For those of us interested in what’s happening at Code4Lib this year, they’ll be live streaming the conference events. The separate stream links are here.
Code4Lib Conference Streaming
December 22, 2010
Data analysis for our own data
As Libraries think about data curation, why don’t we start with our own data? This Code4Lib article from NCSU talks about how to plan and execute a data analysis project for helping to make decisions and share with stakeholders for various programs.
Some examples include:
Reference Transactions
QuickSearch (NCSU’s homegrown federated search)
Library Course Tools
Special collections usage
“Although there is undeniably a time-commitment involved in initiating this kind of effort, especially in cases where data-analysis and interdepartmental outreach are not part of one’s usual responsibilities, we think the short term and long term benefits are significant. At NCSU Libraries, a grassroots approach to data analysis with cooperation between technically-oriented librarians and departmental stakeholders has yielded positive short term results, helping a variety of departments to answer questions about how patrons use specific library applications and services. Developing strong collaborative partnerships between departments is both a challenge and a positive outcome of this approach. Longer term, we hope these efforts can increase awareness of good data collection practices and of the opportunities that exist to leverage data to answer questions that can help libraries improve applications and services, as well as foster a spirit of collaboration between library departments.”
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/4258
December 2, 2010
IM+ has a web application
October 15, 2010
November Spark! Presentation
New date & time for this session!!
November Presentation : November 4, 2010 : 11 am : L33 Hagerty Library
Please join us as iSchool faculty member Christopher Yang presents his grant project on creating unified subject categories across institutional repositories He would especially like to get feedback on this idea from librarians and practitioners. The project abstract is below.
The November session will be videoconferenced using Adobe Connect and the URL will be distributed with the meeting invitation. Finally, please welcome Rebecca Goldman as co-organizer of future Spark! sessions. Please feel free to send ideas for future Spark! meetings to either Rebecca or Rebekah.
Project Abstract:
Owing to the information explosion, today’s libraries face the necessity of building unified collections derived from different repository sources and integrating resource types from different institutional repositories. In this situation, it is imperative to integrate the distinct subject directories such as classification and taxonomy into a unified subject directory. This will facilitate federated searching of information resources and will in turn enhance the user experience of seamless information access. Furthermore, the importance of information and resource sharing through collaboration across libraries, museums and other institutions have been increasingly recognized; accordingly, there is a critical need for integrating subject categories and taxonomy derived from different repositories. However, there are enormous challenges for information professionals in undertaking such an integration task. The core of the challenges stems from the fact that each of these subject directories evinces a complex semantic and syntactic structure that is embedded in local collections; moreover, there is no existing tool to support the integration task. In order to overcome such obstacles, it is necessary to devise a semi-automatic tool to support information professionals in apprehending relationships from the subject categories of different repositories and in recommending plausible changes and fine-tuning of the integration process.
To address these critical issues and challenges, in this two-year research project the research team at the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University seeks to develop techniques for facilitating an effective integration task and developing open source tools which enable information professionals to successfully integrate and expand taxonomy and subject categories derived from different repositories. Toward this end, we shall test our techniques using the Internet Public Library 2 (IPL2: http://research.cis.drexel.edu/index.html) IPL and Librarian’s Internet Index (LII)–and develop a new platform to share the open source. The platform will also be used to obtain feedback from information professionals to enhance our tools and will serve as an online community forum (i.e., a social networking site) through which information professionals express and exchange experiences in using the developed techniques and open source tools for the integration tasks.
The goals of the project are listed as follows:
Goal 1: To determine relationships between subject categories from different repositories (e.g. IPL and LII) through several text classification models.
Goal 2: To develop integration operations and process based on the identified subject category relationships of IPL and LII.
May 4, 2010
June Spark!
June Open Format : FindIt! Summon One-Search : June 8, 2010 : L33 : 10 am
Our next Spark! presentation will be an open conversation style meeting about FindIt! our new Summon “one-search” tool and the transition from SFX to 360Link. We’ll talk about what it does, how it works and have a conversation about methods for making FindIt a success here at the Drexel Libraries. There will be a quick demo and we’ll have some library “experts” on hand to discuss the implementation process, branding, the rollout this summer and any other questions that may come up.
5/6/10 Update: Peter will provide our demo, and John and Nancy will have some information to share about the new OpenURL resolver, 360Link.
As always, we’ll have tasty morning snacks, so bring a drink and your questions!
April 29, 2010
Kate, in American Libraries!
Congrats to our very own Kate Lynch for her work at DrupalCon San Francisco, held last week. As you all may know, Kate’s been very involved with Drupal for our own library website, as well as with the Drupal community as a whole. In addition to her presentation on accessibility at the recent conference, she was a part of a presentation focusing on libraries and library websites, and got a nice mention in the American Libraries conference writeup.
Yay, Kate!
[Thanks Peter!]
April 20, 2010
May Spark!
May Presentation : May 4, 2010 : 10 am : Location L33
May’s Spark! presentation-style format will feature Kate Lynch who will discuss the progress made in student personalization features for the website. She’ll go over the project, the design elements so far, and how it will work for students. There will be time for discussion and questions after her talk.
As always, we’ll have delicious morning-style snacks from our Spark! chef, Baker E. Bring a drink, and enjoy!
January 25, 2010
Library Automation and ILS survey
Marshall Breeding at Library Technology Guides has published Perceptions 2009: An International Survey of Library Automation. The survey asked about levels of satisfaction with various companies libraries use for their ILS, as well as information on open source products.
From librarytechnology.org:
Top survey findings
- Products and companies focusing on smaller libraries and narrower niches generally receive higher perception scores than those involved with larger, more complex organizations that and that serve multiple types of libraries.
- Apollo, a system adopted exclusively by small public libraries topped the charts in ILS, company, support perceived satisfaction and in company loyalty, following the formula for success mentioned above. Most libraries adopting Apollo have migrated from abandoned products such as Winnebago Spectrum and Athena.
- Libraries operating AGent Verso from Auto-Graphics and Polaris from Polaris Library Systems continue to receive extremely high scores, consistent with previous editions of this survey.
- Companies and products serving large and complex library organizations and diverse library types receive a broader range of responses, and fall into a middle tier of rankings. Yet where they fall within this middle ground represents important differences. Millennium from Innovative Interfaces, Library.Solution from The Library Corporation, and Evergreen as supported by Equinox Software came out as very strong performers at the top of this middle tier.
- Companies supporting proprietary ILS products receive generally higher satisfaction scores than companies involved with open source ILS. Evergreen, primarily supported by Equinox Software fell into the middle tier of satisfaction ratings. LibLime received especially poor marks in customer satisfaction; libraries implementing Koha independently gave themselves high ratings.
- Except for the libraries already using an open source ILS, the survey reflected low levels of interest, even when the company rates their satisfaction with their current proprietary ILS and its company as poor. Other than libraries already running an open source ILS, and for Winnebago Spectrum and Athena, the mode score from libraries using proprietary ILS products was 0. These results fail to confirm the trend of broad-based interest in open source ILS; rather we observe a minority of early adopters voicing strong support.
