PUBLIC MARKS from biblio

We hit a milestone today: the anonymous

The OCKHAM Initiative seeks to promote the development of digital libraries via collaboration between librarians and digital library researchers. By promoting simple, open approaches and standards for digital library tools, services, and content, the gap between digital library development and the adoption of digital library systems by the traditional library community will be bridged.

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What does the OpenURL Router do? openurl.ac.uk is the home of the OpenURL Router

This page provides a quick demonstration of OpenURLs and how they can be resolved in a context sensitive way.

The OpenURL standard, first developed by Oren Beit-Arie, of Ex Libris, and Herbert Van de Sompel, now of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is a protocol for interoperability between an information resource and a service component, referred to as a link server, which offers localized services. The underlying concept of the OpenURL standard is that links should lead a user to appropriate resources. A link server, such as the SFX™ server from Ex Libris, defines the context of the user. When the link server accepts an OpenURL as input, it acts on it to provide users with services that comply with their institution's collections and policies. The OpenURL standard enables a user who has retrieved an article citation, for example, to obtain immediate access to the "most appropriate" copy of that object through the implementation of extended linking services. The selection of the best copy is based on user and organizational preferences regarding the location of the copy, its cost, and agreements with information suppliers, and similar considerations. This selection occurs without the knowledge of the user; it is made possible by the transport of metadata with the OpenURL link from the source citation to a "resolver" (the link server), which stores the preference information and the links to the appropriate material.

So, last week, before I left for SMUG, Mike Rylander (of Evergreen-ILS), Joshua Ferraro (of Liblime/Koha) and I began talking about OpenSearch interfaces for our respective catalogs. The only reason I was able to really contribute to the conversation was the fact that I had my little python CGI, but I hadn't thought much about it since I wrote it.

So as Art and I continue to try to export the data from our respective Voyager catalogs to create an alternative web opac, I have been trying to formulate what such a beast should look like. We have the opportunity to make the web interface look and behave in any way we want, so there are a lot of things to think about. The goal is to make the opac behave in the way non-information professionals would expect a searching interface to work, so we're not just talking about a cosmetic makeover to the current design.

Jashua Porter has a short piece about Folksonomies and their role in overcoming the difficulty in implementing taxonomies in the standard website.

Discussions related to information and technology in academic libraries, universities and life in general.

Many of the design teams we talk to face the same major issue: how to organize the information on their sites. From creating navigation schemes to developing site hierarchies to refining checkout sequences, it’s highly important for design teams to organize information effectively for their users. Information architects frequently must deal with the problem of managing more and more information. Rarely can they remove information from a site; in most cases, it’s add, add, add. Design teams must make room for this new content in some way, either by incorporating it into the current organizational scheme or by altering the information architecture to allow for it.

When purchasing a computer from Dell.com, you have the option to configure the machine and get exactly the options you want. Once you've reached a configuration you're satisfied with, you can save it, print it out, fax it to someone, or e-mail it. When the designers at Dell added this functionality, they knew something other online computer retailers didn't know. They knew that computers were high ticket purchases and that people, when buying one, often need to seek the approval of a high authority (such as their boss or spouse). The design needed to provide an easy way for someone to stop the purchase process and go off to get that approval. How did the designers at Dell realize this important requirement while virtually every other vendor missed it? They understood something the other vendors didn't. They understood the “context” of buying a computer.

If the library blogosphere was your only source of current events within libraries, you would think that RSS was new MARC record and that podcasting will alleviate the need for circ rules.

* Repository Identification * OPAC List * Add Library These bookmarklets were inspired by Jon Udell's LibraryLookup homepage. The enhancement provided here is to include other ISBNs for the same work in the query. As Jon notes in his tips, the same work is often available in a variety of editions, all with different ISBNs. Based on OCLC's FRBR Research, related ISBNs have been clustered and made available as a stand-alone web service. Sorting the list by the number of OCLC member libraries that hold that ISBN increases the probability of finding a hit near the top of the list. To account for the possibility that the user really is interested in a particular ISBN, that number appears first in the list, regardless of the number of holding libraries. In the future, however, these bookmarklets may be further enhanced to take advantage of the fact that OCLC already knows which editions of a work your library holds and place those at the top of the list.

If your local public (or college) library uses one of the online catalog systems listed here, you may be able to create a bookmarklet that will help you look up books in your library. After you've "installed" your bookmarklet by dragging it to your browser's link toolbar, you can use it to look up books at your local library. Let's say you're on a book-related site (Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, All Consuming, possibly others), and a book's info page is your current page. (Specifically: its URL contains an ISBN. Choose a hardcover edition for best results -- see tips below.) You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library. The bookmarklet will invoke your library's lookup service, feed it the ISBN, and pop up a new window with the result.

Services Z39.50 is an information retrieval standard supported by libraries and software vendors to access information resources independent of the database location or the hardware/software used. * NLC Z39.50 enables you to search and retrieve records from the National Library of Canada database using Z39.50 software connected to the Internet. The NLC collection is a portion (approximately 10%) of the entire AMICUS database. This service does not require registration. * AMICUS Z39.50 enables you to search and retrieve records from the entire AMICUS database using Z39.50 software connected to the Internet. This service requires that you register for an AMICUS account.