Maurice York from NCSU started us off with Ther I Fix’d It – the ILS undone in 3 easy steps. He’s going through a rather amusing history of the ILS from card catalog to automation. Now he’s packing in journals and links and ejournals and discovering that it’s hard to manage. He’s adding bits and pieces and secondary (and tertiary) systems until they are out of control. Step 1 – campus is buying stuff, get rid of acquisitions module (more academic library stuff..) Step 2 – get serials out Step 3 – get rid of all the other electronic stuff, too. There. He fixed it.
Next is Jacquelyn Erdman talking about design as strategy, not decoration. Be able to come up with something crisp, clean and that will communicate 4 tips:
- Choose your graphics carefully – only add things that are required for the message
- Choose your font wisely – this is your voice
- Get help in selecting colors – www.colormatters.com/colortheory.html – steal colors others have come up with
- Use Templates – use color libraries in Photoshop
Note: looks like the guy who was going to do Google Squared didn’t show – I’m sad…
Marilyn Billings talked about ESENCe – an example of partnering with Faculty to pull in large grants. Lots of academic library stuff that really doesn’t apply to me yet. I’ll let you know when she says something I find useful as a public library type.
Next up was Tate Nunely of Ex Libris talking about Digital Perils and Preservation. He began with stats – the growth of digital content – up to 988 exabytes by Jan 2010. He did a case study for digital preservation – the NASA Mars data, by the time they went back to look at it, the digital info was degraded – only 10% was usable. Challenges:
- Deterioration
- Obsolescence
- Failure to document the data
- one more that I missed…
Preservation should not be what we “should do”, but what we “should be doing right now”. Take a look at what you are preserving occasionally – make sure you have what you think you have in a format you can still access.
Finally, Mark Beatty spoke about creating your own sandbox with Bitami. www.bitnami.org try out an open source system (drupal, linux, wordpress, etc) in an easy way with a Bitnami stack (everything installs in a protected way). You can do it locally or in the cloud using Amazon’s Ec2 – they already have Bitnami stacks ready to go. Ohhh – they have a RubyStack. I’m going to have to play with that… Advice – pay attention to where it’s being installed so that you can add modules and themes and such.
Oh – there is a surprise talk by Cody from the University of Minnesota. lib.umn.edu/mobile – their mobile site. We’re gonna get a tour!! 2 search boxes – search Primo installation or classic version or search scholarly databases. Records indicate book, availability, location and then “get it” (paging and delivery service) only – very pared down for mobile users.
Now for questions & answers. I’m getting nervous about my battery life, though, so I’ll hit publish…
