Zzzoot

This is old news from February, but I seemed to have missed it: the NRCan (Federal Natural Resources ministry in Canada) libraries have chosen the Open Source Evergreen integrated library system (ILS). Kudos to my colleague George Duimovich and others at the NRCan library . Here is the opening search interface . It is great to see sensible Web 2.0 and Open Source choices can be made in such organizations.

Day 1 LibX2. LibX Edition builder . Build custom version of LibX Xtensible Catalog. Drupal, LMS, NCIP, LMS integration: Blackboard. webcast . scriblio: Social Library System Wordpress based plugin enjoysthin.gs . Mark Matienzo. anarchivist.Rich contextual book marklet. Emily Lynema. NCSU Libraries. E-Matrix : Open Source ERM Eric Lease Morgan. Alex4 . Erik Hatcher. Lucid Imagination. Lucene/SOLR. Index of Lucene apache site. Mike Taylor and Mike. Index Data. Translucent record store=="Torus" pazpar2 . Registry of searchable targets? Hard to do. IRSpy :Z39.50 Mike Beccaria from Paul Smith College. Microsoft DeepZoom . "Like microfiche" - audience. Photosynth of library stacks?? Dan Chudnov, LOC. BagIt File Package Format Random things heard and seen: citation style language , Open Vocab , UCSD Libraries Digital Assest Management System , SWORDS . Distributed version control: monotone , mercurial , bzr . Day 2: A new frontier - the Open Library Environment (OLE) -- T...

From a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education : Wired Campus , in response to a Tech Therapy podcast: " Episode 33: Libraries vs. IT Departments ": Our experience at Indiana University shows that librarians and IT departments cannot only coexist, and do it successfully, but also that we must become assertive partners in order to achieve the results our users now expect. It’s time to move beyond the rift that apparently separates many libraries and IT departments. None of the compelling issues facing academic libraries today can be accomplished without strong support from IT departments. Among them: establishing robust institutional repositories; supporting e-science and data curation services; providing metadata and e-text consultation; growing a virtual reference community; and developing course management systems. The list goes on.

The Industry Canada minister accepted (Sept 2 2008) recommendations from the Science, Technology and Innovation Council on the sub-priorities of the four priority areas identified in the 2007 Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy ( The State of Science & Technology in Canada , 2006, Council of Canadian Academies ). The recommended sub-areas are: S&T priority: Environmental science and technologies Sub-priorities : Water (health, energy, security); cleaner methods of extracting, processing and using hydrocarbon fuels, including reduced consumption of these fuels S&T priority: Natural resources and energy Sub-priorities : Energy production in the oil sands; Arctic (resource production, climate change adaptation, monitoring); biofuels, fuel cells and nuclear energy S&T priority: Health and related life sciences and technologies Sub-priorities : Regenerative medicine; neuroscience; health in an aging population; biomedical engineering and medical technologies S&T p...

One of the more interesting things that I learned on my recent trip to Denver was the new feature of Aquabrowser called ' My Experience ' where LibraryThing tags (17M) and ratings (2M) are pre-loaded and made available out-of-the-box. More important is how all instances of My Experience can participate in a global network of other instances, and can share additional social networking information generated by the users' of the instances (and perhaps other sources?). I also have to say that I was very impressed with the presentation of TLC 's Indigo ILS front-end: it was very convincing (and much better than their online flash presentation : they need to fix that!).

Inside Higher Ed (Feb 19) has an article on some of the changes afoot in library technology: Open Minds, Open Books, Open Source . "Last month, a survey by Marshall Breeding, director for innovative technologies and research at Vanderbilt University’s library, revealed a measure of discord over the options available to librarians for automating their electronic catalogs and databases, software called integrated library systems.....So librarians aren’t exactly reaching for their torches and pitchforks. Still, some libraries, fed up with software that doesn’t fully meet their needs, have decided to take matters, figuratively, into their own hands. With a bit of grant money and some eager developers, institutions have begun creating their own open-source solutions that are fully customizable, free for others to use and compatible with existing systems. The result has been a whole crop of projects that, when combined, could serve as a fully integrated, end-to-end open-source solutio...

Extensible Text Framework (XTF) : FLOSS platform for access to digital content XTF is the California Digital Library 's amazing access platform for digital content. It is based on Lucene , a tool that is well known as a scalable and stable full-text engine. But XTF is more than Lucene, and is a full end-to-end system, offering ü ber configurable indexing, quering and display. Java-based, completely XSLT-driven presentation-layer, extensible to things like Shibboleth , and has some very nice additioanl features like OAI-PMH provider and SRU . From what I can tell it does not have an SOA architecture, but offers a high degree of modularity which could easily be wrapped in Web services, etc

Access 2006: First Day v1.0 While I am here at the Access 2006 conference, I can't help that I am missing out on some great Web 2.0 discussions, knowing that I am missing out on going out with Michael Stephens et al. to the Thai restaurant at Internet Librarian International in London, which I did do last year. Richard Wallis reports in Panlibis that he has the good fortune of doing this this year. That said, I am sure that Access will not dissappoint, as it has always been a great conference for the library techie crowd...