Data. The final frontier.
Linked Data and bibliographic metadata models Some time after I wrote “UMR – Unified Metadata Resources“, I came across Chris Keene’s post “Linked data & RDF : draft notes for comment“, “just a list of links and notes” about Linked Data, RDF and the Semantic Web, put together to start collecting information about “a topic that will greatly impact on the Library / Information management world“. While reading this post and working my way […]
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 […]
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 […]
It strikes me that training for and documentation about our new Aleph ILS are aimed at three types of staff: system administrators, system librarians and staff (expert) users. Basically system administrators are supposed to take care of “technical stuff” like installing, upgrading, monitoring, backups, general system configuration etc., while staff users are dealing with the “real stuff”, like cataloging, acquisition, circulation, etc. System librarians appear to be a kind of hybrid species, both technicians and […]
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 […]
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 […]
End of August I attended the Technological Developments: Threats and Opportunities for Libraries module of TICER – Digital Libraries à la Carte 2008 at the University of Tilburg, The Netherlands. One of the speakers was Marshall Breeding. His presentation “Library Automation Challenges for the next generation” consisted of three topics, one of which was “Moving toward new generation of library automation”. He discussed “rethinking the ILS”. The old I(ntegrated) L(ibrary) S(ystem) was about integration of […]