It might make sense to have a posting for miscellaneous links and info for each next-gen product. We can either edit the original post to add material, or add material by appending to the original post via comments.
I'll get the Primo one started with this posting.
The April 2008 issue of Ariadne contains an article on Implementing Ex Libris’s Primo at the University of East Anglia.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Project Outline Draft
Scope definition from pm glossary on Q:
Scope statement-Scope is the way that you describe the boundaries of the project. It defines what the project will deliver and what it will not deliver.
4. Cataloging/Metadata issues
6. Embedded OPACs/Seamless Library website
7. UTA campus CMS, content management system: how will OPAC work with CMS?
8. Web 2.0
Scope statement-Scope is the way that you describe the boundaries of the project. It defines what the project will deliver and what it will not deliver.
Here is an outline draft for discussion and revision to cover the issues that need to be researched. I think the blueprint for the 10 step planning process from Calhoun's Report pgs. 16-20 will be helpful for reference, also.
1. Define next-gen OPACs
- Concepts
- Technology
- User expectations
- Future trends
- Traditional versus federated searching
- User surveys
- Usability testing
4. Cataloging/Metadata issues
- Future trends
- FRBR
- RDA
6. Embedded OPACs/Seamless Library website
7. UTA campus CMS, content management system: how will OPAC work with CMS?
8. Web 2.0
- Social tagging
- Bookmarking
- More like this
- Spell checking
- Tag clouds
- Perpetual beta
- Cell phone access
- Resource discovery, new ways of searching
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Reading redux
Ross Singer writing about Communicat: The Next Generation Catalog That Almost Was… in the 2007-12-17 issue of The Code4Lib Journal. He covers some of the challenges of trying to tie components together with middleware, when there's not a suitable off-the-shelf solution.
More FRBR
The following is from a book review by Christine Schwartz in The Code4Lib Journal, Issue 4, 9/22/08, http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/138
"... if there was ever a time when the library world needed FRBR it’s now. We’re dealing with the question of how to provide access and create discovery tools for users in a rapidly changing library landscape. We’ve been slow to exploit the capacities of the Web for collaboration, sharing metadata and content, linking, etc. So FRBR’s entity-relationship framework and emphasis on bibliographic relationships may be its most important contribution to how we think about library resources in the digital, hyperlinked environment.
Based on the entity-relationship model, FRBR has some street cred in the IT world. It can function as a bridge beyond libraries to the world of information technology (much the way Dublin Core has done with metadata). It’s a conceptual model that can be used to develop different data models. I think we will see more development of the FRBR model as time goes on and it may be that FRBR and its companion models, FRAD and Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR), will be the most important data models for future library metadata structures and standards."
"... if there was ever a time when the library world needed FRBR it’s now. We’re dealing with the question of how to provide access and create discovery tools for users in a rapidly changing library landscape. We’ve been slow to exploit the capacities of the Web for collaboration, sharing metadata and content, linking, etc. So FRBR’s entity-relationship framework and emphasis on bibliographic relationships may be its most important contribution to how we think about library resources in the digital, hyperlinked environment.
Based on the entity-relationship model, FRBR has some street cred in the IT world. It can function as a bridge beyond libraries to the world of information technology (much the way Dublin Core has done with metadata). It’s a conceptual model that can be used to develop different data models. I think we will see more development of the FRBR model as time goes on and it may be that FRBR and its companion models, FRAD and Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR), will be the most important data models for future library metadata structures and standards."
More readings
Library
Technology Reports, Vol. 43, No. 4,
July/August 2007
This complete issue focuses on "next generation" library catalogs.
Technology Reports, Vol. 43, No. 4,
July/August 2007
This complete issue focuses on "next generation" library catalogs.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
After the fall
There was an interesting opinion piece on redesigning OPACs in the January/February 2007 issue of D-Lib Magazine, The Online Library Catalog: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained?.
A single search interface to everything?
Many of the next generation OPAC products claim to be a single interface to everything. Since that's also the claim of federated search products, it's worth while to examine this claim a little closer to see how it is accomplished.
When we dig a little deeper into the product literature, we see that these next gen discovery products are actually handing off to a federated search product (in addition to searching the records imported into the internal database). This hand-off may be integrated into a single search, or it may be accomplished via searching in another search box and/or tab of the next gen OPAC user interface.
"So what?" one might ask. This is significant because:
1) for that portion of the search, it reverts back to the lowest common denominator search of the federated search engine, and
2) there are serious issues with integrating the results returned by the federated search product with the results returned by the internal database.
When we dig a little deeper into the product literature, we see that these next gen discovery products are actually handing off to a federated search product (in addition to searching the records imported into the internal database). This hand-off may be integrated into a single search, or it may be accomplished via searching in another search box and/or tab of the next gen OPAC user interface.
"So what?" one might ask. This is significant because:
1) for that portion of the search, it reverts back to the lowest common denominator search of the federated search engine, and
2) there are serious issues with integrating the results returned by the federated search product with the results returned by the internal database.
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