I went to a panel discussion the “Catalog Transformed†featuring Andrew Pace, John Blyberg, Jina Wakimoto, Jill Newby and Cindy Levine. Andrew showed off their Endeca-based OPAC and explained why it had a feature set that ran circles around all the other currently available tools. Cindy did some sample searches and generally showed the thing off. John Blyberg, speaking about his ILS Customers Bill of Rights started out this way, “How many people in this room are satisfied with their OPAC?” No one raised their hand… except for, after a moment, Andrew Pace. Bump, set, spike.
Category: ‘puters
make Amazon suck like your OPAC. innovative + api haxie
If Amazon sucked like our old OPAC. To be fair, this Innovative version is pretty ancient. Funny? Yes. Accurate? Not entirely. [thanks marlene]
libraries and librarians on video
A few different links.
- Do librarians really love Ask.com? Gary Price discusses the Ask.com television ad [mov file] where the founder of Ask.com says “If librarians love us, then I think the world should love us too.”
- WKYC’s news program “investigates” what they see as the growing scourge of porn in libraries. Here is the original newscast which includes [non-graphic] footage of them “catching” a man masturbating to porn in the library.
- Almost Live’s takeoff on COPS, featuring librarians
- bonus video: Conan the Librarian
- double plus bonus video: the filipino librarian’s I Am A Librarian video, a response to this
you’ve tried COPA, now how about DOPA?
Please remember, librarians and teachers, that the less you inform and educate yourself about online communities like MySpace, the more you’ll have to take people’s words for the risks they may or may not involve. Now that people are looking into legislation potentially filtering sites like MySpace in schools and libraries (places that already have a high degree of filtering, so I’m not sure I totally get this) it’s a good time to inform yourself if you haven’t already.
Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA) has just introduced new legislation that would regulate the availability of sites like MySpace at schools and public libraries, claiming that “this new technology has become a feeding ground for child predators that use these sites as just another way to do our children harm.”
[thanks ryvar]
the black box of computer trouble paired with the bright light of radical trust
It’s easy to morning-after quarterback big computer disasters, but eleven days seems awfully long for an OPAC outage that was caused by a disk drive failure. When my ISP has a disk drive failure, they’re back up in an hour or two and restoring the data in the background over the rest of the day. It would have been really interesting to have been able to read a library blog about this outage and get updates on how the restoration was going, wouldn’t it? Instead we can peek at the Google cache to see what the library web site looked like, and see how it looks now. That sort of potential transparency is scary, but ultimately builds patron/customer/funder confidence, and helps with messes like this one. Michael Stephens has been discussing Darlene Fichter’s idea of radical trust, or put more simply “trusting the community.” and I think it’s something we’ll all be hearing more about, if not actually talking about. Trust me.