Endings and Beginnings
Posted On Oct 4 2006I got an e-mail today from the RedLightGreen team at RLG. RedLightGreen provided inspiration and set the bar in many respects long before anyone had uttered the words “next generation catalog.” The much-lauded interface to the research union catalog is fading away in the wake of the OCLC RLG merger. Fortunately, this is not as much a deprecation as it is a passing of the baton to WorldCat.org, which launched in beta status last month. WorldCat includes both the faceted navigation and “Editions” feature (tying like titles together into a single record display) made popular by RedLightGreen. The second mouse …
Overheard at IFLA
Posted On Aug 29 2006Okay, so I heard it second hand–I was nowhere near Seoul, Korea, for the 72nd IFLA conference (I’ve only been to IFLA once. . .when it was in Boston) when Sungdae Ahn, vice president and general manager of EBSCO Information Services-Korea, said, “Service, not content, is the new king.” While she might not have been the first to use that phrase, I’m not quite sure what I think of it. I will give EBSCO their props for creating some pretty innovative services for the content that they already govern. A partnership with WebFeat has increased metasearch access for EBSCO A-Z …
MetaMeta
Posted On Jul 28 2006A colleague of mine likes to joke about something he calls “MetaMeetings” …meetings about meetings. Organizations (especially academic ones, it seems) like to have those. So I was wondering what a blog post about meta stuff should be called. There are many meta things happening out there. EBSCO has announced that eight new publishers have added journal content to MetaPress, their electronic content management and hosting service. This got me thinking about institutional repositories, a topic I have been able to mostly avoid (beyond hating that horrible name). When I have turned my attention to it, I am always surprised …