exlibris – commonplace.net

Just in time or just in case?

October 16, 2009February 14, 2020 Lukas KosterLibrary

Metasearch vs. harvesting & indexing The other day I gave a presentation for the Assembly of members of the local Amsterdam Libraries Association “Adamnet“, about the Amsterdam Digital Library search portal that we host at the Library of the University of Amsterdam. This portal is built with our MetaLib metasearch tool and offers simultaneous access to, at the moment, 20 local library catalogues. A large part of this presentation was dedicated to all possible (and […]

Roadmaps to uncertainty

October 6, 2009January 12, 2020 Lukas KosterLibrary

What will library staff do 5 years from now? I attended the IGeLU 2009 annual conference in Helsinki September 6-9. IGeLU is the International Group of Ex Libris Users, an independent organisation that represents Ex Libris customers. Just to state my position clearly I would like to add that I am a member of the IGeLU Steering Committee.These annual user group meetings typically have three types of sessions: internal organisational sessions (product working groups and […]

Who needs MARC?

May 15, 2009November 3, 2020 Lukas KosterGeneral

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 […]

Developers meet developers, people meet people

December 14, 2008January 12, 2020 Lukas KosterGeneral

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 […]

How open are open systems?

October 12, 2008January 12, 2020 Lukas KosterLibrary

In my post “LING – Library integration next generation” I mentioned Marshall Breedings presentation at TICER “Library Automation Challenges for the next generation”.Besides “Moving toward new generation of library automation” one of his other two topics was “A Mandate for Openness”, about Open Source, Open Systems, Open Content.Marshall Breeding distinguishes five types of Open Systems, three of which in my view are the most important: Closed Systems: black boxes, only accessible via the user interfaces […]

Library Systems and the world of hardware

October 8, 2008January 12, 2020 Lukas KosterGeneral

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 […]

So, commonplace.net….

October 3, 2008January 12, 2020 Lukas KosterGeneral

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 […]