During February 2011

Inside ZSR

ASERL Webinar on Next-Generation Discovery Systems

Roz, Erik, Ellen M., Kaeley, Craig, Audra, Rebecca, Kevin, Derrick, Susan and Mary S.attended the ASERL Next Gen Discovery Tools session. The session was an overview of various next-generation discovery systems (e.g Serials Solutions Summon, WorldCat Local and Ebsco Discovery Services among others). ECU reported on their methodology for evaluating and selecting a product (ultimately... more

ASERL Webinar – ASERL Members e-Reader Experiences

On Friday, Feb. 18th, a group of ZSR colleagues and I took in a webinar put on by ASERL member libraries discussing their experiences with e-Readers. Speakers included Nancy Gibbs from Duke U., Millie Jackson and Beth Holley from University of Alabama, Eleanor Cook from ECU, and Valerie Boulus from Florida International U. The webinar... more

iRODS user conference

Today I went to the iRODS user conference in Chapel Hill, NC. iRODS stands for Integrated Rule Oriented Data System. the system is intended to be used as a data and digital object curation system that supports data curation activities (e.g. preservation activities) and access activite (e.g. create, access, replace, update, version). iRODS is usable... more

Leslie at MLA 2011

I’m back from another Music Library Association conference, held this year in Philadelphia. Some highlights: Libraries, music, and digital dissemination Previous MLA plenary sessions have focused on a disturbing new trend involving the release of new music recordings as digital downloads only, with licenses restricting sale to end users, which effectively prevents libraries either from... more

Code4Lib Day 2

One important point of today’s presentations at code4lib was on using community-based approach to provide solutions. There was also an interesting breakout section led by Lyrasis on the importance of open source solutions in libraries and why they are becoming so popular. In order to develop a digital exhibit that would aggregate digital collections originally... more

Gretchen at 2011 Lilly Conference

Over this past weekend, I spent Friday – mid Sunday at the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching and Learning in Greensboro. The experience was rewarding; I enjoyed meeting others in the field, and learning what other local institutions are working on. I look forward to trying out some new ideas on teaching and... more

Vufind updates

JP already talked about Vufind but I thought I would add in my notes from the Vufind talk today. Demian Katz (Villanova) took some time in the afternoon to talk about Vufind and its growing support for metadata standards other than MARC. The update centered on how Vufind had been re-tuned to be more agnostic... more

JP at Code4Lib 2011

Before commenting on today’s topics, I thought I would say few things about the pre-conference section on “Solr: what’s new?” that I attended yesterday. Although there were other interesting pre-conference sections offered concurrently, I chose to attend the one on Solr because of the important role that its SolrMarc utility plays in vufind record indexing.... more

Update on Kuali OLE

I decided to devote a post to the OLE project given our interest in the direction of OLE in the coming year. Tim McGeary gave an update on the status of OLE – the project is currently in a build phase with nearly $5Million in funding from various sources. Coding started in early February, working... more

Dianne Hillman on collaborative opportunities

The second keynote of the morning was Dianne Hillman – she talked about collaborations between programmers and catalogers. Dianne dated her career by showing us a few tools that I remember from my early time as a librarian (Cord catalog rods and a card filer)! I wonder what that says about the pace of change... more