Environmental scans

A couple of reports from OCLC that may help us get some overview perspective are:

• College Students' Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources
  
  "...examines the information-seeking habits and preferences of international college students. This report is a companion piece to the December 2005 OCLC Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report."
  


• Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition (2003)
  "The scan provides a high-level view of the information landscape, intended both to inform and stimulate discussion about future strategic directions."
  

I've put a local copy of the first one on the Q drive.

Web 2.0

What is Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly
Overview of Web 2.0 and brief descriptions of AJAX and perpetual beta on p. 5.

Taming Technolust: Ten Steps for Planning in a 2.0 World by Michael Stephens
Article from Reference & User Services Quarterly, Summer 2008, Vol. 47 Issue 4, p314-317, 4p
Some points quoted from the article:

1. “I’m still taken aback when I hear of libraries spending money
for technologies without careful planning, an environmental
scan of the current landscape, and a complete road map for
training, roll out, buy in, and evaluation.

2. Technology planning is best done in open,
collaborative space where everyone has a voice and can
share their expertise.

3. Let beta be your friend. Let your users help you work out
the bugs of that new service. Admit openly that whatever
you are planning is new and there may be a few kinks.

4. Spot trends and make them opportunities. Scan the horizon
for how technology is changing our world. Being a successful
trendspotter is one of the most important traits of the
twenty-first-century librarian.

5. Evaluate your service. This is the next step in all the 2.0
talk."

"Unified Resource Management"

Ex Libris is working on a "Unified Resource Management" (URM) strategy as a next-generation replacement not only for the ILS, but also for many of the other library applications (i.e. ERMs) that are currently stand-alone products. A similar strategy, sans the ILS, is being followed by Serials Solutions with their "360" product. The URM concept is something that we should be include in our investigations.

See the attached comments for links to info on the URM concept.

RDA

Something to consider in reviewing the OPAC products is their plans for integrating RDA. RDA stands for “Resource Description and Access” and is the working title of the new standard that will be the successor to AACR2 (present cataloging rules). FRBR and FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data) provide the conceptual foundation for RDA. RDA is scheduled to be released late 2009.

Background on RDA http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/jsc/rda.html

An Introduction to FRAD http://presentations.ala.org/images/c/c5/Frad_ala_200806_color.pdf

Primarily Primo Post

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.

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.

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

2. Analyze current OPAC

• User surveys
• Usability testing

3. What do UTA users want/expect?

4. Cataloging/Metadata issues

• Future trends
• FRBR
• RDA

5. Interoperability

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

9. Plan for a next-gen OPAC that will be adaptable to future trends, or not obsolete by the time we finish the study

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.