Engaging with library users on the web is no longer restricted to simply putting a static HTML file on a server and calling it a successful website. Yet without technical assistance and forethought, content management can be an actively complex and frustrating process. A content management system like WordPress lets you manage your website more … Continue reading WordPress as a Library CMS
Mobile devices are ubiquitous in today’s society, and there’s no evidence that that is going to change. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, as of mid-2010, 82% of American adults own a mobile phone or a mobile computing device that works as a phone. it is crucial for librarians to understand mobile … Continue reading Libraries and Mobile Services
Connecting users with the information they seek is one of the central pillars of our profession. Web-scale discovery services for libraries are those services capable of searching quickly and seamlessly across a vast range of local and remote preharvested and indexed content, providing relevancy-ranked results in an intuitive interface expected by today’s information seekers. First … Continue reading Web-Scale Discovery
In the November/December issue of Library Technology Reports, ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom Collaborated with Jason Griffey, Sarah Houghton-Jan and Eli Neiburger to produce “Privacy and Freedom of Information in 21st Century Libraries”, a practical guide to issues facing today’s library professionals. This excerpt comes from the issue’s introduction. The intersections of technology, security, and … Continue reading Bridging Intellectual Freedom and Technology
OpenURL link resolvers have become a vital part of many libraries’ offerings, especially those of academic libraries. As resolvers have become more important, they have undergone the same iterative usability testing and interface improvements that are common for library websites and catalogs. Only recently has effort been devoted to improving the functionality of resolvers by … Continue reading Rethinking Library Linking: Making OpenURL Better with Data, Data, and More Data
Over the years, librarians and researchers have studied the usage of books, journals, meeting rooms, photocopiers, programs, and just about any other resource or service libraries have chosen to provide. The reasons for doing so are simple: Librarians wish to provide their communities with resources and services of the highest utility, effectively foreseeing which materials … Continue reading Measuring E-Resource Use: Standards and Practice for Counting Remote Users
After the initial hype is past, the real value of an emerging technology unfolds as librarians adopt, test, and learn from it on the ground. By understanding a tool’s practical library affordances and how they are adopted, adapted, and rejected, we can better evaluate its local promise critically, creatively, and with an eye toward sustainability. … Continue reading Hope, Hype, and VoIP: Riding the Library Technology Cycle
The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange specification defines a set of new standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of web resources. This presents an exciting opportunity to revisit how digital libraries are provisioned. ORE and its concept of aggregation—that a set of digital objects of different types and from different locations … Continue reading Aggregating Web Resources
If we think back, we can imagine a time before the book and, once books became inexpensive and widespread, how revolutionary and democratizing the book was as a tool for sharing information. It must have been incredible to think that you could have so much text in such a compact form, and so many of … Continue reading Gadgets and Gizmos
This article was adapted from a blog post on ALA TechSource Blog. View the original article. Mobile, mobile, mobile. It’s all we hear these days. Mobile…it’s the new black. Mobile…you just GOTTA. At my library, mobile web browsers have only accounted for .3% of the total site traffic so far this semester. Taking all the public PCs … Continue reading Planning for a Mobile Site
Library catalogs have evolved over time as technology has changed. The last 150 years have seen a progression from book catalogs to cards, and eventually, to online catalogs. Each of these changes has provided new capabilities that can be adopted for improved user services. The next step in this evolution is on the horizon, and … Continue reading Cataloging Horizons
Before the current wave of mass digitization ventures were even a gleam in the eye of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, many libraries were already engaged in their own endeavors. These early projects often involved digitization of historical images, maps, and documents centered on a place or historical period. The projects were innovative at the time and … Continue reading Digital Renewal
