Posted inALA blogging our digital future
ALA Wrapup: Days 3-4
OCLC Blogger Salon This has been covered by a lot of people, so if you want more details, the posts were all pulled together at the ALA Chicago Wiki. I,…
Posted inALA libraries our digital future tech trends
ALA Wrapup: Day 3
On Saturday, I went to two sessions that were really a study in contrasts. After the first one, I felt like I'd heard it all before. After the second one,…
Posted inALA libraries our digital future
ALA Day 2: Loving that “old school” style
Just because I'm young and female does not make me a "princess". Adam and I had just left the Jybe booth, where we'd had an interesting talk with Brian, the…
Posted inlibraries our digital future
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…
Posted inlibraries our digital future
Library services to distance learners
Where I got my MLIS, distance learners had to pay more per credit hour than students who took classes on campus. I understood that the extra fees paid for the…
Posted inlibraries our digital future search
Lorcan Dempsey on library middlware
I've read a lot of posts and articles lamenting the fact that many students and patrons prefer using Google to the library's print and electronic resources, but few look at…
Posted inlibraries our digital future tech trends
Dumb down the catalog? Yes, let’s!
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…
Posted inlibraries our digital future tech trends
Oh Canada!
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…
Posted inlibraries reference tech trends
Chat interoperability
My new friend, and fellow Wesleyan alum, Stephen Francoeur, wrote: Wouldn't it be cool if your patrons could use an IM client to chat with your web contact center software…
Posted inour digital future social bookmarking
What’s happening in social bookmarking
I have been wanting to write more about social bookmarking for a long time, but I had two job interviews last week and an all-day marathon interview to prepare for…
Posted inreference tech trends
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…
Posted inour digital future
Jybe and the difference between free software and open source
I've gotten very excited by the reviews I've read about Jybe, but I had never actually given it a try myself. Until today. For those who don't know, Jybe is…
Posted inlibraries our digital future
Is innovation all about technology?
I'm sure there are people who think that technology is the be-all-end-all and that every bleeding-edge technology should be implemented in libraries. But I don't happen to know any of…
Posted inlibraries our digital future search
The Failure of Middleware, Part 7: OAI and Google Scholar
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…
Posted inlibraries our digital future search
The Failure of Middleware, Part 6: Link Resolvers
Link Resolvers allow users to move from a citation to the actual article (so long as the library has access to it), regardless of which database the article happens to…
Posted inlibraries our digital future search
The Failure of Middleware, Part 5: The Unintegrated Library System & Federated Search
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…
Posted inour digital future reference
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…
Posted inlibraries our digital future
The Failure of Middleware, Part 4: What works?
Next, our fictional student is going into RedLightGreen to find resources for her paper. RedLightGreen, a union catalog, is an excellent tool for resource discovery as the user only needs…
Posted inlibraries our digital future
The Failure of Middleware, Part 3: How do we measure up?
So now that we know what our population wants, we can see how our OPACs measure up. I created a screencast using my alma mater’s OPAC to illustrate some of…
Posted inlibraries our digital future
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,…
