tag onebiglibrary (photos, blogging)
ZOTERO
Center for History and new Media chnm.gmu.ca
→one of their projects like Wordpress for museums?
-instead of having a "my backpack" (e.g.) thing specific to each provider (e.g. Proquest) -- have it in the browser.
(Zotero blog)
- it's kind of like del.icio.us with citation capabilities
- Timeline feature is cool.
- So far, no web app.
- New syncing feature now available.
I had never heard of Zotero before, and I seemed to be alone in that. It seems like a neat and fairly intuitive tool that's like a cross between del.icio.us (save stuff you find on the web, while you're on the web) and something like EndNote or Reference Manager (saves it in your chosen citation format). Cool if I'm doing research, but it's not something I'd play around with on my own time. I might download it just to check it out, though.
-EDUCATING FOR THE ONE BIG LIBRARY-
(apparently I am moderating?)
OBL -- set of trends
local → agglomeration
-bringing people into your system
-interaction of libraries with social web
-glue
- what is and isn't the library?
- access issues
- →users don't always distinguish.
The Unconference organizers' cute trick was informing all recent graduates or current library school students that we would be moderating this session. Amy and Jan quickly opted out since a session on Drupal was happening at the same time, but I headed up there and moderated with two lovely women named Aliki and Marian, both from U of T. I'm glad it happened, in the end, as it obliged me to speak up in a session. I think it went well, and I don't think I made a fool of myself, except at the end of the day when I was asked to wrap things up. I get a free pass since this was my first conference, un- or otherwise.
EVERGREEN
John Fink
Laurentian
Windsor
McMaster
Declining importance of ILS
-one part of an enormous whole
-other info. sources
Open-source ILS
-price
*ownership. →it's yours.
Not necessarily supported. Some orgs. are rising now that do support for Evergreen. e.g. LibLine.
→parallels with Linux?
Evergreen was designed for public libraries.
Evergreen is not "feature-rich". Interest from aca. lbraries is changing this somewhat.
"Non-trivial install process"
-lots of options
-lots of dependencies
-you must instal certain things before installing Evergreen.
Issue: Portability of information.
Project Conifer
Goal: Have a central ILS + have data visible to all 3 uni's (L, McM, W) and be able to share
↓
The machines that support this are at Guelph.
conifer.mcmaster.ca
open-ils.org
COMMENTS
I was woefully unprepared for this session, since it assumed some background knowledge of Evergreen. John, the presenter, tried to do a short introduction to the idea but to be honest, I was struggling for the first little while since I didn't even know what an ILS was (it's an integrated library system, but I think I got the gist of it from context). I always like to hear about open-source technology; I'm not anything approaching a programmer, but I appreciate the ethos behind it.
3 comments:
Geez, I'm sorry. I sort of had a feeling something like this would happen -- this is what comes of realizing close-to-the-last-minute that hey, you might actually have to *talk* about the thing you proposed a month ago. So I whipped up some notes, and hoped that my standard "Ask-if-I'm-confusing-you-at-all" spiel would be sufficient to save me.
If you've got any questions you'd like to ask, please don't hesitate to let me know.
Hi guys, I wanted to put in my two cents on the Evergreen is not-feature-rich comment.
Evergreen has features other ILS's don't (and yes, vice versa), but the most striking differences come with how it scales up (and down) with load, code, and organization complexity (service oriented architecture, clustered approach for redundancy and high availability, and n-tier inheritance of policies and settings).
Evergreen is also very clean and drops a lot of the historical baggage that more "mature" software have accumulated. For example, we abhor overloaded fields, fake records, fake users, etc., and instead try to make things as orthogonal as possible and give librarians the ability to create as many custom fields and values as they need.
We implement features according to the needs of our users, and not for marketing reasons. As with evolution, there is no pinnacle of perfection, no ultimate target, just a constant flux of adapting to changing environments and the needs of our users. Evergreen was designed for change.
Feel free to drop us a line on the community mailing lists! http://open-ils.org/listserv.php
-- Jason
Holy cow, I have comments!
John, there's no need to apologize. The Unconference was definitely geared toward a certain audience and you had every right to assume some background knowledge. At least you kept me on my toes! And now I know who to contact if I have any more questions.
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