VuFind 0.7

Chris Barr (Design & Interface Specialist at Villanova University library) writes: "With this release [i.e., 0.7] we included an experimental browse feature that we would love to hear some feedback on from this list, as the topic of browse has come up here in the past.Try the browse demo here: http://www.vufind.org/demo/Browse/Home . This is still a work in progress. Some things in the browse are still buggy (Subject Area & Tags don't work yet). Hopefully you can overlook this and discuss, beyond the technical part, theoretically how you see a browse functioning and if this is going in the right direction or not... What can we do differently, beyond squashing the bugs, to make the browse useful for an average user?"

Bibliographic Control Working Group Report

Release of the LC Report has been mentioned on the CMS Web Log, and was the topic of discussion at our last Catalog Librarians meeting. Here are my notes for Section 4.

OPAC 2.0 on Alice's Blog (Dec. 15)

See original page and CMS referral.

"The Three Worlds of IT"

In "Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology," (Harvard Business Review, November 2006, p. 141-149) Andrew McAfee argues that "managers who distance themselves from IT abdicate a critical responsibility." They should "stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage." He goes on to distinguish three categories of IT that need to be understood and harnessed by managers. My notes are posted on the CMS Weblog.

Fun with LoC Authority files

Back on February 12, Jessamyn West mentioned on librarian.net that a complete set of LoC authority records had been made available for download by Simon Spero. Tim Spalding also announced it on his thingology blog. Now (per Nathan Rinne on AutoCat 11/13) Bernhard Eversberg has used it to create a user-friendly BrowseLCSH application.

Michigan and Yale Take Heat on Commercial Digitization

In response to accusations that the UM Library has sold itself out to Google, Dean of Libraries Paul Courant told the Library Journal (Nov. 11 LJNewswire), "As part of our arrangement with Google [for 7 million volumes scanned in 6 years], they give us copies of all the digital files, and we can keep them forever," he wrote. "Our only financial outlay is for storage and the cost of providing library services to our users. Anyone who searches U-M's library catalog Mirlyn can access the scanned files via our MBooks interface. That's right, anyone." A related LJ article appeared on Nov. 12: "University of Michigan Library Head, in New Blog, Defends Google Deal."

A related article appeared in the Nov. 9 Yale Daily News, regarding the contract signed between Yale and Microsoft. The reporter points out Yale's endowment now exceeds $22 billion, and the 2008 library budget is $89.6 million. And assuming a $3.5 million price tag, covering the full processing of 100,000 volumes would cost only one-half of one percent of the University's $615 million capital expense budget. (Though estimate I've heard was more like $7.5 million).

Some Upcoming NELINET Events

These three look promising:

Nov. 16, 8:30 AM-3:30 PM, the 2007 Bibliographic Services Conference: "Subject Access - Out of Control?"

Dec. 10, 9:30 AM-3:30 PM a workshop by Ed Sperr on "Widgets, Mashups and Web Services", a kind of companion to the "Exploding Your OPAC" class of October 25.

Dec. 12, 10-11 AM, a webinar on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).

FAST Database Available on Web

Steven just informed me that the FAST Authorities Database is available as a public Web site. I wonder if it will be integrated at some point with the NSDL Metadata Registry.

Joseph Lucia's Thought Experiment

Via ngc4lib, a a lucid suggestion from Joseph Lucia about building open source library applications.

Here's an excerpt:

What if, in the U.S., 50 ARL libraries, 20 large public libraries, 20 medium-sized academic libraries, and 20 Oberlin group libraries anted up one full-time technology position for collaborative open source development. That's 110 developers working on library applications with robust, quickly-implemented current Web technology -- not legacy stuff. There is not a company in the industry that I know of which has put that much technical effort into product development.

BiblioCommons founder Beth Jefferson Interviewed

On Jon Udell's "Interviews with Innovators" at IT Conversations. Podcast features Beth Jefferson, founder of BiblioCommons, a company that "aims to transform public libraries' online catalogs into environments for social discovery of resources that are cataloged not only by librarians, but also by patrons."

Beth was a speaker at 2007 code4lib .

Digitization and its Discontents

There's a nice article by Anthony Grafton in the November 6, 2007 New Yorker on the mass digitization of library holding.

Here are some of his conclusions:

"The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases ... The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating".

Noting the great wealth of resources now available on line, he suggests that "these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you."

Exploding Your OPAC (NELINET)

I attended a NELINET workshop with Ed Sperr on October 25 entitled "Exploding Your OPAC ." I posted my notes to the CMS blog in case others our curious.

The Open Library (John Hostage memo)

John Hostage mentioned via Autocat a presentation by Aaron Swartz of the Open Library Project, held at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The project's goal seems to be a wiki-like "Web page for every book," including descriptive metadata and hyperlinks to full-text copies, library holdings, online booksellers, etc.., where available. It is also to include print- and scan-on-demand services and social tagging. Hostage said the audience included the likes of Tim Spalding (Library Thing) and David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous). "Someone even mentioned FRBRoo, the object-oriented model of FRBR that is being developed."

NYTSL 2007

The NYTSL Fall 2007 program on Libraries and Free and Open Source Software Movements, will be presented by Edward Corrado of the College of New Jersey.

Ed co-authored a winning IMLS grant toward developing an open source OPAC and is a member of the Code4Lib Journal editorial board.

Mass Digitization and Open Access

According to a September 13, 2007 news release, the Yale Library is partnering with Microsoft to scan 100,000 of its public domain books:

Yale is committed to providing the widest possible access to its collection ... The full text of the digitized books will be indexed. Full text searching enables researchers to locate relevant material that they could never find through traditional indexes or library catalogs (e.g. a single paragraph in a work on an unrelated topic).

Mass digitization will certainly improve access to Yale's collections. The problem is that while the majority of Web searchers rely on Google (54% versus 13% for Microsoft's Live Search) , Microsoft requires that the new digital copies be indexed exclusively in Live Search. Google users will simply not be able to find the full texts presented or indexed there (though they may find catalog records courtesy of openworldcat.org). One wonders, therefore, whether this arrangement undermines Yale's commitment, mentioned above, "to provide the widest possible access to its collection."

Compare this to the approach taken by UConn, which is partnering with the Boston Library Consortium and Brewster Kahle's Open Content Alliance. According to the October 4th LJ Academic Newswire, Vice-Provost Brinley Franklin said, "The library staff at UConn was unanimous in its endorsement of unrestricted access to materials we digitize ... We are ready to turn down funding from companies that restrict searching digital collections through their proprietary search engine." An October 22 New York Times article (slashdotted on Oct. 23) reports that the Boston Public Library, MIT, Brown, the Smithsonian, and others, have similarly opted out of the Google/Microsoft model.

Open Source ILS Market Penetration

In the October 15th issue of LISNews, Bob Molyneux reviews the extent of open source ILS market penetration in U.S. libraries and elsewhere. In particular, he looks at the adoption of Koha and Evergreen, based on data gathered from Marshal Breeding's lib-web-cats (library websites and catalogs) database. A growing number of public libraries have adopted open source ILSs. So far 4 academic U.S. libraries are using Koha (e.g., Galen College of Nursing); none is using Evergreen. In Canada, Laurentian University is in the process of migrating to Evergreen.

Also posted to CMS weblog.

Fac-Back-OPAC

The "Faceted Back-up OPAC" or Fac-Back-OPAC is an advanced catalog interface based on Lucene Solr, marc4j, and Django. Dan Scott (Laurentian University) archived the software on Google Code. There seems to be step-by-step install documentation as well.

Dan Scott mentioned how Solr dominated the code4lib 2007 conference, including all-day preconference led by Erik Hatcher and MyResource portal demo by Andrew Nagy. The Fac-Back-OPAC was derived from Casey Durfee's "Open Source Endeca in 250 Lines or Less".

1. MARC records (bibs and holdings) are extracted nightly from traditional OPAC.

2. then run through marc4j scripts (controled by Jython programming language) converting them to UTF-8 MARCXML.

3. then indexed through Solr (see tutorial) configured with bibliographic schema, run inside Jetty application server. Fields are extracted from MARCXML records as XML strings and sent to Solr instance via HTTP POST method.

4. The Django Web application framework then comes into play. It "implements the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern written in Python".

Siris Cross Catalog Searching

Jeffrey cited the interface of the Lucene/Solr-powered Siris Cross Catalog Searching.

SIRIS stands for Smithsonian Institution Research Information System.

Solr "is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat. See the complete feature list for more details, then check out the tutorial." There are several sessions on Lucene/Solr offered at the Apache Convention, Monday-Friday, Nov. 12-16, 2007, in Atlanta.

MyLibrary

Eric Lease Morgan reminds ngc4lib readers about MyLibrary, a set of object-oriented perl modules that (per README page) lets you generate dynamic web pages from collection data, create personalized pages, perform inventories, support manual data-entry, import MARC and OAI-accessible data, index content and support 'search this site' function, syndicate content to portal, and write reports in form of browsable (subject, title, format, etc.) lists. There's a demo library catalog with 300,000 records, to which I signed in as Eosuchian. According to the about page, "The content of the MyLibrary database was indexed with Kinosearch and made accessible via an SRU interface. Search results sport cover art from Amazon.com. If reviews exist, then they can be read. Users can to view the full MARC records in tagged, MARCXML, and MODS formats. Users can create accounts for themselves and have items (virtually) delivered to them."

Drupal

See John Blyberg's blog, slides [pdf] from LITA 2007 program, article in Library Crunch ("Blyberg's Beautiful Drupal"), and LITA blog on Building Public Libraries with Drupal.