Sterling Fluharty has an interesting post about Zotero 2.0 and the semantic web. His analysis helpfully points to the limits of Web 2.0 and folksonomy, pushing us toward the benefits of a semantic web.

In my never ending effort to fill all of my waking (and some sleeping) hours with new and exciting projects, I decided to try installing vufind so we could evaluate it against our catalog.  Roy Tennant describes it in a Library Journal article:

http://www.libraryjournal.com/blog/1090000309/post/1050012105.html

I have an instance running at:

http://digilib.bu.edu/vufind/

I did very little customization to the home screen, just a slightly modified logo and added a few links to other search options. I loaded all of the bib records from Millennium (as of two days ago) that are not suppressed (@1.3 million). The call number, location and circ status are harvested in real time. You will note that this seems to work for some, but others simply say loading.  The book cover images, reviews, and comments are being loaded from Amazon.  A search of “bioethics” shows several records with book cover images and reviews from Amazon. It would be possible, however, to add info from Google, Syndetics, etc.

A few days ago I harvested OAI records describing the University of Toronoto digitized collection from the Internet Archive.  At some point in the near future I’ll convert them to MARC and load them in as well.

This is vufind version 0.82.   Obviously it is still in development, though Villanova and a few other libraries have gone live with it:

http://library.villanova.edu/Find

http://www.vufind.org/

I’ve still been playing with Scriblio, the WordPress Blog plugin being developed by Casey Bisson up at Plymouth State in New Hampshire. It seems slow in comparison to Scriblio, particularly with a large collection.  I may continue to work with it on small collections, but it has a way to go before I would put it in production for the entire BU catalog. You can see it at:

http://digilib.bu.edu/cat

I’ve been thinking more about the importance of conversations in the library. For a number of years I’ve talked about our collection embodying a conversation that spans centuries and continents, but it’s been harder to think about how to facilitate an ongoing conversation with our current library users. Certainly we do so by way of reference transactions but those seem fewer than I would like.

One of the pedagogical premises behind the direction we are headed in the Theology Library is that “knowledge is created through conversation.” We are trying to find ways to facilitate an ongoing conversation among our library users. I’ve been interested in how we might imagine the online catalog facilitating conversation. A couple months ago I embedded a Scriblio interface to a small collection of digital objects into the History of Missiology Web site. The idea is that we can allow users to comment on the texts. I decided to give it a try on a little larger basis. I’ve begun loading records from our online catalog into another instance of scriblio. This may be a way of providing a forum for conversation…

http://comm745-server.bu.edu/alt_cat/

Following on my post from yesterday about Eric Lease Morgan’s paper on the “Next Generation” of the Library Catalog, Roy Tennant has an article in Library Journal calling for rapid change (as in: “fix them soon”) in the primary information discovery tools provided by libraries. Though uses the term “Library 2.0,” I see this as part of a larger movement that recognizes that traditional library models for information discovery, access, and use are inadequate for most users….

Library Journal – Fixing Library Discovery
Whether you are an early adopter such as NCSU of new opportunities, or are content to wait for library vendors to provide the next generation of finding tools, it’s clear that how library users will find information at a library is in a period of rapid change. This is a good thing, since library finding tools are mostly broken, particularly when compared to finding tools offered by companies such as Google and Amazon. We must fix them—and soon.

Many voices have been questioning the long-term viability of the library catalog. Here Eric Lease Morgan proposes a “next generation” catalog. From the executive summary…

“Next Generation” Library Catalog
People’s expectations regarding search and access to information have dramatically changed with the advent of the Internet. Library online public access catalogs (OPAC’s) have not kept up with these changes. The proposed “next generation” library catalog is an attempt to address this phenomenon. It’s design less like a “catalog” — an inventory list — and more like a finding aid. It contains data as well as metadata, and it is bent on doing things with found items beyond listing and providing access to them. It is built using open standards, open source software, and open content in an effort to increase interoperability, modularity, and advocate the free sharing of ideas.

Technically speaking, this “next generation” library catalog is a database/index combination. The database is made up of XML files of various types: MODS, TEI, EAD, etc. The index is a full-text index supplemented with XML-specific elements as well as Dublin Core names. End-user access to the system will be through a number of searchable/browsable interfaces facilitated by SRW/U. Services against individual items from the interfaces (such as borrow, download, review, etc.) will be facilitated via OpenURL.

The implementation of this “next generation” library catalog is divided into a seven-step process:

1. Allocate resources
2. Answer questions regarding information architecture
3. Conduct surveys, focus group interviews, and usability studies
4. Create/maintain the “next generation” library catalog
5. On a daily basis go to Step #4
6. On a quarterly basis go to Step #3
7. On an annual basis go to Step #1