Comments for QM library and emerging web technologies

Comment on Janet Talk: Instant Collaboration and voice over IP for HE by SarahM

SarahM — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:49:00 +0000

This sounds very cool and would be great if we could get more people onboard. I’m definitely in!

The problem is not always that the technology isn’t available, as it clearly is in this case, but that everyone within the community has to be able to access and want to use it.

The words that jump out at me on the Janet Talk web page? ‘Shared whiteboard’, am I a geek or what?

Comment on Blogs and wikis… by Emma

Emma — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:45:32 +0000

I think we do need a change in culture - obviously - but we are not likely to get this unless we have the right tools to use and make it easy for people to participate. Having to remember to look at the blog and the wiki and our email and then not being able to check someone’s phone number from within email but having to find the right web address and opening that too and then having to cut and past addresses into the mail box, not being able to view calendars, MSN refusing to ‘remember me’ because my deskstop is locked down in some way - personally I find all this a real hinderance and I want to join in! If I was feeling left out of the cultural shift I’d probably give in altogether until the tools we provide are better and more seamless.

Comment on Blogs and wikis… by Damian

Damian — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:10:03 +0000

This looks really good. It looks a lot more userfriendly and has a lot more to give. I would have definitely considered this if it were about a year ago. However, do we need a change in software or a change in culture?

Comment on Drift through the music! by Jeremy

Jeremy — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:42:17 +0000

Yes, and they might even enjoy the exploration experience too. Clicking on a tag might return a list of ranked records; it would be nice to be able, say, to slide tags and records into a box to be posted to Facebook, Delicious, whatever, as well.

In my dreams! Wonder what our academics would think of this?

Comment on Drift through the music! by Emma

Emma — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:44:40 +0000

There is something so appealing about the interface that it begs you to browse around and explore new stuff you would never think of listening to normally. If we could translate a smidge of that feeling into the catalogue we might find library users were far more willing to explore collections than we currently think.

Comment on Drift through the music! by jeremya

jeremya — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:45:47 +0000

Coo, what a good idea! But think about, say, replacing the tabs by ‘Libraries’, ‘Online’, ‘Other data’ (ie repository, other non-library indexed data); the moods by ‘research’, ‘taught’; and the genres by LC main classes.

Not necessarily best examples and you might not get sweet music, but something else might pop up!

Comment on Drift through the music! by damian311

damian311 — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:31:46 +0000

Are you suggesting we deliver information content to the students based on what mood they’re in? Some suggestions:

No work today,
1 hr to deadline,
all nighter (exam next day)

Comment on New breed of OPACs by jeremya

jeremya — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:31:40 +0000

Here’s an implementation of Endeca at McMaster University Library, a Horizon catalogue, courtesy Slavko Manojlovich via a Sirsi OPAC list:

http://libcat.mcmaster.ca/index.jsp?sid=1183C576597F&Tab=1

This is his additional comment:

‘What you see is the advanced search. I know I am from the old school but this doesn’t appear very advanced to me.

Indeed. I can’t tell which is Endeca or which is Horizon here either. Nonetheless I quite liked the Browse tab, which gives you search results as soon as you click on the tab. I wonder how it decides which results to present at this most general level …

Comment on New breed of OPACs by jeremya

jeremya — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:20:54 +0000

Yes, AquaBrowser is nice, although at the moment it doesn’t seem terribly configurable. Relevance can’t be weighted according to the location of words in records (’nice idea though’ and cusdtomisation would be required to influence relevance ranking based on user ID or location.

I’m off to an AB launch at Croydon in a couple of weeks time.

I’ve found at least 1 other thingy that offers graphical navigation through tags, although I can’t remember what it is at the moment. I’ll post here (if I can remember how) if I find it again.

According to my sources, (other Sirsi library) people are also thinking about (lifted from email):

‘a) Third party commercial front-ends (e.g. Endecca, Primo, Worldcat, Local, Bibliocommons)

‘b) Open Source front end (e.g. VuFind)

‘c) Sirsi’s Next Solutions (Is there something in the works? Any sense of a release date, more importantly any sense of when it (or EPS) will be truly functional?)’

So Sirsi Next doesn’t seem to be around yet; EPS doesn’t work (and neither did the old Openly (1cate)-based Rooms).

We know about Endeca, and presumably also Primo and Worldcat. Bibliocommons (http://bibliocommons.com/), described as a library socuial networking site, people seem interested in, but unfortunately it’s home page currently isn’t terribly forthcoming.

Could something like LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/), lib social networking, be of interest?

I just had a quick look at VuFind (http://www.vufind.org/). It appears to support COINs so I was seeing lots of QM SFX buttons everywhere; there are the (what seems to be these days) usual facets and categories; there’s some nascent exploration of tags although these didn’t seem to be working in the demo (’browse the catalogue’ at bottom); &c.

VuFind is open source; there are increasing others:

- Evergreen (http://www.open-ils.org/)
- Koha (http://www.koha.org/)
- Emilda (http://www.emilda.org/)
- Openbiblio (http://sourceforge.net/projects/obiblio/)

seem to be among the best known.

I’ll post more as I happen on it, but must dash now - train to catch!

Jeremy

Comment on New breed of OPACs by damian311

damian311 — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:43:51 +0000

This report comes highly recommended:

http://www.techsource.ala.org/ltr/next-generation-library-catalogs.html