NLA Technical Services Round Table

Curious about "What a Book is Worth?"

noreply@blogger.com (NLA-TSRT) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:58:00 +0000

Sign up today to attend the pre-conference on Dr. Berger's presentation of Determining the Value of a Book. There are still about 20 spaces left. First come, first serve!

Annual Conference and Pre-Conference Information Posted

noreply@blogger.com (NLA-TSRT) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:05:00 +0000

TSRT will sponsor five great programs for the 2008 Annual Conference and one all-day Pre-Conference. For more information, proceed to our page on the annual conference. As always, look for some wonderful reviews post-conference. Better yet, sign up now to be a reviewer.

Spring Meeting Musings

noreply@blogger.com (Sheryl Williams) — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:34:00 +0000

Another Spring Meeting has sped by. Angela and Laura have posted terrific reports of the meeting; thanks to both of them. It was a bit chaotic at times, but we're an adaptable bunch. There are a few outgrowths of the meeting that I'd like to comment on.

First, we're always looking for topics to consider for presentations, or for the theme of the meeting. Several excellent suggestions were included on the evaluation forms. As time goes on, I inevitably read of a meeting or presentation that sounds like something we could do, but I never have a place to send the suggestion. Now we have a place. Under the "Conferences" section to the right, you'll see a heading for "Suggest a program topic." Anyone with access to the TSRT blog is able to make an entry, and we encourage you to do so. If you are not yet a TSRT blogger, email Casey (casey.kralik@bellevue.edu) and she'll get you set up. And share your expertise; if there is a topic related to something you do, we'd love to hear you present on it!

Secondly, we're also always looking for locations for the Spring Meeting. Of our members, 25% live outside the Omaha-Lincoln area. The question is, how "fair" is it to make these members continually drive to Omaha or Lincoln for a meeting? That consideration is why NLA's annual meeting moves around the state. Aurora is a fairly-central location; if you know of others, please let us know.

Now it's time to move on to the fall conference. We're excited about our pre-conference on "What is a book worth? Determining the value of a book." Dr. Sidney Berger, the presenter, is well-known in his field, and will offer a lot of information in this all-day event. Additionally, we have several presentations being made at conference; we'll look forward to seeing you at them in Lincoln.

-Sheryl

Another TSRT Spring Meeting Report

noreply@blogger.com (Angela Kroeger) — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:22:00 +0000

The Spring Meeting out in Aurora, Nebraska, was pretty good this year. The overall topic was "Spelunking or Serendipity: Discovery in the Catalog."

Jeffrey Beal, in his keynote address, "Metadata: Promise and Practice," talked about the need for rich metadata to make online catalogs and other search interfaces work well. He addressed the ideas of "search fatigue" and "Google rage" and posited that we are nearing the point where users will demand better, more accurate search results, the key to which is good metadata. The growing popularity of faceted searching suggests the rising importance of building and maintaining solid metadata for an increasingly diverse body of resources. He compared the strengths and weaknesses of deterministic searching (exact match), stochastic searching (full-text), metatext searching (catalog records and other metadata), and metadata-enhanced stochastic searching (full-text searching using metadata for limits and facets). He suspects that Google's advanced search limits on language, file type, usage rights, etc. are likely metadata driven, but of course, Google's staff-mode, like their ranking algorithm, is a well-guarded trade secret. He finished off with an exploration of Gresham's Law.

Gresham's Law originated in the realm of coin collecting. If two coins have the same face value, but are minted with different metal content, people will hoard the coins with a higher metal value and spend the ones of lower value. Thus, as the "good money" disappears from circulation, the "bad money" becomes the only money. (Think of pennies. Pre-1982 copper pennies are beginning to grow scarce as people squirrel them away in jars, while post-1982 copper-clad zinc pennies are deemed essentially valueless by collectors and remain in circulation.) Applied to other disciplines, the idea is that when something of lower quality becomes popular due to its low cost, the counterpart of higher quality increases in price until it is driven from the market or becomes accessible only to the elite. In this way, it appears that there is a present trend wherein cheap and abundant keyword searching is replacing expensive and accurate metadata searching.

But perhaps next-generation catalogs which rely on facets will reverse the trend, as facets require metadata or "metadata surrogates." (I'm not sure what "metadata surrogates" would be. Wouldn't any new descriptive encoding scheme be, by definition, metadata? Of course, eventually the word metadata will go out of vogue, and then we'll call it something else, even though it will be the same fundamental concept, much in the way that metadata itself is just the trendy name for cataloging.)

After the keynote came the first of the breakout sessions. Jan Boyer and I presented "Classifying Music CDs: Unearthing the Collection," showcasing our recently-completed music CD project. We had about nine people in attendance, and it seemed to be well received. No one threw vegetables at me, anyway. Some of the attendees had done similar projects with CDs or DVDs, and so I learned some new and cool things while talking to them after the session.

The majority of folks went to "Image Indexing: A Philosophical Approach" by Peter Konin. I have heard that this was a fascinating session. The subject material is certainly cool. I would imagine that cataloging images so they could be indexed and searched effectively with keywords would be very challenging, not to mention fun.

After the first breakout session, we had the TSRT business meeting, followed by lunch. Then we had the second breakout session. Jim Shaw presented "Broken URLs and Access to Content via the Catalog." I am sure he did an awesome job, but I attended "Connecting Print Titles with Their Electronic Alter Egos in the Catalog: Analysis and Full Disclosure" by Judith Wolfe, Dana Boden, and Joan Konecky of UNL. I figured, I need to learn all I can about electronic resources and about serials. They presented a project they did to find and correct various searching problems and disjoints between their catalog records. Sometimes the record for a print title would make it appear that it had ceased, and there would be no link or direction of any kind toward the electronic record that superseded it. They had a fairly diverse range of problems they encountered, from simple missing URLs to garbled, misleading records.

The majority of attendees, picked the third option for the afternoon session, Sue Ann Gardner's "LibraryThing and You: One Face of the Future of Catalogs and Cataloging." By all accounts, this was an excellent session. I would have loved to attend that one, as well as Jim's presentation, however the nature of breakout sessions is that sometimes you have to choose and bypass something else of interest. How sad. Everything on the program looked interesting.

Overall, it was a good and worthwhile meeting, even with the high winds whipping the cars all over the interstate on the way to and from Aurora.

TSRT Spring Meeting

noreply@blogger.com (bookgirl) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:37:00 +0000

What a good conference!! I have a lot of new ideas to take back to work (like barcoding DVD's inside to force people to check for a disc at CKI and CKO). Like it's ok to have teachable moments at the catalog rather than dumbing it down (or googling it up, whichever). Like there are a lot of us out there struggling with the aboutness and itness of things and how to explain that to non-librarians let alone make it useful to them. Like Gresham's Law and precision and recall, each of which will come in very handy when trying to explain to the PTB why libraries matter and what what catalogers do matters...

Just getting home after a side-trip to see my mom & brother. If you've never been to Aurora's Leadership Center, and the opportunity arises - go see the place. Stay the night - preferably when the weather is nice enough to explore the grounds. Nice facility, comfy bed, great wireless in the main facility. Only drawback - no Dr Pepper products. If you're a Pepsi drinker, you've got it made in the shade...

And yes, Deirdre, I really WILL blog about the dangerous ideas session from PLA soon :)
Laura

Proposed By-Laws Changes 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Boyer) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:53:00 +0000

TSRT members will vote on proposed by-laws changes at the Spring Meeting on April 25th. The proposed revisions can be found under By-Laws in the right column. Major changes include: 1) Removal of the Treasurer position and 2) Changing the terms of office to conform with the NLA year. There are other minor changes. TSRT members who will not be attending the Spring Meeting and have questions or concerns should contact a TSRT officer. Contact information for officers can be found in the column to the right. Click on comments and let us know what you think.

Register Now for Spring Meeting

noreply@blogger.com (NLA-TSRT) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:31:00 +0000

The deadline is quickly approaching for registration of our Spring Meeting. Sign up now!

TSRT activities

noreply@blogger.com (Sheryl Williams) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:32:00 +0000

Okay, so I'm not very good at posting news. It's not that I don't think about all of you frequently.

We've got quite a bit going on right now with TSRT. We're planning our spring meeting for Friday, April 25, in Aurora, although it looks as though we won't have a lot of papers; only three submissions so far. This means that they will probably be one after the other, rather than having to chose. Frankly, I would rather be able to go hear all of them. Watch for the registration form, coming out in early March. I know it's a busy time, but this is the best date we were able to work out. There is still time to submit a paper, so just let me know.

One of the matters we will look at during the business meeting in Aurora will be By-laws changes. Jan Boyer has been working hard on these. One change will be the removal of the Treasurer's position, as we will let the NLA treasurer handle the record keeping and check writing. I found it interesting that other sections/round tables didn't move on this until TSRT announced its decision. We're such leaders!

Your board is excited about fall conference as well. We have several papers being done, PLUS, for the first time ever, TSRT is sponsoring a pre-conference. We will have Dr. Sidney Berger ("Please, call me Sid.") presenting his workshop on how to value books. This is the same one that he presents at the University of Illinoise-Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and it's going to be an exciting day. Unfortunately, we're going to have to limit attendance to 40. So far we have received funding from McGoogan Library, which will cover his speaking fee, and we are waiting to hear about other grant submissions.

If you would like to present at this fall's conference, your program proposal needs to be in pretty soon.

We're also looking for candidates for office. This year we have two openings, Vice Chair/Chair Elect, and Secretary. If you'd like to volunteer, let me know. We are looking for individuals who are excited about the group, and willing to serve.

That's about all for TSRT right now. On a personal note, I have a new grandson, Dominic Jeremiah, born February 12. He's absolutely adorable (show me the baby who isn't), and much loved by his sister, Skyler.

Sheryl
swilliam@unmc.edu

Call for Papers for Spring Meeting

noreply@blogger.com (NLA-TSRT) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:18:00 +0000

Spelunking or Serendipity : Discovery in the Catalog

Friday, April 25, 2008
The Leadership Center
Aurora, NE

Call for Papers Form

The theme reflects the uncertainty regarding the present and future direction of the library catalog in the midst of Google and mass digitization projects. Long regarded as the source for information from the world’s experts, the library catalog was once the near-exclusive source for users. The rise of Google and its objective of “organizing the world’s knowledge” have led to the conditioning of user expectations by the Web. Now is the time for libraries to enrich and share content for the millions of items in their collection.

Leading the day’s presentations will be keynote speaker Jeffrey Beall, Metadata Librarian at the Auraria Library, University of Colorado Health Sciences, Denver. His topic of “Metadata: Principles and Promise” will discuss the use of rich metadata to aggregate resources, and how structured retrieval displays will again be recognized for the value they add to information retrieval.

Jeffrey Beall is an author and a well-known authority on metadata, and the editor of The Journal of Library Metadata.

Topics for this meeting might include discussions of how your library has changed its approach in searching the catalog; innovative ways in which you are presenting materials in your catalog, or how your library is meeting the challenges of Web 2.0. The length of each breakout session will be 50 minutes; please allow 5-10 minutes for questions.

Please return the form by March 1, 2008 to:
Sheryl Williams
Chair, TSRT
McGoogan Library of Medicine
swilliam@unmc.edu

Report on Workshop: Assigning Library of Congress Subject Headings

noreply@blogger.com (Angela Kroeger) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:14:00 +0000

I attended Charity Martin's workshop on Assigning Library of Congress Subject Headings on January 9 at the Nebraska Library Commission. It was a very good, informative experience. I had the good fortune of attending at the same time as Mary Tilley from UNL, who is so incredibly knowledgeable that it was like having two teachers.

In addition to covering the basic differences between topical, geographic, title, personal name, corporate name, and conference name subject headings, along with all the various types of subfields, we got a lot of practical, hands-on experience. Throughout the morning, we did a series of mini-exercises, where we had to find the correct form for one of each of the types of subject headings, using subjects of our own choosing. In the afternoon, we were each given a book from a collection of diverse topics and asked to do a subject analysis of the book. Then we shared our completed subject headings with everyone else in turn, so we could see the ways each person approached their book. I thought it was interesting to learn about "technical reading," the art of examining a title page, contents, reviews, and other matter to determine the subject content of a book without having to actually read the whole book.

The only depressing thing is the rule with geographic subject headings that requires the latest name of a jurisdiction to be used in subdivisions. This leads to headings like World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Russia (Federation), which is legitimate and correct according to the rules, even though Russia (Federation) is a post-1991 political entity. World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Soviet Union would make more historical sense. But that's hardly Charity's fault. We can blame the Library of Congress for that sort of thing. However, we'll follow the standards--even when they seem weird--because of the need for metadata interoperability.

Charity's class was a great introduction to one of the more complex aspects of cataloging, and she provided us with the tools to continue learning on our own. And it counts toward the Nebraska Library Commission Cataloging Certificate Program. All in all, time well spent.

2008 Spring Meeting

noreply@blogger.com (NLA-TSRT) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:30:00 +0000

The 2008 Spring Meeting will be held at the Leadership Center in Aurora, CO on April 25th. TSRT is still working on programming and registration but is pleased to announce that Jeffrey Beall, a Metadata Librarian, will be the keynote speaker.

Congratulations!

noreply@blogger.com (NLA-TSRT) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:45:00 +0000

One of our very own TSRT members and board member has received:

C & U's 2007 Distinguished Service Award

Jan Boyer is this year's recipient of the College & University Section's Distinguished Service award. She was recognized for her service to multiple units of the Nebraska Library Association and her recent work as Chair of the Nebraska State Advisory Council on Libraries.

Ask a Cataloger

noreply@blogger.com (Casey K.) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:59:00 +0000

TSRT is thinking about starting an "Ask a Cataloger" service. We are trying to work out the logistics but think that this would be a valuable service for anyone who had a cataloging question. Let us know what you think, send us your ideas and/or solutions. Email us at nla_tsrt@yahoo.com

Check out our updates

noreply@blogger.com (Casey K.) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:59:00 +0000

What's new?

Our list of Current Officers
Did you miss Jan and Bob's presentation on shelf-ready? View their power point presentation.
See also added links and tutorials on our resources page.

TSLL TechScans Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Corinne) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:54:00 +0000

TSLL TechScans is a new blog concerning "the latest trends and technology tools for Technical Services Law Librarians." TSLL is the Technical Services Law Librarian newsletter and TechScans is one of the columns in the newsletter. Although the blog's contributors are law librarians, the content is not limited to law library concerns. It's coverage is of interest to all technical services librarians. It also offers an RSS feed and is available at http://www.tslltechscans.blogspot.com/.

Some Observations from the NLA/NEMA Fall Conference 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Angela Kroeger) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:41:00 +0000

I thoroughly enjoyed the 2007 NLA/NEMA Fall Conference out in Kearney. I'll admit that when the program first came out, I wasn't tremendously enthused. However, every session I attended turned out to be very interesting, informative, and worthwhile. It ended up being a wonderful experience.

The first of the three TSRT sessions was "Nebraska Public Documents Digitization" by Jim Shaw, Katherine Walter, Beth Goble, and Cindy Drake, in which they unveiled the new Nebraska Public Documents online archive, available at http://cdrh.unl.edu/nebpubdocs/. It's still very much a work-in-progress, plagued by dirty OCR and all its attendant spelling errors and false hits, but it is a very promising start. With beautifully clear scans of Nebraska state agency reports from 1891 through 1956 (with a few noted gaps in coverage), this promises to become a key service for historical research in this state. Give it a try. The results are relevancy ranked. Use an asterisk for wildcard truncation and quotation marks for phrase searching. Boolean operators are an option as well. It's full of excellent material.

One thing lacking from the Nebraska Public Documents archive, which I hope may be added in the future, is some kind of browse function, perhaps the ability to browse a list of agencies that produced reports, for searchers who are not exactly sure of what they're looking for. However, there is already the ability to browse by date. Under search, you can enter a year instead of a keyword to see a list of all documents produced in that year. Very handy for someone trying to get a general, overall feel for a particular time period. It's a great archive that many people have worked long and hard to get going. I hope they are able to continue building the interface and adding more documents. Keep an eye on it.

The second TSRT session was "Are You Ready for Shelf-Ready?" by Jan Boyer and Bob Nash. Having been deeply immersed in the implementation of shelf-ready processing at UNO's Criss Library, for me this was just a stroll down memory lane. (Which probably means I'm too close to the topic to review the session objectively.) They mentioned a lot of the perils and pitfalls as well as the benefits. It's hard to say how many of the problems we had were specific to YBP, PromptCat, or our ILS (III), since we had no experience with other vendors. Shelf-ready processing with other vendors or other systems may be easier or more difficult, but Jan and Bob addressed this limitation in their experience very well with occasional reminders of, "Your vendor may do it differently. It's always best to ask." The main strength of their program was bringing up issues that we never knew would be issues from the start of the process, all those "oh, we didn't think of" items that bubbled to the surface during implementation. Hopefully those who attended this presentation will be able to ask those questions from the start and have a much smoother implementation.

The third and final TSRT session was "Cataloguing Ghettos: Segregating Titles by Gender and Race" by Kevin Graham and Charity Martin. This is a topic that has nibbled at my brain for a long time, so I was glad to see it brought to light. They addressed the way a book on philosophy with a feminist slant will be classed in the HQs rather than the BFs, so the users browsing the psychology section will never see it. (Likewise any other topic presented from a feminist viewpoint or with the idea that gender is relevant to the topic tends to get segregated in the HQs.) A similar problem occurs in E185.5-E185.98, a teeny-tiny call number range where an enormous array of topics is crammed into African Americans as "elements of the population" in the United States. As the presenters observed, the classification number range allotted for African Americans is smaller than the range allotted for the presidency of Martin Van Buren. (I don't know about your library, but mine only has sixteen books total on Martin Van Buren, not all of which are even in E386-E387, but we have 3,194 titles in E185. So really, this is no small issue. However, there are many other areas where the range allotted for such-and-such topic is woefully inadequate, and equally many ridiculously wide ranges allocated for topics that turned out to be obscure. So it's not just the Es.)

African American history and culture are all mashed together, along with works that could arguably have been classed with women's history, feminist theory, politics, sociology, psychology, geriatrics, law, family therapy, religion, etc. etc. etc. Browsing the many shelves of E185.86 that a medium-sized academic library is likely to have for any particular subtopic, one would never find anything but for serendipity, and that is not always the most reliable method of research. And though they were not explicitly mentioned, I suspect similar classification ghettoes could be found for other minorities, such as Native Americans or gays. (For example, would someone looking for in the DSs for Japanese history ever stumble across Love of the samurai in HQ75.6?)

On the other side of the issue, one of the people in the audience pointed out that while some groups, such as African Americans and women, have so much material about them that spreading them out among other topics would be useful, other groups about whom less has been published, such as Korean Americans, tend to benefit more from having all their materials together. But where do you draw the line? How much published material does a library need to have on a particular racial, ethnic, or social group to make the leap from classing it all together to dispersing it throughout the collection? And once materials are classed together, they tend to stay together, even when a "hot topic" takes off and there is a publication explosion. I know the staff at my library certainly don't have the time or resources to reclass any measurable percentage of that mass of materials in E185. Does any library?

It's a problem that had no immediate, obvious solution. But it is certainly worthy of thought and discussion. Wider-spread awareness of the situation increases the likelihood of a solution blooming.

Of the several other sessions I attended, two of them had aspects overtly relevant to cataloging. One of these was Greg Sunderman and Melissa Cast-Brede's session, "Wikipedia: Encyclopedia of the People." They made brief mention of Wikipedia's disambiguation pages. Now, while they listed the disambiguation pages under Wikipedia's weaknesses, I consider the disambiguation pages to be one of Wikipedia's most fabulous strengths. Even as a consumer, when I use Wikipedia, I rely heavily on those disambiguation pages to get me to where I really need to be, and also to tell me about new topics that I never even imagined that just happen to have the same name/acronym. If we in technical services want authority control to survive into the future, we need to be looking at the disambiguation pages as a model. They work intuitively and seamlessly in a way I've never seen from any ILS's handling of authority records.

The other session that had some relevance to cataloging was "There's Someone Queer at the Library," by Kimberly Shelley and Debbie Krahmer. Among many other excellent subtopics, they talked about how GLBT people disproportionately do not ask for assistance in finding things (and, likewise, disproportionately use materials in-house without checking them out). So how do libraries help such stealthy, hidden users? Good cataloging! The way to make GLBT materials more accessible is through better subject headings. With academic and scholarly works, the subject headings are usually okay, but sometimes they're a bit lacking on biographies, documentaries, and films. Worst of all, the widespread practice of omitting subject headings altogether from works of fiction and poetry makes it essentially impossible for interested individuals to find novels featuring GLBT characters or poetry by GLBT authors. How often do you hear non-catalogers clamoring for better-quality cataloging and more subject headings? So let's step up to the plate! There's a need, and we're the ones who can fill it.

Overall, the conference was a great experience, full of thought-provoking sessions and lots of stuff relevant to technical services. To everyone who presented or otherwise helped put the conference together, great job!

Scavenger Hunt?

noreply@blogger.com (Casey K.) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:49:00 +0000

Stop by the TSRT booth at NLA and find out how you can

join our round table
participate in a fun and exciting scavenger hunt
grab a bunch of delicious treats
sign up for rss feeds to our website
learn about next Spring's meeting in Aurora

NLC Cataloging Certificate Program

noreply@blogger.com (Casey K.) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:10:00 +0000

Did you attend last Thursday's class on Authority Control given by Corinne Jacox at the Nebraska Library Commission? Or, would you like to see what you missed? Check out this resource for the power point presentation. It was a great class and wonderful introduction to authority control. For a follow up, be sure to check out "Assigning Library of Congress Subject Headings" coming this fall. Good job Corinne and thanks to the Nebraska Library Commission for making this possible!

TSRT Officers Elected

noreply@blogger.com (Janice Boyer) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:41:00 +0000

Congratulations to Sally Gibson and Casey Kralik! Sally is the newly elected Vice Chair/Chair Elect of the Technical Services Round Table and Casey Kralik will be serving another term as Treasurer. The Round Table really appreciates that Ella Jane Bailey, Professor Emeritus from UNO, and Glenda Wilson, IT Specialist from UNK, were willing to run for office.

NLA/NEMA 2007 Fall Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Jan Boyer) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:51:00 +0000

Be sure to register for the NLA/NEMA conference before Sept. 30. TSRT is sponsoring three programs. Check them out at: http://www.nebraskalibraries.org/TSRT/fall.html The TSRT booth will be informative and fun. Kearney is the place to be Oct. 24-26!

NLA/NEMA Fall Conference Scholarship

noreply@blogger.com (Jan Boyer) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 14:48:00 +0000

Are you a member of TSRT or are you willing to join?
Would you like to attend the NLA/NEMA Fall Conference in Kearney?
Is funding limited or not available from your institution?

If you answered "yes" to the above questions, please consider applying for the TSRT Scholarship. Fill out an application (http://www.nebraskalibraries.org/TSRT/TSRT%20Scholarship.rtf) and submit it before September 10, 2007.

Spring Conference Review

noreply@blogger.com (Librarian) — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 20:25:00 +0000

To me, a conference or workshop is successful if I have learned something new, have been inspired, or have been introduced to tools I could utilize to perform my job better. Since Angela Kroeger’s posted a fantastic, thorough review below, especially on the keynote address, I will focus on specific aspects of sessions I attended that fulfilled my requirements. To me, they were successful in the following ways:
Through a glass darkly: Divining the “Next Generation Catalog” - Drawing on his vast experience with library databases as a vendor and as a systems librarian, speaker Mark Andrews offered fresh insight into the advantages and disadvantages of open- source ILS systems. Since library systems should be chosen based on user needs, Mark warned us that “free” open source systems are not really free – some do not have acquisition and serial modules and some can or cannot be tweaked to fit system needs. A “next generation catalog” is one that goes beyond being an index of information – instead it should be a dynamic, efficient process for the end user. Mark provided valuable insight into the features and shortcomings of Koha, PHPmylibrary, OpenBiblio, Evergreen, Solr, and other open-source systems; this input contributes toward making an informed decisions about these much-talked ILS alternatives.

The Next Generation Depository Library: Addressing Public Access to Government Publications in the Electronic Era addressed the issues surrounding selection of government documents, the availability of online access to government publications vs. downloading records, and the maintenance required when adding internet links to catalog records (validity and stability of direct internet links). What I learned from presenter James Shaw about the latter issue was the advantage of choosing links that utilize PURL, a service that attempts to check broken links for you. One significant resource that reduces the amount of time searching for and cataloging new government documents and points us to e-docs alert lists is the Nebraska Library Commission’s State Documents page. As a new librarian, new to Nebraska, and new to conferences, I returned from this conference eager to apply the concepts and tools I learned!

C&U/TSRT Joint Spring Meeting Observations

noreply@blogger.com (Angela Kroeger) — Mon, 21 May 2007 19:30:00 +0000

As a new NLA member, I attended my very first C&U/TSRT Joint Spring Meeting. The theme of the Next Generation Library excited me, and the meeting did not disappoint.

Rachel Bridgewater's keynote address, "What We Talk About When We Talk About 2.0" was very stimulating. She observed that "Web 2.0" is not so much a completely new thing as simply "Web 1.0" grown up. Widespread broadband access and cheap memory are the key factors that made 2.0 possible. The five key factors differentiating 2.0 from ye olde web are:

1) Web 2.0 as a platform. Rather than using their own hard drives as their primary platform, increasingly users are moving to the web as their primary workspace. The web provides an excellent platform for collaboration, although there are still some security and backup issues to be worked out.

2) 2.0 is participatory. You don't just view web pages anymore, you contribute to their content. This has economic and ethical issues, such as, how do you define authorship when an article on Wikipedia may have been written and revised by dozens or hundreds of people?

3) 2.0 is about microcontent. We're breaking away from the print world metaphors. Rather than thinking of a gallery page as a document, we are now thinking of the individual photo as the smallest unit of content on a gallery page. Websites, therefore, are being viewed as collections of microcontent rather than discrete pages in their own right. A blog, for example, is a collection of posts, rather than a unified entity.

4) 2.0 is open. With RSS feeds, content can be completely decontextualized. A reader doesn't need to visit the blog to read the post, but instead can have the post appear in their own reader, reformatted to their own specifications. The information may look very different than in its "native habitat."

5) 2.0 is easy. Codes? We don't need to know 'em anymore. You can edit on Wikipedia, create a blog, or write a mash-up that overlays on Google Maps without knowing any html, XML, or anything else. You don't need to be a techy to add content to the web anymore.

Rachel advised instructors to assign Wikipedia, rather than tell students not to use it. Have students read the discussion and history pages of articles in order to learn about the controversies, to learn to "interrogate their sources." The thing about Wikipedia is that the dirty little secrets of the knowledge creation process are now out in the open, visible for all to see.

Rachel left us with the advice, "The best way to understand the participatory web is to participate in it." You don't have to do everything, but pick one thing, maybe blogging, maybe del.icio.us, whatever interests you, and dive in.

Within the week, Rachel will be posting resources related to this session at
http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/bridgewa/.

Moving along to the first breakaway session, I attended Mark Andrews' presentation "Through a Glass Darkly: Divining the 'Next Generation Catalog.'" This was another fascinating exploration of ways to bring the catalog into the 2.0 age. Mark observed that open source does not equal free; it only means that you choose to spend your money differently, because when something breaks, you have to fix it yourself. He talked about faceted searching and mash-ups. Mash-ups, based on APIs, are very difficult to do with ILSs, because ILSs are based on old, outdated technology. We need to demand new and better things from our ILS vendors.

Mark demonstrated the Omaha Public Library's use of WebFeat federated searching. The library catalog is part of the base search, but it need not stand alone anymore.

He stressed that we need user-contributed content to our catalogs, from folksonomy tags to reviews, and we need "people who checked out this also liked" recommendations.

Mark introduced us to Cycorp, a machine that knows how to read ontologies. (http://www.cyc.com/). Cyc learns one fact and one assertion at a time, the way a child learns. So this machine can grow and become smarter, hopefully developing common sense and genuine cognitive reasoning. (Mark admitted that Cyc scares him a bit.)

I didn't hear a lot at Mark's session that I hadn't heard before (except for Cyc), but that just reassures me that I've been following the right trends. Some of the things he mentioned, like Danbury Library's mash-up of their catalog and LibraryThing, I've only heard about within the last week, so Mark was definitely on top of everything.

The second breakaway session I attended as "Library Friendly Technology: Applications that Work@your library" by Karin Dalziel and Marcia Dority Baker. They talked about portable applications, which can be stored on a flash drive and thus need not be installed anywhere as you move from computer to computer. These are open source, typically free, and typically PC only. There are Mac versions of a lot of these applications, although they are generally not portable and must be used on the hard drive.

They demonstrated quite a few applications from nifty Firefox extensions to OpenOffice to PBWiki and far too many others to describe here. Their sources for these applications are PortableApps.com and SourceForge.net. One of my favorites that I was not previously familiar with is skrbl ("scribble"), an online whiteboard. (http://www.skrbl.com) You can share your skrbls with anyone, and they can add/delete/alter them. This could be great for committee work. (The only problem is that it does not seem to work properly with Firefox.)

Karin and Marcia recommended that each library survey its staff to find out who is using which technologies. Libraries may turn up in-house experts that they never knew they had.

You can view their Bibliography for this presentation at http://nirak.pbwiki.com/Bibliography and Karin's blog at http://nirak.net/.

The third and final breakaway session I attended was Michael Sauers' "The Social Web: Wikis, Blogs, Flickr, and More!" He started with the idea that users are "prosumers," that is, they are simultaneously producers and consumers of content.

He discussed a wide array of social features of the web, including simple publishing, tagging, friends lists, comments, recommendations, feed publishing, and sharing. Practical examples ran from the familiar, such as wikis, blogs, YouTube, LibraryThing, etc., to the unfamiliar, such as last.fm and Squidoo. He demonstrated the NLC presence on some of these services, including YouTube, Flickr, and Second Life. And he demonstrated his own presence on some others, such ad Digg and del.icio.us. Covering so many topics did not allow him to go in depth on any of them, so it was really more of an overview, a catalog of potential services for librarians to explore on their own.

He observed that librarians are used to taxonomies (authority controlled headings) and often suspicious of folksonomies (tagging). However, he suggested that when enough people add enough tags to enough items, patterns really do emerge.

You can view Michael's blog at http://www.travelinlibrarian.info/ and his social web bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/travelinlibrarian/socialweb.

All in all, while there was a lot of overlap in content among the sessions I attended, the spring meeting was definitely a useful, informative experience.

Meet the Candidates

noreply@blogger.com (Casey K.) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:03:00 +0000

Today is the deadline for submitting your candidates for NLA's offices.

If you are eager to see who is running for Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect and Treasurer of TSRT this year, then check out our section on Candidates for Office. We've got some excellent candidates this year!

Spring Meeting! Next Generation Library

noreply@blogger.com (Jan Boyer) — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:50:00 +0000

Registration is now open for the joint College & University Section/Technical Services Round Table Spring Meeting at Union College on May 18th. Learn about the Next Generation Library and network with colleagues. Link to the preliminary program:
http://www.nebraskalibraries.org/TSRT/spring.html and the registration form:
http://www.nebraskalibraries.org/TSRT/07registration.rtf