Conference reports and more from ZSR Librarians
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
The opening session of Code4Lib began with a short presentation by the Director of the UI Libraries. UI Libraries won the ACRL Library of the Year award in 2010 and my short visit showed exactly why. The library had literally transformed four floors into study space, highly networked collaboration space and an information commons that... more ›
This morning I had a pre-conference session on using Amazon Web services at code4Lib. It was a small room of people but I enjoyed having the opportunity to work with people on learning to use the EC2 system. In preparation for this I created a guide on using Amazon EC2. I came into town yesterday... more ›
Two weeks ago, fresh on the heels of Midwinter, I hit the road again for yet another conference – ScienceOnline 2011. Fortunately SciO11 only had me traveling as far as the Sigma Xi headquarters in Research Triangle Park, where I spent the weekend learning about and debating the latest in the intersection of science, scholarship,... more ›