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 …
More Meta
Posted On Sep 29 2006After spending a couple years of my professional life trying to improve the state of metasearch (federated search, if you prefer), I took a little break from being so passionate about the subject. But, like e-books, it’s one of those library technologies that I just can’t seem to shake an interest in. And it seems like librarians are loosening up a bit and letting patron demands and satisfaction with “good enough” search results replace an entrenched skepticism about the adequacy of metasearch. It’s still amusing to note that it took metasearch for librarians to beatify content providers’ native interfaces, which …
I Own Me
Posted On Sep 22 2006I got a very exciting email today–probably one of the best I have gotten in a long time. It was a statement from Sallie Mae announcing that my last student loan payment would be posted next month. “It’s like you’re a real librarian now,” said Sharon, my loving wife. Actually, that was a good one. I felt like I owned something new. It got me thinking about ownership, sort of a hot topic in libraries for the last several years. I don’t want to belabor content ownership here because others have done that better. My concern lately is just who owns …