Category: Web/Tech
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Libraries and Web Archiving
Barbara Fister has an interesting article in Library Journal in which she paints a happier-than-usual picture of what university administrators think of libraries and librarians. That's great, but what jumped out at me was down towards the bottom of the article where Daniel Greenstein, vice provost for academic planning and programs at the University of…
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Embedding chat widgets within EBSCO databases
A couple of years ago the U of Calgary was among the first to embed an IM chat widget within its OPAC. What I've really wanted to do since then was also embed it within the bibliographic databases, where students spend even more time. I tried a couple of times with ezproxy's search and replace…
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EBSCO’s Response to Gale’s Open Letter and Customer Questions
I received the following information from EBSCO this morning – a link to 3 PDF documents addressing some of the brouhaha over their ALA Midwinter announcement of exclusive magazine content. The URL indicates that may be a temporary location, so here are direct links to local copies: EBSCO's Response to Gale's Open Letter ICOLC Questions…
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Access 2010 Call for Papers
This year Access (The premier library technology conference in Canada) is being held in Winnipeg October 13-16. The Call for Papers has just been announced. Submissions are due Feb 15. I’m really looking forward to attending this year (last year PEI was just too far away to be economical). See you there?
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The trouble with de-duplication and web-scale discovery
One of the topics of discussion at last week's Summon Advisory Board was the status of de-duping records returned by Summon. On the face of it it seems to be a simple issue – if the titles and authors match, throw the duplicate records out and you're good to go. The Summon technical team explained…
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The ABCs of e-book format conversion: Easy Calibre tips for the Kindle, Sony and Nook
TeleRead has a great post on The ABCs of e-book format conversion: Easy Calibre tips for the Kindle, Sony and Nook. It’s written by one of the developers of Calibre, a program for managing ebook collections, and as such touts Calibre as pretty much the perfect tool for handling your conversion needs. What’s really nice…
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Quick Review: Opening Up Library Systems Through Web Services and SOA: Hype or Reality?
Late last year I received a review copy of the most recent Library Technology Reports, Opening Up Library Systems Through Web Services and SOA: Hype or Reality? written by Marshall Breeding. It's a simple report, consisting of a mere three chapters. Chapter One introduces the concept of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and places them in the context…
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QR codes in the library
Aaron at Walking Paper linked to this great short Prezi by Laurie Bridges on how using QR Codes in Libraries and Museums.
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Behind the scenes with IT at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics
Earlier this week a vendor flew a few folks involved with IT for the Taylor Family Digital Library out to Vancouver to see some cutting edge stuff. One of the stops was the Headquarters of the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VANOC) where we spent about a half hour with the VP for IT, about 40…