Library 2.0 on nostuff.org archive | Chris Keene

Library search/discovery apps : intro

Wed, 27 May 2009 14:41:41 +0000

There’s a lot of talk in the Library world about ‘next generation catalogues’, library search tools and ‘discovery’. There’s good reason for this talk, in this domain the world has been turned on its head.

History in a nutshell:

The card catalogue became the online catalogue, the online catalogue let users search for physical items within the Library.
Journals became online journals. Libraries needed to let users find the online journals they subscribed to through various large and small publishers and hosts. They built simple in-house databases (containing journal titles and links to their homepages), or added them to the catalogue, or used a third party web based tool. As the number of e-journals grew, most ended up using the last option, a third party tool (which could offer other services, such as link resolving, and do much of the heavy lifting with managing a knowledge base).
But users wanted one place to search. Quite understandable. If you are after a journal, why should you look in one place to see if there is a physical copy, and another place if they had access to it online. Same with books/ebooks.
So libraries started to try and find ways to add online content to catalogue systems in bulk (which weren’t really designed for this).

The online catalogues (OPAC) were simple web interfaces supplied with the much larger Library management system (ILS or LMS) which ran the backend the public never saw. These were nearly always slow, ugly, unloved and not very useful.

“Sitting on a gold mine” – improving provision and services for learners by aggregating and using ‘learner behaviour data’

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:03:16 +0000

I’m at a workshop today called “Sitting on a gold mine” – improving provision and services for learners by aggregating and using ‘learner behaviour data’ (it rolls off the tongue!), which is part of a wider JISC TILE project looking at, in a nutshell, how we can use data collected from user and user activity to provide useful services, and the issues and challenges involved (and some Library 2.0 concepts as well). As ever, these are just my notes, at some points I took more notes than others, there will be mistakes and I will badly misquote the speakers, please keep this in mind.

Mashed Libraries

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:16:09 +0000

Exactly a week a go I was coming home from Mashed Libraries in London (Birkbeck).

I wont bore you with details of the day (or more to the point, I’m lazy and others have already done it better than i could (of course, I should have made each one of those words a link to a different blog but I’m laz… or never-mind)).