Links and Updates

It's been a while since the last update, primarily due to the demands of the new service. These have been bookmarked over the last few months...

Library Journal - Skyriver: New Bibliographic Services Provider

Read Write Web - Review of 2009

Panlibus -How college students seek information in the digital age

JISC - Employment Law PC Desktop Edition

Library 2.0 Gang - ebooks and ereaders , Social Software in Libraries

Search Technologies: Summon

Described as 'the Google search for Libraries', Summon has been snapped up by none other than Library 2.0 Guru, Dave Pattern, for Huddersfield University.

The university library will use the service to enable single-search access to its collections, by integrating searches of online databases, along with the local catalogue, Repository and archival collections. Users will be able to refine the results of their search by date, subject area and format.

weblink: Summon

OCLC announce online LMS

From Marshall Breeding's Library Technology Guides portal:

OCLC is connecting the content, technology and expert capabilities of its member libraries worldwide to create the first Web-scale, cooperative library management service. Member libraries can take the first step to realizing this cooperative service model with a new, “quick start” version of the OCLC WorldCat Local service.

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Richard Wallis, from Talis, has already Blogged on the merits of this 'free' system.

OCLC Report: Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want

The actual report may be downloaded, in full from the OCLC site. A brief summary:

In 2008, OCLC conducted focus groups, administered a pop-up survey on WorldCat.org—OCLC’s freely available end user interface on the Web—and conducted a Web-based survey of librarians worldwide.

The Online Catalogs report presents findings from these research efforts in order to understand:

• The metadata elements that are most important to end users in determining if an item will meet his or her needs
• The enhancements end users would like to see made in online library catalogs to assist them in consistently identifying appropriate materials
• The enhancements librarians would recommend for online library catalogs to better assist them in their work

The findings indicate, among other things, that although library catalogs are often thought of as discovery tools, the catalog’s delivery-related information is just as important to end users.

UKeiG Conference: Innovation in e-Information

UKeiG Conference: Innovation in e-Information - encouraging creative thinking and discussion amongst information professionals Dates: 16th-17th June Venue: Manchester Conference Centre

• Speakers and topics include:
• Jan Wilkinson, Rylands University Library: Customer needs
• Richard Wallis, Talis: A new web of information
• Nic Price, Independent Adviser: User-centred web design
• Roger Mills, Oxford University Library: Digital images
• Laurence Bebbington, University of Nottingham: E-law
• Martin White, Intranet Focus Ltd: Risk management
• Ross Scrivener, Royal College of Nursing: Web 2 in action
• Hazel Hall, Napier University: Social computing tools

Breakout sessions will be topical, so may change, but are currently:

• Innovative search techniques
• Avoiding legal problems
• Increasing the value of your intranet
• Practical solutions for managing digital images
• The future of online publishing
• Information security

The Juice Project

From Richard Wallis at Talis..

The Juice Project, like many such endeavours, has grown out of programmer laziness.

One facet of the Talis, Technology Evangelist, role is to demonstrate how easy it is to extend the web interface of our products with embedded functionally. With a few years experience in Ajax programming techniques and a moderate understanding of JavaScript, html, and CSS, none of this is exactly rocket science. Over recent months and years this has been made even easier with the aid of JavaScript Frameworks such as Prototype, Dojo, and JQuery. These take much of the hard work out of writing code that will work in several browsers, and easy repeatable ways of identifying components in an html page.

Despite all of that, adding ad-hoc mashup style integration of external services from sources such as Google Book Search, Amazon, and WorldCat, over several months becomes an inefficient task. Taking previously developed code, analysing it to refresh your memory on how you did what you did, re-factoring it to fit it to your new service, and finally debugging the inevitable conflicts with what you did before, is not the most enjoyable task. Adding to this the possibly of applying the result to more than one application brought me to the conclusion that I need a framework to take care of all this!

The OLE Project [Online Library Environment ]

With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a multinational group of libraries is developing the design for an Open Library Environment (OLE), an alternative to the current model of an Integrated Library System. The goal is to produce a design document to inform open source library system development efforts, to guide future library system implementations, and to influence current Integrated Library System vendor products.

Overview

The goal of the Open Library Environment Project is to define a next-generation technology environment based on a thoroughly re-examined model of library operations and connected to other enterprise technology systems. Our project activities include training workshops on Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Modeling, in-person and virtual meetings, webcasts and online discussions to get input and feedback from the broad library community, and development of a design document. The workshops are being led by representatives from the library community and by consultants with expertise in Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Modeling. By the end of our project, we will have a design for a next-generation library system using Service Oriented Architecture. We also will have built a community of interest that can be tapped to help build the OLE framework.

Library 2.0 Toolkit

Zoho Writer 2.0 - Zoho just released version 2.0 of its Zoho Writer word processing application. While the company has added quite a few new and useful features in this release, the most obvious change is a new user interface which looks a lot like the 'Ribbon' in Microsoft Office.

Using Firefox Effectiely in Libraries - Paul Doty from the Owen D Young Library created a presentation about using Firefox effectively in libraries.

Roving Librarian's Using Wikis ForLibrary Web Sites - "Would you think that a library web site could be designed using wiki software? How strange is that? In CMS the Wiki Way, Meredith Farkas in the December 2008 issue of American Libraries, writes about how wikis can be used as content management systems (CMS) for library web sites. She contends that using a wiki might be appropriate for a library that wants to allow multiple individuals to maintain a web site that does not contain information that changes constantly...."

PDF Editor PDF Vue - Free and fairly full-featured editor PDFVue isn't the only webapp that can fill out PDF forms online, but it lets anyone add images, sticky notes, links, shapes, and more to forms and documents

You can head to PDFVue and upload your files for editing online, or install a Firefox extension to have the webapp be your automatic PDF handler—not necessarily a speed move, because the webapp has to download and customize anything you were taking a glance at.

Calibre e-book Manager -Whether or not you have a portable e-book reader, Calibre is packed with features to help you organize your e-books. To start, you simply tell Calibre where you store your book files. It does a pretty good job pulling the necessary information and self-populating, although you'll still find yourself making occasional edits, like swapping the author and title fields. If you're a LibraryThing user, you can also hook into that account to populate the fields.

Sony Reader / Google Partnership - Sony and Google are partnering to make half a million books that Google has digitized for its eBook project available for free to Sony Reader customers through the Sony digital book store. That brings the total number of books in the Sony store to 600,000, or more than twice the number of eBooks found in Amazon's Kindle store.

VisuWords Graphic Dictionary [Phil Bradley's WebLog] - Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Library 2.0 Toolkit

Webjam homepage. Social networks made easy. Create personal or group sites, add your own widgets, activity feeds and so on. They're suggesting it as an alternative to Pageflakes.

100 Powerful Web Tools to Organize Your Thoughts and Ideas. Nice collection of tools, broken down into note taking, bookmarking, mind mapping, wikis, highlighters, to do lists, collaboration, calendars and time trackers.

Dimdim is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required to host or attend meetings.

The Future of Academic Libraries - 29 reports collated by John Dupuis in the Confessions of a Science Librarian blog has created an excellent list of recent major reports on the future of academic libraries.


The European Library Updates Site.
"The European Library announced a new site release of www.theeuropeanlibrary.org, a free resource to discover learning and research materials, covering all subjects, from 38 national libraries across Europe. Originally developed as a central point of access to Europe’s library material, the website now combines multilingual search functionalities with several online exhibitions (www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/exhibition) and Web 2.0 tools.”

100 resources for getting things done. Cameron Chapman at Mashable puts together a giant list of productivity applications in GTD Toolbox: 100+ Resources for Getting Things Done. I would add the Remember the Milk to-do list application because it has great mobile capabilities which really come in handy. This helpful list is organized into the following categories:

• Complete Solutions
• Collect and Process
• Organize, Review and Do
• Mobile Apps

Webdesigner Depot presents a list of 14 Applications for Project Management and Collaboration. Each annotated entry includes a screenshot of the application, description of its functionality, and price.

University of St.Andrews Photo Archive

This website offers you access to the amazing wealth of photography held within the Special Collections Department of the University of St Andrews Library. Here you will find masterpieces of very early photography from one of the world’s outstanding collections, as well as thousands of images taken by masters of the art, both professional and amateur, over the last century and a half.

Click to review the collection

Kindle 2

New product specs include:

Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines

Lightweight: At 10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback

Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, service plans, or hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots

Books in Under 60 Seconds: Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds; no PC required

Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and even crisper images

Longer Battery Life: 25% longer battery life; read for days without recharging

More Storage: Take your library with you; holds over 1,500 books

Faster Page Turns: 20% faster page turns

Read-to-Me: With the new Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you

Large Selection: Over 230,000 books plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs available

Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise

Google Books and mobile phones

The new Book Search mobile portal is optimized for touchscreen devices like the iPhone or Google Android devices. But you can use it to find and read books on any internet connected device. I grabbed this screenshot using a desktop web browser.

1.5 million books are available to US readers, and over half a million of those books are available internationally. Many of the books are classics that were written long ago and which are no longer covered by copyright. But there are also some newer texts that have entered the public domain for one reason or another.

Librray 2.0 Gang - Google Books and Libraries

A new Talis podcast, featuring Richard Wallis and co.

‡biblios.net - Talis / Liblime Update

Talis, the UK market leader in providing academic and public library solutions, and LibLime, the leader in open solutions for libraries, are pleased to announce a partnership to make available over five million bibliographic records to the library community on the ‡biblios.net platform.

‡biblios.net is LibLime's free browser-based cataloguing service with a data store containing over thirty-million records. The database is maintained by ‡biblios.net and uses a similar model to Wikipedia. Cataloguers can use and contribute to the database without restrictions because records in ‡biblios.net are freely-licensed under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (http://biblios.net/pddl).

Talis is providing data from the Talis Union Catalogue; the open shared core of records from the Talis Base service, to ‡biblios.net, including over 5 million bibliographic records, catalogued by public and academic libraries in the UK over the last 30 years. The Talis Union Catalogue is a treasure trove of rare, old and out-of-print items which will complement the existing ‡biblios.net database. The sharing principles of Talis Base, established over the years, are now being supplemented by reciprocal sharing with other open sources such as ‡biblios.net.

The Talis contribution to ‡biblios.net goes beyond the data being made available to the project. The Open Data Commons license itself was originally created by Talis in collaboration with Creative Commons. It represents a milestone for sharing data on the Internet, supporting innovative projects such as ‡biblios.net.

"Talis has made two important contributions to pave the way for freely-licensed, community-maintained sources of library metadata" explains Joshua Ferraro, CEO of LibLime. "We're excited about the value that the Open Data Commons license, as well as the Talis data set bring to ‡biblios.net. We're looking forward to future partnership opportunities with Talis."

Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist at Talis adds "The open sharing of data, the default motivation for most librarians, has often been stifled by confusion and fear about ownership and licensing. Open Data Commons helps clarify and dispel those fears, opening up data that can confidently be shared. ‡biblios.net is a great example of the innovation that results when data is really open.”