Data. The final frontier.
Connecting real books, metadata and people I spent one day in the stacks of the off-site central storage facility of the Library of the University of Amsterdam as one of the volunteers helping the library perform a huge stock control operation which will take years. Goal of this project is to get a complete overview of the discrepancy between what’s on the shelves and what is in the catalogue. We’re talking about 65 kilometer of […]
Lessons from Cycling for Libraries As I am writing this, more than 100 people working in and for libraries from all over the world are cycling from Amsterdam to Brussels in the Cycling for Libraries 2013 event, defying heat, cold, wind and rain. And other cyclists ;-). Cycling for Libraries is an independent unconference on wheels that aims to promote and defend the role of libraries, mainly public libraries, in and for society. This year […]
The connection between information technology and library information systems This is the first post in a series of three [1. Mainframe to mobile – 2. Mobile app or mobile web? – 3. Mobile library services] The functions, services and audience of library information systems, as is the case with all information systems, have always been dependent on and determined by the existing level of information technology. Mobile devices are the latest step in this development. […]
Why use a non-normalised metadata exchange format for suboptimal data storage? This week I had a nice chat with André Keyzer of Groningen University library and Peter van Boheemen of Wageningen University Library who attended OCLC’s Amsterdam Mashathon 2009. As can be expected from library technology geeks, we got talking about bibliographic metadata formats, very exciting of course. The question came up: what on earth could be the reason for storing bibliographic metadata in exchange […]
In my post “Tweeting Libraries” among other things I described my Personal Twitter experience as opposed to Institutional Twitter use. Since then I have discovered some new developments in my own Twitter behaviour and some trends in Twitter at large: individual versus social. There have been some discussions on the web about the pros and cons and the benefits and dangers of social networking tools like Twitter, focusing on “noise” (uninteresting trivial announcements) versus […]
As you may have noticed from some of my tweets, the Library of the Unversity of Amsterdam, my place of work, is in the process of replacing its ILS (Integrated Library System). All in all this project, or better these two projects (one selecting a new ILS, the other one implementing it) will have taken 18 months or more from the decision to go ahead until STP (Switch to Production), planned for August 15 this […]
Last month I was in the opportunity to participate in the first official Ex Libris “Developers meet developers” meeting in Jerusalem, November 12-13, 2008. The meeting was dedicated to the new Open Platform strategy that Ex Libris has adopted. I already mentioned this development in my post How open are open systems?. Together with one of the other attendees, Mark Dehmlow, of Notre Dame University Library, I wrote a short report on this meeting in […]
In his post “Twitter me this” Owen Stephens writes about differences in use and audience of Social Networking Sites. (Apparently at Imperial College London they had a similar kind of Web2.0 Learning programme as we had at the Library of the University of Amsterdam.) Owen distinguishes audiences on several, intermixed levels (my interpretation): “young” (e.g. MySpace ) vs. “old(er)” (e.g. Facebook ); “business/networking” (e.g. LinkedIn ) vs. “family and friends” (also FaceBook); “professional” (e.g. Ning […]
The project for implementation of Aleph as the new ILS for the Library of the University of Amsterdam started last week (October 2) with the official kick-off meeting. The Ex Libris project plan was presented to the members of the project team, bottlenecks were identified, and a lot of adjustments were made to the planning in order to be able to carry out more tasks simultaneously and thus earlier in time. First steps are installation […]
I have had this domain name for a long time, before I started working with digital library systems, even before I knew about them. It was January 2000, at the peak of web 1.0. My main motive was that I wanted to have an email address that I would not have to change every so often because of disappearing free email providers (my first email address was something at crosswinds.net). But I also wanted to […]