the electronic needs of a library system were fulfilled by the ILS. At the time, …

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More from Google Mapsour digital future, reference

by Meredith Farkas on 4/5/2005 with Comments Off on More from Google Maps

A few months ago, Google had purchased Keyhole, a program that allowed you to look at satellite photos of anywhere in the U.S. They allowed users to download it for free for a week or so and play with it. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t until today that I got to see what Google …

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The Failure of Middleware, Part 2: Who are our users?libraries, our digital future

by Meredith Farkas on 4/4/2005 with Comments Off on The Failure of Middleware, Part 2: Who are our users?

The first thing anyone designing a website or a search engine should ask themselves is how can we meet the needs of our users? In the case of academic libraries, those users are faculty and students. This year’s first-year college students were eight-years-old when Yahoo! was born. Technology is ubiquitous to them and they approach …

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