Electronic Resources and Libraries 2009

The Conference is over. Some excellent content and good presentations. The conference committee should be proud. Also a good group of attendees. Plenty to learn just talking to others between sessions. Some takeaways.

1. Check into having our catalog hosted, Evergreen perhaps.
2. OLE Project. SOA. It will be the backend, use Blacklight, whatever for the OPAC. Meant to integrate with other components, Shibbolith, LDAP, EDP, etc. Modular.
3. Worldcat Local. Attempt to answer the question "What data should be at the network level and what at the local level?"
4. Vicky Reich gave the most thought provoking talk. For many years we have been modeling our behavior on the business model. "Just in time, not just in case." Now looking at Circuit City, the auto industry, financial industry, realtor business it might not have been such a good idea. We could be next.
5. Muse Single Search is working for someone. Only federated search that even had one happy person.
6. LibGuides were mentioned several times. Have to investigate.
7. Thought experiments: Tag clouds as a display. Give users the option to open some of their circ history for finding other similar readers. Enhancing digital texts.
8. Use more than one pass of XSLT to get data in correct format. Share XSLT.
9. What is it like to be a librarian? Its all about money and power.
10. Link evaluator for FF from OCLC.
11. Kill zombie budget items, those that fund the dead programs but continue on. One library cut entire paper reference collection.
12. K. G. Schneider makes me proud to be a librarian.

Thanks to all who put this conference together. wonderful trees on the campus.

Electronic Resources and Libraries

Got a couple of things to think about at the welcome party last night.

Oracle comes with a built in link checker. Have to check just how good it is.

One library is no longer checking in journals. Time is best spent elsewhere.