Submitted by Richard Wallis on February 18, 2010 - 8:11am
At ALA Midwinter PTFS announced their intention to purchase the leading open source system support company LibLime. Just before the recording of this month’s show, they announced that PTFS and LibLime could not agree upon financial terms and have agreed not to proceed with the acquisition. So who better to join us as a guest on the show, than PTFS CEO, John Yokley. Read More »
Submitted by Richard Wallis on January 10, 2010 - 5:06pm
The Gang for this month, Carl Grant, Marshall Breeding and Frances Haugen, convened as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, to review the game changing influences on our world over the last ten years and then attempt to predict what we will see in the next ten. Read More »
Submitted by Richard Wallis on December 15, 2009 - 5:15am
Our guest for this show is Meredith Farkas, Author of the book “Social Software in Libraries”. A couple of years after publishing her book, Meredith has become a little jaded about the way libraries are using social software, with some libraries seeing it as a magic wand for community building and engaging with their users. This chimed well with the thoughts of the Gang, who were drawn to the conclusion that like most software, it is just a tool. How you use a tool to communicate with your users, is far more important than the tool itself. Librarians wondering why their blog posts are not receiving comments, should be checking their content for comment-ability. Read More »
Submitted by Richard Wallis on November 8, 2009 - 4:47pm
Until fairly recently it has been all quiet on the shared cataloguing front. Cataloguing departments taking records from the Library of Congress, other National libraries, or one of many other libraries that share their Z39.50 connections. Many libraries also being members of an organisation to share the cataloguing load, such as OCLC, or Talis Base in the UK. About a year ago dust started to stir on the surface of this stable landscape, when OCLC caused a curfuffle with their move to redefine their record reuse policy. Then in January, open source library system vendor announced ‡Biblios.net, a free cataloguing service in which you can share with other libraries. In the last few weeks we have had SkyRiver arrive on the scene. Not much visible on their site yet, but according to press releases they hope to deliver quality at a lower costs - so things are a changing. Read More »
Submitted by Richard Wallis on October 8, 2009 - 4:05pm
In comparison with the rest of the library world, supported by the traditional, closed source, vendors, the open source sector is still fairly small. The question I put to the Gang this month was “Can the open source sector scale?”. Will it be able to grow in it’s current form to become a significant alternative to the commercial vendors? Read More »
Submitted by Richard Wallis on September 11, 2009 - 1:40am
The Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader are spreading their influence across libraries, especially in North America. Our guest this month is Orion Pozo from North Carolina State University where he has helped rollout a couple of Sony Readers and a few dozen Kindles of various versions, for students to loan.
The interest of the Gang this month (Marshall Breeding, Carl Grant, Frances Haugen) soon moved on from the student experience and current practicalities at NCSU, to the wider potential and impact of eBooks on the world of libraries. Read More »
Submitted by Richard Wallis on August 7, 2009 - 10:23am
There is more to the term Social OPAC than meets the eye, as we found out when we brought together this month’s guest Beth Jefferson from Bibliocommons with Gang regular John Blyberg.
Bibliocommons has spent the last couple of years realising their ambition of delivering a social OPAC service for Canadian libraries. This centrally hosted service, although architected differently, shares the same motivations as John’s SOPAC project to add value to the OPAC user’s experience with social features. Read More »
Submitted by Richard Wallis on July 13, 2009 - 5:13am
The Mashup, where data from one or more sites is brought together to add value to the data on another site, is only four years old. Google Maps, the basis for so many of these was released in February 2005. The iconic early example being HousingMaps.com which brings together [mashes up] data from Craigslist.org and displays it on a Google Map. Nevertheless in those few short years the mashup has become an established part of the web, and libraries are not immune from the trend. Links out to Google Book Search, WorldCat, and many other ways of enriching the library interface are not that uncommon an addition to OPAC and other library interfaces. Read More »
Submitted by Richard Wallis on June 9, 2009 - 6:50am
In last month’s show there was some speculation as to what reaction there would be from the organisations that supply ‘traditional’ library systems to the OCLC announcement of their web-scale, cloud computing, library system initiative. In an attempt to answer that speculation I took the unusual step of bringing together a specific set of Library 2.0 Gang members from that community as against our usual open house of whoever is available. Read More »
Submitted by Richard Wallis on May 7, 2009 - 3:01am
New Gang member Frances Haugen from Google, joined Marshall Breeding and myself for a discussion about one of the recent trends in computing and the Internet, Cloud Computing, and how it will influence libraries, especially in the light of recent announcements by OCLC. To give us an introduction in to the topic, our guest this month has a background in libraries having been a colleague of mine at Talis for several years. Dr Paul Miller can now be found at Cloudofdata.com, working at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web, providing the insights that enable you to exploit the next wave as we approach the World Wide Database. Read More » Paul provided us with an overview of what is meant by Cloud Computing, before the conversation moved on to the OCLC strategy to move library management services to Web scale.
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