Riot Librarian

Category: library systems

  • Planning a Website Re-Vamp, Part I

    Before I started working in the Sonoma State University Library, I knew re-designing the Library website was going to be a priority. Everyone made it clear to me during the interview process that they weren’t happy with the site and that it had historically been one of the bigger challenges in the Library. Fixing the…

  • NISO BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting, Part 1

    April 15th and 16th, I attended NISO’s BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting in Baltimore. The meeting was intended to bring together different people working in the information space, not just librarians but publishers and organizations involved in scholarly communication, to talk about a path forward as we begin to move beyond MARC. The Library of Congress has…

  • The Catalog is Dead

    In the five years I’ve been a part of libraryland, one conversation seems never to die: How can we improve our online catalogs? There are so many ways to approach this question, from a user-interface perspective or a metadata perspective, a software architecture perspective or a task-based perspective. But there is an assumption at work…

  • The Library of the Future?

    During the closing keynote speech at LITA National Forum this year, Sara Houghton encouraged us to engage in a little thought exercise. She wanted us to imagine the ideal library of the future, without the limitations of what we believe is possible or what we’re currently doing. We should, she suggested, set aside some time…

  • MARC as linked data

    I wanted to draw attention to an article I read recently: Improving Presentation of Library Data using FRBR and Linked Data by Anne-Lena Westrum, Asgeir Rekkavik, and Kim Talleras. If you’re curious about how linked data might be implemented in a specific library project, and how you, yourself, might think about going about a similar…

  • Kindle Library Books

    The inability to check out books from my library using my Kindle irked me from the first moment I started using the Kindle. When Amazon and Overdrive announced that they were finally partnering to allow library lending on the Kindle, I was pretty excited. Sure, as a librarian I know it’s far from a perfect…

  • I’d say they’re displeased

    I’m doing some research for a paper I’m hoping to write (in the next 10 days…) and I came across this quote that I can’t help but call prescient. I’m reading Julian Everett Allgood’s 2007 article, “Serials and Multiple Versions, or the Inexorable Trend toward Work-Level Displays” (yes, it’s thrilling), and he writes, Probably the…

  • The Presidents’ Panel

    Perhaps I was a little harsh yesterday on the Twitter, when I was at the RMG Presidents’ Panel. Maybe I shouldn’t have said the Innovative rep was being petulant. Maybe that wasn’t very professional of me, but you know what? It was really unprofessional of him. I guess ILS vendors and their reluctance to provide…