Everyone at the conference will be editing the program to include their summaries (and make edits to my summaries). Make sure you check out what people are writing if you weren’t able to attend.
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- Two views on security in software - One is you hope no one finds the problem the other is that you put it out there and hope someone fixes it.
- FreeCiv - Free civ-like game
- Howard County Library System is all open source as well as 2-3 libraries in NZ
- How does staff get around the non-admin rights issue at their institutions. Staff understands - but how do they learn about these new tools in order to get things installed on their systems.
- Price savings is a way to sell OS - but it’s not really the be all and end all - it may not be free.
- Small libraries are generally more agile and can make the change easier than a big organization
- The city of Paris and Munich has gone open source - it has been done on a large scale - just not necessarily in libraries.
- www.librarytechnology.org/libwebcats/ - search for Evergreen and Koha libraries by using the Advanced Search. Keep in mind that not all libraries using Koha are listed here - there are many small libraries that have never reported which ILS they’re using - but this tool will give you a good idea of what’s being done with the OS ILS
- Chris Cormack gave a history of Koha
- Case Studies - http://koha.org/about-koha/case-studies/nelsonville.html
- No one knows of libraries that are using Vista as the operating system
- Open Office is really user friendly and lets you bring in document from MS Office.
- Sounds like Ubuntu is trying to get people on board and removing the fear associated with switching to OSS
- Greg from NYPL was able to install Ubuntu on a work box - (works in the web office) been using more OSS for web work - Quanta Plus, Scream and GFTP - he’s trying to get away from Dreamweaver and Flash and learn to use the Linux tools more. Meredith asked: How do the tools compare? “You get used to using a certain tool set which makes the difference difficult - but since Ubuntu loads so much faster than Windows I’m ready to work right away” (Polly mentioned going off to get coffee after starting her computer at work - I go off and get tea).
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Moderated by Kate Sheehan and Abby Blachly
- 4 Libraries worldwide have LibraryThing for Libraries - still a new service.
- Does everyone know what LibraryThing is? — a social cataloging website - connects you to other users based on what books you share. The only info that LT keeps is usernames and password - so they don’t know anything about you except what you want to share. Adding books to your library is easy - you can choose from 89 libraries around the world through Z39.50 to populate your library. 6 different recommendation engines working to provide you with recommendations based on your library. Books are combined together with a FRBR type display (entirely done by the users).
- One person felt that the unsuggester was the best service offered by LT - great for book clubs and groups.
- LT for Libraries is LT selling it’s data to libraries so they can incorporate it into their catalog.
- Kate (Danbury Library) added it in April of this year. It was so easy - “Copy, Paste, Dance with Joy” - it’s that easy. It doesn’t matter what ILS you’re using.
- LT for Libraries ISBN based - what about pre-ISBN books? Right now it doesn’t work with that but there is a plan to use a title/author match. (Abby)
- Easy to use interface for updating how it displays in the catalog. Copy JavaScript and paste it. (with III Kate stuck it into the footer)
- LT for Libraries provides info (tags, other editions, recommendations/books like this, etc) only for titles that are owned by the library.
- Great tool for Reader’s Advisory. An attendee says that he uses Danbury’s catalog for that all of the time - this led to a 44% increase in web traffic in one year.
- They haven’t heard much feedback from patrons - they usually only hear from them if they want to complain - so Kate says “no news is good news.” When she shows it to people they get really excited.
- Kate feels that LT for Libraries is better than NoveList for Reader’s Advisory.
- The point of social networking is a grass roots operation - and things like Encore from III have a feel of corporations trying to be cool. LT for Libraries has people working for them who know what’s going on - and there is no way that we could do this with just our user base - LT for Libraries gives libraries access to all of it’s user’s data
- Julian Clark wasn’t sure how it would connect to the academic library world - it works great for public libraries because of the content. Abby showed Julian that there are academic libraries that can use this tool successfully. Kate has always been surprised at the number of academic books within LT.
- Is there a way to find what the obscure books are? Yes - you can sort your library by the number of others who have the book. You can also see a list on your profile of books that only you and one other person share.
- LT user “moccany” - A museum using LT soley as their catalog.
- LT just announced a deal with AquaBrowser last week http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/08/librarything-and-aquabrowser-my.php.
- LT is 40% owned by Abebooks.
- Kate “It’s way cheap.” - about LT for Libraries.
- There are no stats for LT for Libraries yet - they’re waiting to hear from the users as to what they want to see in their reporting module. (right now with all of the presentations and library news - the stats would be skewed to what librarians are looking at).
- Kate about LibraryThing - “Here is a really small group that understand library and listen and come up with ideas in a way that we’re not used to getting. Other people know how to do this right - why can’t our ILS do this? … It’s such an interesting group of people to work with and I’ve learned so much.”
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Ben Armentor - Columbia Computer Programmer was our moderator.
- A lot of people here for the intellectual discussion - a nice balance of catalogers and those here for general interest.
- Ben’s summary of Weinberger’s position: Weinberger’s position is that you can describe the organization of things in collections (the long view). There is an age of first order of things (physical object). The second order of organization - emergence of metadata/cataloging - you keep an index to identify items. The third order (more emergent) - like cataloging of metadata - is a much more generic type of descriptive terms/associations (unlike cataloging which is based on the physical limitations) - broader type of organizing things.
- Do we feel that the metadata scheme is there to handle this type third type of order? Aren’t associations also based on culture?
- One librarian felt that tags were a way of dumbing down the system. LC subject headings are always the same and easier to find things.
- Weinberger isn’t saying it’s one or the other - he says to use LC in conjunction with other folksonomies - and actually breaks you out of the cultural constraints because you can have multiple tags for the one item.
- You can also see that all of the terms are related.
- All data is metadata - all metadata is data when it comes to digital objects (title, summary, author, and tags).
- People often say to public librarians that they have found things on Google - the reference librarian always wants explain that Google doesn’t have any content - it just searches stuff. (Kate Sheehan)
- Isn’t Library 2.0 saying that there are no experts? No, it’s saying that everyone is an expert in some way. Library 2.0 is not the dismissal of authority. It’s the retooling of authority and coming at it in different ways. (John Blyberg).
- Look at facetted search engines -it’s a great way to get at additional information in a browseable way. It introduces this idea of serendipity which is also what tagging does. It’s a way of having a new start point. (John Blyberg).
- If you’ve read that book - then you know more thorough understanding of what it’s about. The cataloger often hasn’t read the book before cataloging it. (Kate Sheehan).
- Cataloging subject headings are what books are “generally” about. You can start there and then find titles using tags to find other resources that are not necessarily generally about that topic - but do touch on that topic.
- Weinberger is more focused on items that probably don’t even have LC classification. He’s talking about items that aren’t necessarily findable right now. (Ben)
- When working with images the LC system is just not adequate. Library arrangement is amazing once you’re in the circle - the group that understands the system. When you’re not in the circle you need a translator (a digital collections cataloger).
- In LibraryThing tags that are similar (dogs and dog) are combined by the people. Is it still a folksonomy? It’s done by people - but it’s also not individual. (Abby & John)
- Do you want to fix misspellings? What if it’s a common misspelling? If the tag/subject heading is spelled correctly but everyone misspells that word it won’t ever be found. Where does editing of tags begin and end - should it be done?
- What about screen readers and tag clouds? Can they read tag clouds the same way (big being more important)? There are ways to edit the code. It’s on the burden of the developer to change the code so the readers can “see” that the bigger words are more important and are read first. The more modern readers can tell the differences in style sheets.
- One person argued that there is a lot of overlap between the LC subject headings and the tags on LibraryThing. Abby responded showing great examples of tags bringing genre info to the top of the search results.
- Our users don’t think in subject headings (Kate)
- Tagging is really great for very large collections where there are a lot of titles in a particular LC heading.
- People tag for personal reasons - allowing them to build meaningful collections for themselves. (John Blyberg)
- Will patrons really come in and tag items? The power users who are passionate about something will come in and tag. Those casual users may not be tagging, but they’re benefiting from the tags. While it’s just power users tagging - they’re still not librarians - they’ll use the lingo that most people understand - the tags are not just geared toward them like subject headings are just understandable by librarians.
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I’m at Library Camp NYC and I’ve attended some interesting sessions. I know that I usually write nice summaries for conferences - but I’m sure you’ll all forgive me in my exhausted state. Summaries are to follow. Pictures are here.
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