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    The Joy of LibX

    February 25th, 2008

    The Emerging Technology Interest Group (aka the Emerging Technology & Innovation Group) held a demonstration of LibX today over the lunch break. This was the first of a planned series of demonstration/discussion sessions that will in future be held on the Tuesday following Library Forum.

    Tim moderated the session and ran through the installation and configuration of the York University edition of the LibX toolbar and some of its main features. A lively discussion followed and Bill and Stacy shared some of their LibX experiences and introduced the group to another useful Firefox extension the OpenURL Referrer. This is an excellent and recommended companion to LibX. John mentioned that LibX uses DOIs (Document Object Identifiers) and Bill showed us how LibX also uses COinS (Context Objext in Spans) to create active links in web pages.

    If you were unable to attend the session you can review the handout that was distributed.


    How’s Do You Feel About Your ILS?

    February 2nd, 2008

    The Digital Library Federation conducted a survey of academic libraries in the fall of 2007 to find out what sort of interest there was in exploring the “integration of ILS data with non-ILS discovery systems.” Of the 100 respondents 40% are looking to change their ILS and 35% of this group are considering open source solutions. That’s a fairly sizable number.

    The chair of the DLF group, John Mark Ockerbloom, referenced the report recently in a post on Everybody’s Library called ‘Blowing the lid off the ILS (and the providers’ chance to have a say)‘. He writes,

    What’s become increasingly clear to those of us trying to move information discovery forward is that we can no longer expect a single ‘integrated library system’ to satisfy our current and emerging collection discovery needs by itself.

    The post is really a follow up to an invitation for interested parties (developers, vendors, and other service providers) to participate in another DLF initiative to draft a ’set of functional requirements’ that could be used to develop ’standard machine interfaces that allow us to build and provide new discovery systems on top of whatever ILS we have …’

    Dan Scott spoke at OLA yesterday morning about the progress of the Evergreen implementation that Laurentian, Windsor and McMaster are working on.

    It’s all sounding good and evidence that movement away from the perceived restrictions of current proprietary integrated library systems is steadily gathering momentum.