Wednesday, May 11, 2011

New Book About User Research for eXtensible Catalog

A book from the eXtensible Catalog Organization, Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design and the eXtensible Catalog.
We are pleased to announce the release of a new book, Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design and the eXtensible Catalog, based on user research for eXtensible Catalog, available now from ACRL or Amazon.

As part of the development of eXtensible Catalog (XC), a project to develop open source software sponsored by the University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries, and funded by the Mellon Foundation and project partners, four institutions conducted eighty interviews and numerous workshops to understand how researchers learn about, acquire, and use scholarly resources. Research findings informed the design and development of XC, a set of open-source applications that provides access to resources across a range of databases, metadata schemas, and standards. In this volume, members of the project team report on key findings of the user research that was done at Cornell University, Ohio State University, the University of Rochester, and Yale University, and discuss the value of including library users and technology specialists from many disciplines in the software design and development process. Editors: Nancy Fried Foster, Katie Clark, Kornelia Tancheva and Rebekah Kilzer. Authors: Jennifer Bowen, Kaila Bussert, Katherine Chiang, Katie Clark, Maureen Donovan, Nancy Fried Foster, Gabriela Castro Gessner, David Lindahl, Melissa S. Mead, Kornelia Tancheva and Wendy Wilcox.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Web2Marc Generator

Seen on Cataloging Futures the Web2Marc Generator.
The Web2Marc Generator is a simple tool that generates MARC or MODS records for websites. This tool is useful for librarians who are interested in adding web resources to their library catalogs.
I'd like to know just where and how it is getting the information. Its nice that it offers the records in MARC, MODS and other flavors.