From Cancellations to Coding: Pandemic-Centered Tech Topics on Day Two of the OBS/TS Summit 2020

So far, day two of the summit has delivered fantastic programming. I wish I could attend it all! The final virtual event takes place at 6 PM EST tonight. This morning my two favorite sessions both dealt with the new realities we are living in post COVID-19 closures, touching on this from the perspective of budget cuts to work from home workarounds. Here were my takeaways:

Top Left to Bottom Right: Gilda Chiu-Ousland, Wendy Moore, Heather Buckwalkter, Anne Lawless-Collins.

TS Resource Management Roundtable: Budget Cuts & Collecting Pivots
I was really on the fence about which of the earliest morning sessions to attend, and I am so glad I selected this one on resource management and collecting pivots. Wendy Moore from the University of Georgia Law Library led the discussion with a powerful statement that really summarizes the entire roundtable and the timeliness of the topics:

"Crisis can lead to LOTS of creativity."

What followed were introductions from each of the panelists including Heather Buckwalter, Gilda Chiu-Ousland, and Anna Lawless-Collins. Each shared the state of things at their institution, the fallout from COVID-19 closures including the stopping of shipments and the addition of online study aids and other e-resources to help students and faculty get through a quick pivot to virtual learning, and the budget (if they had %'s or figures yet) that they are each facing for fiscal year 2021 and 2022. This session (as with several from day one of the summit) was not recorded to allow attendees to feel more comfortable sharing the details and situations of their library, law school, or larger institution. Two polls were executed in the larger Zoom room before dividing into smaller groups for more personalized and in depth discussions. The polls were very interesting, revealing many of us still do not know our budget, or have vague %'s that are yet to be approved, and that the majority of us are cutting print journals more than any other area of our collections.


In the smaller groups, attendees were better able to share their own situations, including some very creative strategies for how to negotiate with vendors, what data they are using to make those decisions about what and how to cut items from the collection, and what they have already or are planning to cancel to meet the demands of the coming fiscal year. There was a big focus on mitigating expectations of faculty and other stakeholders, and many were open about having these difficult conversations with their faculty members related to monograph acquisitions and with their institutions related to print course reserve materials. Overall an excellent program that was really open to sharing their situations so we can all learn from one another and continue best serving our library users.

Hot Topic: Technologies We Use

Presented by Jesse Lambertson, this session was more of an open discussion than a straight-forward presentation. Sharing his own library system as the beginning example, Lambertson pitched questions to the audience with lively responses in real time and invited members to un-mute and speak to their specific system challenges in the work from home environment. It was really interesting to hear individuals sharing the pros and cons of their various integrated library system platforms once they were catapulted into teleworking. The clear up-side to having a web-based interface was the ease that these librarians and their staff could quickly pivot to working from home without the hassle of using VPN or requiring remote desktop. These included those using TIND and Alma to name a couple. Several of us still working with iii's Sierra were able to join in chorus about our struggles in working from home with spotty VPN support and the differences in Sierra web as compared to the desktop client.

Presenter Jesse Lambertson screen shares Python script snippets hack for working with CSV data.

For importing and exporting records, both individually or in batches, many hacks were shared including creative ways use Marc Edit when working from home and the potential for more API's between Marc Edit and the ILS. It is of course that time of year when we are all gathering statistics. With much overlap from the previous session I attended, many of us commented we are accessing collection and user data much more right now to better inform decision making in a time of budget cuts. As a result, further roadblocks and workflow workarounds were discussed for various systems. Several attendees shared how they query their system for cataloging and other statistics, the issues they experience in the format of the data they pull out, and the obstacles that come with trying to do this type of work from home or with very limited access to the library. Many individuals (myself included!) are periodically retrieving data from their systems, exporting it at txt or csv files, and then taking it home on laptops of flash drives to be able to spend more time with it when teleworking. However, and few shared more innovative approaches to both massaging data as well as collecting and sharing it. Lambertson shared a highly creative approach using Python scripts to automate certain aspects of the csv to Excel conversion of his data. Another attendee shared their library's customized Google Sheets dashboard which pulls data from the ILS into the same location as reference transactions statistics (populated by Google Form responses). A truly fantastic session with lots of open dialogue between attendees. I am so glad I attended and I can't wait to see and hear how the experiential system and data approaches our members are working with now unfold in the coming months and years as access to our offices and systems remains largely unknown during a pandemic.

Functioning at Lightspeed: Day One of the OBS/TS Summit 2020 & Linked Data in Libraries Conference

Screenshot from the Summit's OBS-SIS Business Meeting

Seriously, how fast is time going by these days? It seems like just yesterday I was attending the Work Smarter Not Harder Technical Services virtual conference from Amigos in mid-February, but here we are at the end of July on the heels of AALL 2020! Today the first ever summit of our two special interest sections is literally happening as I type this blog post. I could not contain my excitement for the topics covered so far, and felt compelled to go ahead and blog about two of the sessions. To find out more about the summit schedule which is still underway, (including business meetings too!) visit the AALL Calendar item. A big announcement from the OBS-SIS business meeting is that the official name of the SIS was voted to change to "Library Systems and Resource Discovery"! Now without delay, here are my two favorites with takeaways:

• Facilitating Open Knowledge: The Intersection of Wikidata and Libraries - Presenters shared how "inter-collectional connections broaden the experience to go into parallel and related items". What a fantastic summary of Linked Data, and Wikidata in particular. The hyperlink for this session title will take you to the slides which I highly recommend saving as a resource if you are interested in more Wikidata. Many slides gave specific examples of using Wikidata for legal faculty scholarship.  Of course it was noted in the session and from commenters in the Q&A that "we’re in the wild west days of wikidata (just like wikipedia used to be - it is very community based)." When considering Wikidata, remember that most things in wikipedia are in wiki data, but it is not always true the other way around. The discussion following the presentation focused heavily on "notability". Presenters made sure to comment that Wikidata allows you to create entries for faculty members that might not make it into Wikipedia. Questions were asked like "is just being a faculty member enough notability to be in Wikidata?" But the goal here is to build a robust citation network in Wikidata, adding items to support structure and more. One problem discussed what that not all language versions of Wikipedia have embraced Wikidata (yet) so the benefit of Wikidata is not across the board. Presenters also shared about a new Wiki-project called Wiki abstract which hopes to dynamically pull summaries from Wikidata). The biggest takeaway was “Notability (wikidata) is not the same as bibliographic warrant (authority control - NACO)”.
• Finding the Silver Lining in System Migrations -  What I discovered at the end of this session was that it was originally intended as a large face-to-face program in new Orleans had the AALL annual meeting and conference not gone virtual. It was planned to be a platform-neutral panel with speakers from a variety of law libraries talking about their migrations. As a result of things going virtual, this smaller session amd the one following it (Hot Topic/Local Systems Committee Meeting Making Post System Migration Efficient and Effective") covered the same terrain in two slices. There were so many takeaways from this session that I can't possibly share them all here, and even though the two speakers talked primarily about their library platforms, their joint experiences with systems and the discussion from attendees still rounded the session out to include a vareity of platforms including iii to alma, aleph, tind, wms, folio, sirsi, etc. A few of my favorite quotes and lessons from the presenters included:
• You have to always look out for other people (not just the records you touch)
• Always draw on the experience of people at other institutions who migrated before you, and don't be afraid to ask them "Please help me! How did you do this?"
• You’ve got to build your own team. There’s the team you are forced to be part of (your department, your library, your university, your consortium) and then your own external team. That is the team you can build yourself, where you can gather info about the migration process from those at other institutions, and share it with others like you later after you have gone through it. 
• Carve out management and leadership opportunities for staff and other librarians  using migration as the backbone, since it is such a major effort, it can be a milestone for any individual's professional growth and take them further in their career. 
• Turn it into a bootcamp (like a mini 2 day conference) where you are migrating from one platform to another. Invite others in your area going through the same process (example was a DC area libraries migrating from Sierra to Alma). 
• Know that other things may have to be sacrificed along the way. You will not survive migration if you try to do everything you have always done during a migration (or any other major project). If you’re the manager, you should be shielding your team from the onslaught of "all the things" during a big migration.
• If you keep trying to do it all you will not do any of it very well...and you may not make it. You have to think about prioritizing things in advance. What will you stop or delay to get the new, major work done? 
• 3 years out and many are STILL cleaning up post-migration data messes. But it becomes the new normal… so it will be OK!
• Get to know and use your university IT department as much as you can. That has been more helpful for people migrating than their law school's IT when there is not an ILS expert in your library or a true systems librarian at your library. 
• Negotiate with staff and librarians to parse out what they really want and need to know how to do (you may need to reference interview the reference librarians!)
• Host a series of in-person if you can (or virtual if you can't) sessions to show staff and librarians how to do all the things they need for workflows as a live demo.
• Keep track of your training offerings and other documentation so you can show you did your due diligence for your library.

Also still currently happening throughout this week is TONS of programming from the Linked Data in Libraries 2020 Conference. The entire slate of sessions have been FREE to attend! You can find the schedule including links to the sessions in sched. You can also find all completed session recordings in the YouTube LD4 2020 playlist. I'm going to embed that below, but first my favorite session (so far) was today's "Linked Data for Sound" session. This excellent live program presented the work of Bethany Radcliff of the University of Texas in Austin. She talked about AudiAnnotate, and shared all of the resources related to the project. The session slides are available online, which include links to GitHub and all of the other pieces of this project. It was fascinating to hear how Bethany is using Linked Data in a practical way to make audio more accessible. The tool is also being used by professors as a teaching tool for literary criticism. Part of Bethany's resources realted to AudiAnnotate include short virtual workshops that show you how to download and use Audactiy (one of my personal favorite free audio editing tools!) to make annotations to audio of all kinds. The discussion was interesting and robust too, with attendees speculating how the tool could be expanded and adapted for video, or for non-traditional audio recordings like bird songs. The conversations and discussions are continuing throughout this week on LD4 2020's slack channel. Join in if you can, and watch the wide variety of sessions (there are 46 videos and counting!!) that already have recordings available in YouTube below:

 

Happy 1 billionth OCN!

On August 8, 2017, OCLC announced on the OCLC-CAT listserv that the OCLC Control Number (OCN) has reached 1 billion. The OCLC Control Number is a unique, sequentially assigned number when a new record is created or imported into WorldCat. The one billionth assigned OCN was for the record of a digitized image from Chiba University Library in Chiba, Japan.

Make sure your library system can handle the longer OCN. For more information check www.oclc.org/support/services/batchload/controlnumber/...

Proxy Servers for Electronic Resources

As I recently struggled with Wolters Kluwer to get our CCH Intelliconnect service to work properly through EZProxy, this topic turned out to be rather timely. Many of our libraries already subscribe to a number of databases and other electronic services, and for law libraries our most popular services such as Lexis and Westlaw require individual logins and accounts. Managing those accounts can be time consuming, but for the user they typically ensure uniform access to the resource from on- or off-campus.

For many of our electronic resources, however, we tend to push for IP authentication instead of user accounts. IP authentication means that we set up the service to recognize the IP addresses (the numeric address of a ‘computer’ on the Internet) for our library or university campus. When a user connects to the service from the library, they are magically (in their eyes) identified to be a legitimate subscriber and granted access. But what about our patrons that are not actually in the library at the moment? One of the benefits of these services is supposed to be 24/7 access…

This is where proxy servers can be a key addition to your service! Basically, a proxy server (such as EZProxy from OCLC) acts as an intermediary for the electronic resource. Users connect to the proxy server, that server authenticates the user in some way, then the proxy server actually connects to the resource. The user never connects directly to the resource, so the only IP address the service sees is that of the proxy server.

In some institutions, proxy servers may also be used for on-campus access as well, simplifying the overall setup and allowing tighter control over who can access the services. Proxy servers might be set up on local servers as hosted services, depending on an institution’s size and resources. It's not always simple to configure or troubleshoot problems, as my recent experiences with Wolters Kluwer can illustrate, but the benefits of a proxy server can be many.

To learn more, visit Library Technology Launchpad’s recent post at http://libtechlaunchpad.com/2017/04/25/proxy-servers-basics-and-resources/

UXF: User Experience Friction at the Library

A recent post on Designing Better Libraries takes aim at user experience friction. According to the definition from The Pfeiffer Report, UX friction is “basically anything which separates the device we use from that ideal user experience,” and “is the slow-down … that occurs when the user experience of a device deviates from our expectation or knowledge.” (http://www.pfeifferreport.com/v2/essays/understanding-user-experience-friction/)

UXF is often seen in web page designs where unnecessary steps have been added, or where poor or specialized verbiage is used. This latter example is often seen in library catalogs and discovery systems where specialized terminology is used to indicate material statuses (e.g., “in transit”). Additionally, customers seeking materials for current use typically need to wade through listings of materials of varying availability, and these customers may not realize that a physical item is not actually available in their current location until after they’ve sought it out on the shelf.

Basic steps to reduce friction include:

• Reducing anxiety
• Removing avoidable steps
• Mitigating context switching

To read the full post, visit http://dbl.lishost.org/blog/2017/03/22/uxf-wheres-the-friction-at-your-library/

Watch the Librarian of Congress Ceremony Live Tomorrow!

14^th Librarian of Congress Incumbent, Carla Hayden
Image from Wikipedia

The Library of Congress (LC) will stream Carla Hayden’s swearing-in on its YouTube channel on Sept. 14 at noon EDT. Hayden, who will become the 14th Librarian of Congress, will take the oath using the Lincoln Bible from the LC’s collection. The video will have closed captioning.

This historic ceremony marks not one, but two milestones: Hayden is both the first woman and the first African-American to serve as Librarian of Congress.  

Want to learn more about the journey?  Check out this round-up of resources from the past few years:

·        Carla Hayden Swearing-In to Be Broadcast on YouTube – September 2, 2016
Library of Congress on the upcoming event

·        What the ‘First Black Woman’ Librarian of Congress Means – July 18, 2016
Time magazine on the milestone firsts of Hayden’s confirmation

·        Five Things to Know about Carla Hayden, America’s First Black, Female Librarian of Congress – July 13, 2016
Fusion.net offers a few interesting facts about Hayden and what her appointment means

·        The Library of Congress Gets a History-Making New Leader – July 13, 2016
The Atlantic’s take on Hayden’s confirmation

·        Senate Confirms First Black Female Librarian of Congress – July 13, 2016
The Hill’s take on Hayden’s confirmation 

·        “No” on Nomination of Carla Hayden to Be Librarian of Congress – July 13, 2016
Heritage Action for America takes issue with the president’s nomination

·        Obama Taps Baltimore Library Chief Carla Hayden to Lead Library of Congress – February 24, 2016
NBC News on Carla Hayden’s nomination by President Barack Obama

·        What Law Librarian Want to See in the Next Librarian of Congress – August 3, 2015
3 Geeks and a Law Blog on what the American Association of Law Libraries hopes to see in their next Librarian of Congress

·        Finding a Librarian of Congress for the Digital Age – June 23, 2015
Information Today’s take on James Billington’s retirement and the skills and expertise desired in his future replacement

·        Nation’s Librarian Champions Digital Age – December 23, 2014
Learn more about James H. Billington and his tenure at the Library of Congress

Prefer to watch instead of read?  Take a moment to meet President Obama’s Nominee for Librarian of Congress through this short video, posted on The White House’s YouTube channel in February of 2016.

Building Bridges with Logs: Collaborative Conversations about Discovery across Library Departments

The process of implementing a discovery tool can be filled with questions, and even after its implementations, questions about its efficacy and the quality of search results can remain. This article describes an interesting approach used by librarians at Virginia Commonwealth University to evaluate their discovery tool.

According to the article’s abstract:

“This article describes the use of discovery system search logs as a vehicle for encouraging constructive conversations across departments in an academic library. The project focused on bringing together systems and teaching librarians to evaluate the results of anonymized patron searches in order to improve communication across departments, as well as to identify opportunities for improvement to the discovery system itself.”

The authors of the article conclude that, overall, the experience was a positive one for the staff members involved and that it led to some valuable insight into the quality of the search results retrieved by the discovery tool.

Jimmy Ghaphery, Emily Owens, Donna Coghill, Laura Gariepy, Megan Hodge, Thomas McNulty, Erin White. Code4Lib Journal, Issue 32, April 2016, http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/11355

Upcoming Joint Reception of the CS/OBS/RIPS/TS Special Interest Sections (AKA the "Alphabet Soup Reception")

Calling all CS, OBS, RIPS & TS-SISers - While in Chicago for AALL this year, please stop by and have some fun during the Joint Reception of the CS/OBS/RIPS/TS Special Interest Sections (AKA the "Alphabet Soup Reception").

SAVE THE DATE! 

Joint Reception of the CS/OBS/RIPS/TS Special Interest Sections (AKA the "Alphabet Soup Reception").

WHERE:  Hyatt-Crystal Ballroom B

WHEN:  Saturday, July 16 from 7pm to 9pm

WHAT: Hors D'oeuvres and Drinks with Old and New Colleagues

Special thanks to Innovative Interfaces for their generous support in making this joint reception happen!

See you there!

The law library in an information age: it is time to do away with the local online catalog and focus on research guides and digital content

An SSRN paper by Jonathan E. Germann

His premise: It is time libraries stop investing in a local public online catalog, a century old device used to facilitate access to physical holdings within a library. Instead, it is time for libraries to become experts at helping patrons navigate the world of the anti-library by creating original content in the form of subject guides. It is also time for libraries to focus on owning digital resources that can be manipulated by computer algorithms.

Read the paper at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2457638

Innovative Acquires Polaris Library Systems

INNOVATIVE ACQUIRES POLARIS LIBRARY SYSTEMS
No, it is not an April Fool's joke.

On March 31, 2014 Innovative acquired Polaris Library Systems, bringing together two of the leading providers of library services platforms to the public library community. The newly combined company will provide Polaris customers with a long term partner in Innovative, which is a global leader in library technology and has been actively investing in people and infrastructure to better serve customers worldwide.

Polaris primarily caters to public libraries. In fact, as a substitute reference librarian at my local public library, I use Polaris--and I love it. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

To read more, and confirm for yourself that it is not an April Fool's joke, check out either website:
http://www.polarislibrary.com/
http://iii.com/polaris

WorldCat Metadata API allows libraries to create their own cataloging applications

WorldCat Metadata API available on the OCLC WorldShare Platform.

OCLC member libraries can use the WorldCat Metadata API to conveniently add and enrich WorldCat records and to maintain WorldCat holdings information and local bibliographic data. Libraries can now  create new applications using the WorldCat Metadata API to manage their cataloging workflows. As always, libraries can continue to catalog their collections in WorldCat using OCLC-built applications, such as Connexion and the upcoming WorldShare Metadata Record Manager.  However, it's pretty exciting that the WorldCat Metadata API enables libraries to manage WorldCat data through integration with library- and partner-built applications.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog

Dempsey, Lorcan. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention." Educause Review Online, December 10, 2012. At: http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/thirteen-ways-looking-libraries-discovery-and-catalog-scale-workflow-attention.

Demsey reviewed various trends in discovery and library catalogs. He offered the following observations: 1) Discovery has scaled to the network level; 2) Personal and institutional curation services are now also central to reading and research behaviors; 3) Library services may focus on different targets such as location and fulfillment, disclosure, particularization, and research advice & reputation management; and 4) Knowledge organization will move to the network level.

Cornell and Columbia to Integrate their Technical Services Operations

The libraries at Columbia University and Cornell University are taking an unprecedented new step in their 2CUL partnership: integrating technical services operations.

For library users, the 2CUL integration will mean better and faster access to more materials — including licensed journal articles, foreign materials and other content. When negotiating with vendors and other third parties for services and content, the technical services operation will exercise bargaining power on behalf of both research libraries.


The integration will also include:

• Seeking a common library management system that integrates data and workflows;
• Establishing collaborative collection building and coordinated processing;
• Reviewing policies, practices, workflows and job responsibilities at each institution, with an eye toward reconciling them as much as possible;
• Drafting best practices and guidelines; and
• Adopting a new organizational structure and culture.

For more information, see: http://communications.library.cornell.edu/news/130116/2cul

Information standards quarterly: The future of library system

Information standards quarterly v.24, no. 4 (Fall 2012) features an overview of future trends in library systems.  In his introductory essay, guest editor Marshall Breeding refers to these next generation systems as "library service platforms".  Three general approaches to building new platforms are described.  "Sometimes you just have to start over", is an approach exemplified by ExLibris Alma and Serials Solutions Intota.  The "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" approach used by Innovative's Sierra and VTLS's Open Skies products approach change in libraries as a more evolutionary rather than revolutionary process.  Finally, "we are open" refers to open source software approaches such as Evergreen and Koha.

A narrative overview of features for the new systems is provided along with a summary comparison chart.  Articles describing experiences with some of these systems follow.

[alcts-eforum] TS Stats & Assessment - Final Summary

ALCTS eforum hosted a two-day discussion on technical services statistics and assessment during Aug. 22-23, 2012. Here is the final summary posted by Buddy Pennington, Director of Collections and Access Management, University of Missouri-Kansas City:

Turning Statistics Into Assessment : How can Technical Services Measure the Value of Their Services?
Moderated by Sarah Simpson (Tulsa City-County Library) and Buddy Pennington (University of Missouri – Kansas City)

The topic of “Turning Statistics Into Assessment : How can Technical Services Measure the Value of Their Services?” generated 160 messages from 55 participants during the e-forum held August 22-23, 2012. The moderators wanted to discuss with others how technical services departments collect and utilize statistics to measure their value.

Day one began with a lively discussion about the statistics we keep. Many of us do count almost everything anyone does – there is a sense that counting production is the bottom line. We count orders placed, items received, titles cataloged, items processed, serials added, and on and on. There were discussions of additional things that can be tricky – keeping track of money spent by subject area or department, OCLC cataloging and authority work, usage statistics, and how to deal with tracking our work on electronic resources – they give us a whole slew of new processes to count! This also led to a brief discussion of numbers we wish we had, like turnaround time, cost/item, and catalog use, with some people offering up their own methods of procuring these numbers, which was very helpful.

Another discussion focused on the complexities of using our ILS systems to pull these statistics, with some people noting that they still relied on manual counting, and others offering help with using the system to get those numbers. It became very clear that this is something that varies wildly from ILS to ILS, and can involve 3rd party software as well. However, manual counting definitely has its challenges – in both validity and time spent.

Reasons for collecting statistics included making collection decisions about what to buy and what to weed, assessing staffing levels, evaluating staff, justifying funding, demonstrating productivity, and making information available to many of the stakeholders for our organizations.

The second day turned toward the assessment component. We started the morning out by discussing how we use the statistics we collect for internal assessment activities. It is critical that we ask ourselves why we are collecting the data in the first place. Statistics can be utilized to establish production benchmarks that can be used to determine staffing needs and/or training priorities. It is difficult to compare different libraries so many establish internal benchmarks.

We also discussed reporting. Many of us issue reports and include statistics in those reports. Reports and statistics can be used to highlight accomplishments as well as trends from year to year. North Carolina State University posts there statistics on the open web (http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/cataloging/stats/), pointing out that potential recruits can get an informed sense of the technical services operations from such information. Many of us are issuing reports to collection development librarians and/or to fulfill accreditation reporting needs.

Discussion on reporting inevitably turned toward discussing the impact or value of technical services. Assessment is turning into demonstrating the value of services to various stakeholders (Megan Oakleaf, The Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report (Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2010. Available at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/value/val_report.pdf). How well do our statistics and reports do that? Demonstrating value can be done, but it can also be more challenging particular when trying to demonstrate technical services value to stakeholders outside the library. Technical services can demonstrate the value of services internally by educating other library departments on technical services through tours, cross-training, open houses and orientations.

The moderators thank Kristin Martin for her support as e-forum coordinator, and the participants for a thought-provoking discussion, and for some great ideas to consider moving forward!

Evaluating Web-Scale DIscovery Services

Hoeppner, Athena. "The Ins and Outs of Evaluating Web-Scale Discovery Services." Computers in Libraries 32(3)(April 2012). At: http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/apr12/Hoeppner-Web-Scale-Discovery-Services.shtml

This introductory article explains web-scaled discovery concepts and terminology, and provides a short checklist for examining the products. The products discussed include: EBSCO Discovery Service (EBSCO), Primo Central Index (Ex Libris), Summon (Serials Solutions), and WorldCat Local (OCLC).

Vaughan, Jason. "Investigations into Library Web-Scale Discovery Services." Information Technology and Libraries 31(1)(March 2012). At: http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ital/article/view/1916

This article describes in depth how the University of Nevada Las Vegas Library investigated the discovery service tools. The Discovery Task Force conducted several internal staff surveys, prepared comprehensive question lists for vendors, organized onsite vendor visits, tracked product enhancements, and made final recommendation. Many of the documents used in the process are available in the Appendix section.

III and SkyRiver Receive Strategic Investments

In a press release dated March 1, 2011, Innovative Interfaces announced that they had received a strategic investment from a middle market private equity firm, Huntsman Gay Global Capital, and from JMI Equity, a growth equity firm that focuses on investing in growing software, internet and business services companies. Innovative's founder and chairman, Jerry Kline, who also owns Skyriver, announced that Skyriver had also received investment on the same terms. Kline will continue as Chairman of the Board of Innovative Interfaces.

For more information, please read the press release.

Three library & information schools join LibLime to make LIS education more practical

According to a LibLime press release issued yesterday, three schools are joining LibLime in the Koha with Class program. The program is designed to give library school faculty a chance to embed the use of an ILS into their coursework and curricula, thereby allowing students to gain practical experience with library automation software as they prepare to enter the library workforce.

The three schools working with LibLime to roll out the project this coming Spring 2012 semester include: The School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University; The Information School at the University of Washington Gallagher; and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College.

Library school students taking classes in library automation and technology systems at these three Universities will be studying the principles for design, selection, implementation and management of automated systems of all types in libraries. Courses will cover the use of ILSs for technical service processing, reference and user services, and management. Courses will also include presentations and demos from vendors and systems librarians, as well as possible site visits.

Esteemed law librarian and professor at the Information School at the University of Washington Gallagher, Richard Jost stated, “I want to use the Koha with Class program to provide my students with a hands-on experience with an integrated library system. For students entering the job market in these difficult economic times, having the added practical experience of working on a library system will better prepare them for job interviewing and launching their careers.”

New Open-Source ILS Available in Japan

Catalogablog reports that there is a new open-source integrated library system in development in Japan. It's called Next-L Enju Leaf 1.0.0, and you can see a demonstration of it here. Catalogablog reports that it is in use by the National Diet Library, and the National Institute for Materials Science.

It also appears to be related to other OS ILSs called the Next-L Enju Root and the Next-L Enju Flower, but I do not know what those are like.

The developer is Project Next-L, described as "a project to build a new integrated library system maintained by Japanese volunteers interested in libraries"