Monthly Archives: June 2006

Electronic Resource Management Systems in Consortial Environments

Posted on by
1

This is a summary of the discussion of the LITA Library Consortia / Automated Systems Interest Group meeting on Monday morning of the ALA Annual Convention in New Orleans. The meeting consisted of a managed discussion of the use of Electronic Resource Management (ERM) systems in consortial environments. In some cases, comments from the two primary speakers and discussion among the commingled and unattributed. Inaccuracies and comments taken out of context are the responsibility of the author of this posting, and corrections or embellishments are welcome in the form of comments to this post or as private e-mail messages.

This is a preview of Electronic Resource Management Systems in Consortial Environments. Read the full post (1118 words, 4:28 minutes estimated reading time)

It’s All About User Services: A Summary and Commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting

Posted on by
3

What follows is a summary and commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting at ALA annual conference in New Orleans on 25-Jun-2006. What I’ve tried to do is collate comments from the panel members and add my own commentary (marked off as such from the rest of the summary) where I thought I had something useful to add. It is my hope that this summary is a faithful representation of the statements made by the participants in the panel. If not, please let me know privately or in the comment area here and I will make the appropriate corrections on the body of the blog post.

This is a preview of It’s All About User Services: A Summary and Commentary on the LITA Top Technology Trends meeting. Read the full post (1692 words, 6:46 minutes estimated reading time)

“Identifiers Roundup” — LITA Standards Interest Group in conjunction with NISO

Posted on by
1

This is a report of the presentations from the LITA Standards Interest Group at the ALA Annual Conference, 24-Jul-2006, in New Orleans. Pat Stevens, interim director of NISO, moderated the panel discussion.

ISSN Regina Reynolds, Library of Congress (U.S. ISSN Center)


Structure


There are 80 ISSN centers worldwide with about 150 people associated with the assigning of ISSNs.

The ISSN International Center is located in Paris. It assigns the prefixes to ISSN centers and holds a master copy of descriptive metadata — the “Key Title” plus other metadata elements in MARC format — for every assigned ISSN. It also provides documentation, a manual (about 80-100 pages in length) and support for new centers coming on board.

This is a preview of “Identifiers Roundup” — LITA Standards Interest Group in conjunction with NISO. Read the full post (1726 words, 6:54 minutes estimated reading time)

Minutes of the ALA/LITA JPEG2000 for Libraries and Archives interest group meeting

Posted on by
3

Attending: M. Anderson, U of Iowa; A. Laas, LexisNexis; Y. Han, U of Arizona; P. Howell, Western Michigan University; Y. Kaganovia, Princeton U; P. Murray, OhioLINK; K. Thompson, Smithsonian Libraries

Participants talked about their interest in JPEG2000 and their institution’s use of the standard: Western Michgan University is digitizing manuscripts and other special collections materials and using JPEG2000 for access; LexisNexis is using JPEG2000 in the maps portion of the U.S. Serials Set digitization program; the Smithsonian Libraries has started converting archival TIFFs to JPEG2000 and is considering use of the standard in the Biodiversity Heritage Library project (including a capability to cross-link taxonomic names in digitized text to oneline databases).

This is a preview of Minutes of the ALA/LITA JPEG2000 for Libraries and Archives interest group meeting. Read the full post (294 words, 1:11 minutes estimated reading time)

Authentication and Access in a Metasearch Environment

Posted on by
Reply

Mike Teets of OCLC and I teamed up to write an article on Metasearch Authentication and Access Management for this month’s D-Lib Magazine. The first part of the article is a bit of a primer on access management techniques followed by a survey and analysis of access management schemes in use last year. The key part, I think, is the “Recommendations” (access restrictions by IP address plus authenticated proxy servers is the best one can hope for right now) and “Next Steps” (Shibboleth is superior to other access control mechanisms beyond IP/proxy that one might consider, but there is lots of work to be done).

This is a preview of Authentication and Access in a Metasearch Environment. Read the full post (278 words, 1:07 minutes estimated reading time)

OhioLINK is seeking to fill a Systems Engineer position. Interested?

Posted on by
Reply

OhioLINK is seeking candidates to fill a newly-created position: Systems Engineer – Access Manager. This position will work with other OhioLINK staff in providing support of daily operations and will serve a primary role as Access Manager. As Access Manager, this position will support users who are experiencing access issues to OhioLINK’s databases and services including IP management, remote authentication, Shibboleth implementation, and analyzing networking issues.

This is a preview of OhioLINK is seeking to fill a Systems Engineer position. Interested?. Read the full post (197 words, 47 seconds estimated reading time)

Minutes of the FEDORA Workflow Working Group meeting of 18-Jun-2006

Posted on by
Reply
Please note — this is a copy of the FEDORA Workflow Working Group minutes from the FEDORA Wiki. It is being posted here in order to get it into the blogosphere at the right places. Please make comments on the FEDORA Wiki “talk” page rather than on this posting.

FEDORA Workflow Working Group Meeting

18-Jun-2006, University of Virginia

Attending: Grace Agnew, Rutgers U.; Chris Awre, U. of Hull; Dan Davis, Harris Corp.; Richard Green, U. of Hull; Peter Murray, OhioLINK; Matthias Razum, FIZ Karlsruhe; Bill Parod, Northwestern U; Adam Soroka, U. of Virginia; Thorny Staples, U. of Virginia; Ross Wayland, U. of Virginia

This is a preview of Minutes of the FEDORA Workflow Working Group meeting of 18-Jun-2006. Read the full post (1281 words, 5:07 minutes estimated reading time)

Disruption in Publishing

Posted on by
Reply

Last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education Review had an opinion piece by Kate Wittenberg, director of EPIC (Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia) with the title “Beyond Google: What Next for Publishing?” (subscription required). An excerpt from the beginning:

While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars on every possible aspect of scholarly communication, information technology, digital libraries, and e-publishing, students have been quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information. Their behavior, undertaken without consultation or attendance at formal academic events, urgently forces those of us in scholarly publishing to confront some fundamental questions about our organizations, jobs, and assumptions about our work.

This is a preview of Disruption in Publishing. Read the full post (347 words, 1:23 minutes estimated reading time)

“Is the Writing On The Wall?” — Take 2

Posted on by
8

Walt Crawford chided me — rightly so — for yesterday’s Is the Writing on the Wall for the Integrated Library System? post. My choice of language was, admittedly, sloppy. I was fired up last night…distracted, if you will, by what was happening at a really good conference. Please allow me the chance to redeem my argument.

In academic libraries, in my experience, there has been a decline in the use of library catalogs. This experience could be verified in the ARL supplementary statistics for at least that population of libraries (I think those numbers are password-protected, so it might be a challenge to try to use them). When I get back on the ground and have some time, I will either offer confirmation of that supposition or retract it.

This is a preview of “Is the Writing On The Wall?” — Take 2. Read the full post (570 words, 2:17 minutes estimated reading time)

Is the Writing on the Wall for the Integrated Library System?

Posted on by
7

While in UNC-CH for JCDL I’ve had occasion to rant with/at some people about the state of the integrated library system marketplace — including, of course, how we got into the spot we’re in and how we might get out of it (and those people were kind enough to engage in the rant). Along comes a series of posts from Casey Bisson and Nicole Engard ultimately pointing back to John Blyberg’s “ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights” that is singing the same tune. There still seems to be a desire for a solution from an existing vendor, and in fact that was part of counter-points brought up by some on the receiving end of the ILS-must-go rant. (Paraphrased: ‘No one can satisfy the need of a library like a library automation vendor’ and ‘As libraries we’re not strong enough to take on the task of building the next ILS ourselves.’) Yet there does seem to be this mounting pressure to get control again over our data and how we present it to patrons.

This is a preview of Is the Writing on the Wall for the Integrated Library System?. Read the full post (1187 words, 4:45 minutes estimated reading time)