Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Evergreen and Pines. There is a lot of buzz around Evergreen: there is excitement about an open source integrated library system. There is another aspect of it that is interesting, which I haven't seen so much discussion about. Evergreen was developed to support PINES in Georgia. It was designed to support consortial working. (And yes, I understand that individual institutions are looking at it also.) I think that this is interesting as we will probably see more consortial activity over time as the benefits of shared working and aggregate access become clearer. In this context, for example, it will be interesting to see what the impact on library use the availability of 'one big library on the web' in Georgia will be .... PINES experienced a whopping 40 percent increase in lending during the past year. As part of this trend to consortial working, I believe that we will see more collaborative sourcing of shared systems.
Related entries: Arcade | New York Art Resources Consortium. A web-based Collections Management System. Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize - Tennant: Digital Libraries - Blo. Discovery AND Selection = Elsewhere. This slide caused the most discussion and comment during my presentation at the AALL workshop about which I posted previously. I return to it here for a few reasons. Some of these assertions have attained meme status. In particular I’ve noticed that Roy’s characterization of searching and finding (which he’s been saying since at least 2005 – I’m sure he can tell us the exact date of the coinage) and Lorcan’s dictum about discovery were listened to with some skepticism and resistance only 12 months ago. They are now treated as common knowledge and an accepted starting point for discussions of our issues. This is good for us.
It focuses us on change. The next two about getting our services and assets into the work flow of the user on the network and about needing to present users with all of our system-wide assets aren’t yet memes but they have entered the vocabulary. The last assertion about selection is far from a meme. Related posts: Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Boxed in: a set of search boxes. Libraries have major challenges in developing their websites. Think just of the information resources they provide access to. There are locally managed resources: a catalog, a repository or two, informational pages, and so on. And there are many remote resources: licensed databases, links to web pages, and so on. And there are pages which try to pull these together: resources organized by subject or department, for example. These resources may be different in scope (reference, discovery, full-text or other content, ...), in type of content, in terms and conditions, in specialization, and so on.
Abstracting up to that single - or small number of - search boxes that are presented as a goal is not straightforward. In this context I was interested to see Suzanne Chapman's "search box round-up". She does a nice job of commenting on several approaches, and has a companion Flickr set of search box pics. Related entries; The simple search box and the rich texture of suggestion. The Quest for the Single, Simple, Successful Search. Yes, for most people the Grail is Google. For many of us in the library world (even for some library users) it’s WorldCat. But there are apparently still numerous quests for one way to search everything that’s available at an institution. In eight visits I’ve made to RLG partner institutions in the last six months, six of them said that this quest was a top priority for them (and perhaps when the other two finish their big building projects, the quest will find its way to the top of their priorities, too).
Some call it metasearch, others call it federated searching, others plan to use OAI harvesting to create a single index of all their collections, and still others think about putting all the metadata into a single system. Most of them had tried something already and were unhappy with it and were determined to try something else. No matter which approach they had tried, in each case the perceived problem involved mapping the data. So what is the right approach, you might ask. On Innovation in the ILS Marketplace | Disruptive Library Techno. Last month the ILS Discovery Interface Task Force of the DLF called a meeting of library system vendors (including one commercial support organization for open source ILS software) to talk about the state of computer-to-computer interfaces in-to and out-of the ILS.
The meeting comes as the work of the task force is winding down. An outcome of the meeting, the “Berkeley Accord,” was posted last week to Peter Brantley’s blog. The accord has three basic parts: automated interfaces for offloading records from the ILS, a mechanism for determining the availability of an item, and a scheme for creating persistent links to records. Taken as a whole, these three items are arguably the most sought-after functionality by software developers seeking to extend the functionality of traditional library catalogs. The three enable all sorts of other things to happen with data stored in the ILS. All in Favor, Say “Aye” All Opposed, Say “Nay” Fortunately, none of the representatives disagreed. Abstentions? VUFind Makes Lime Green Splash at ALA - Tennant: Digital Librari.
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