I arrived in Bogota last night and today I’m off to visit a few libraries, my first stop is the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia. As Colombia’s national library, one of their main responsibilities is serving as the country’s legal deposit.
The collection includes monographs, journals, and a large music collection. The library’s music collection includes both [...]

On Thursday I attended the webinar titled “Opening up Library Systems through Web Services and SOA” which was co-hosted by WebJunction and ALA Tech Source, and moderated by Marshall Breeding. The session was very interested and presented three different cases of how Integrated Library Systems can be made more accessible, regardless of whether they run [...]

This Thursday Marshall Breeding will be moderating a webinar discussing whether a integrated library system be open without being open source. He will explore the ways that an Application Programming Interface (API) can help libraries wring data and functionality out of their ILS, extend its functionality, and interact with other applications.
The webinar is hosted through [...]

I was just reading an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education on library catalogs. The article starts off by mentioning a student who was having a hard time finding the material she wanted at her local university library. The discussion then continues by claiming that OPACs are loosing users because some people find them [...]

With some financial help from the National Endowment for the Humanities, digital-humanities professor Mary Flanagan is developing a game that will help add tags to some of Dartmouth College’s archival collections. Flanagan expects that students will be interested in the game which presents a player with an image for which they have to create “labels” [...]

Google just announced on its blog that they are developing a new tool which aims at integrating email, live chat, photos, videos, maps, feeds, gadgets, and more! The idea is to centralize communication, but also to make collaboration easier.
Right now the project is still being developed, but they are looking for techy people who can [...]

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is a collaboration, started in 1989, of the 53 Commonwealth head’s of state to promote open and distance learning (ODL), as well as sharing resources and technologies. COL works with government officials to promote information and communication technologies (ICT) as a means to impact the areas of education, learning for [...]

Memory Archive is an online project that is gathering memoirs from everyday people. The site allows you to search for memoirs indexed for particular words (either in the title or in the text), or you can brows various collections through category pages (here is an examples of the category page for “places“). Another good way [...]

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 UPenn [...]

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 [...]