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I just realized I haven’t yet posted a report of my attendance at NCLA. Should be a good test of my note-taking. As I had observed at ALA this summer, I found the presentations by and one-on-one discussions with vendors to be a very valuable part of the conference.

During a presentation by the Executive Director on NC LIVE, I learned about a “vendor showcase” immediately afterward, highlighting EBSCO e-books. So I skipped the exhibits and poster sessions (sorry Carol) and went to learn more about this successor to NetLibrary. Through this presentation and subsequent discussions with the EBSCO Steves, I learned much about this new product, and I have already been able to make some improvements to our service. For instance, I obtained the correct database-level URL to direct users to the EBSCO e-books home page. I also learned how to set up a “notify” option so that when an EBSCO e-book is in use, the user can have an e-mail sent when the e-book becomes available (before NCLA, our users simply got the NetLibrary equivalent of a busy signal). I also learned that users can share notes, citations, etc., by creating shared folders in MyEBSCOhost.

I attended an informative presentation by Andrew Pace of OCLC about their new product Webscale Management Services (WMS). WMS is a cloud-based integrated library system; my impression was that they had added Circulation and Acquisitions functions to WorldCat. Three WMS Beta implementers-a public library system, Davidson College, and High Point Univ.-spoke about their experience thus far with WMS. All three spoke favorably of the product and of OCLC (perhaps because they were co-presenting with OCLC?). One said that “the support from OCLC has been wonderful”; another said that students have taken to the product with little or no training; and the librarian from Davidson said “I hope I never have to do another ILS migration in my career.”

I also had a couple of good conversations with our EBL representative about managing our DDA title files. We didn’t solve any problems (yet), but I learned more about how the process is designed to work, and he learned more about how we want it to work.

Other sessions I attended:

  • e-book approval – this enlightening discussion of the e-book approval plans at NC State and Duke was previously described by Carol
  • providing access to online resources – this presentation turned out to be too basic to be helpful, with its tab-by-tab tour of LibGuides and its very rudimentary explanation of how a proxy server works.
  • authentication on public computers – staff from the WCU Hunter Library reported on their research into academic libraries’ practices for authenticating users at public computers