The European Digital Library project has been working since September 2006 on creating a portal to gather digital collection from National Libraries around Europe, including Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain and Sweden. Europeana, as the site has been named, will be part of the will include material from the European Library (without [...]

Yesterday The Harvard Crimson published an Op-Ed by Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, who has set the groundwork to create an Office for Scholarly Communication which will manage an open access repository hosting the works of Harvard’s faculty of arts and science (FAS). This project will be [...]

I started out being hesitant to go down the road that is making OPACs and other library related tools look more like Google, Amazon.com and the like, but the more I learn about what these new tools can achieve the more I’m growing to like them. One of the latest examples of these new initiatives [...]

During the same Hot Topics Discussion mentioned below I also heard a presentation about the implementation and use of LibraryThing at a public library by Kate Sheehan, Coordinator of Library Automation at the Danbury Public Library. Sheehan described how the library has integrated LibraryThing, a site which allows users to create bibliographies, plus rate and [...]

During ALA Midwinter I attended a Hot Topics Discussion Group titled “Tag You’re It: A revolution in patron-library interaction”. The first presenter was Jennifer Sweda, cataloging librarian at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, who talked about PennTags, the ongoing project in social tagging in their library catalog. PennTags is a social bookmaking tool developed at [...]

Not too long ago OCLC rolled out a new OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) of sorts. This new tool known as WorldCat Local offers a three tiered display of cataloged search records, first from the local library, then the local consortia, and finally from the whole WorldCat. Including material continuously added to WorldCat.org, this new [...]

At the same lecture that I attended earlier this week I learned about the Cook Memorial Library in Tamworth, NH. This small public library has done away with their old static website and have replaced it with a WPopac. A WPopac is something created by Casey Bisson by tweaking WordPress to become an OPAC (Online [...]

Earlier this week I attended a lecture that addressed social tagging and its use to libraries. Today more and more libraries and archives are trying to make themselves more visible by creating engaging websites, starting blogs and posting photographs on Flickr. While many of these are started to attract people to the library, it was [...]

There is a good amount of discussion in the library world that revolve around how and if we want to make library services more like Google or Amazon.com. The belief is that library users today want information to be available very quickly and without much effort, and that recommendations such as those used in Amazon.com [...]