TechEssence.info

I saw a note come through recently about a server that the University of Cincinnati Libraries had set up to be a "sandbox". What this means is that it is a place where new software (particularly open source software) can be installed for staff to investigate.

The sole admonition is to "Play nice together" and it currently has such applications as Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, WordPress, phpWiki, Tiki, and Moodle installed, among others.

I think this ia a wonderful idea and I'm glad to see that the University of Cincinnati Libraries takes their responsibility to help its staff learn new technologies seriously. I wish that more of our institutions did so.

Jessica Hupp at VirtualHosting.com has put together an amazing list of web

Library Journal picked up on the Talis podcast about the Library Software Manifesto

Yes, the server was hacked recently, and as soon as I discovered it to be the case I backed up the data, wiped it, and reinstalled all the software.

The folks at Talis pulled together a group of knowledgeable folks to discuss the Library Software Manifesto published here at TechEssence.info. It has now been published on the Talking with Talis web site as a podcast.

Last week I gave a talk at the 2007 CODI Conference (Customers of Dynix, Inc.). I had decided to take as my topic a "library software manifesto" in which I would outline the rights and responsibilities of libraries and library software vendors. I posted about this on the Code4Lib mailing list and used some of the resulting comments in the resulting Library Software Manifesto published on this site.

Should you focus your efforts on a smaller number of really big technology projects, or a larger number of smaller projects? Of course there is no one right answer for all institutions, and it’s likely no institution would rely on one approach to the exclusion of the other. But it can be difficult to find the right balance between the large-scale, high-impact initiatives and those that are more nimble and quick to appear.

We are ALL busy. Yesterday for example, I had a plan of what I was going to accomplish at work, but then I came in to an e-mail from a student asking for articles about the Second Anglo-Afghan War (for which we had next to nothing in the databases so I really had to hunt), and after that I found out about some dead links I needed to fix on a Web page, and then I got a call from a professor whom I needed to talk through some database searches, and then I had a reference shift all afternoon. So by the end of the day, I was shocked to find that I'd barely gotten any of the things I'd wanted to accomplish done. Imagine, if this is going on every day, how I, or anyone else in our profession, can actually make time for any sort of continuing education work?

I was at a meeting of librarians and library staff recently in which the topic of how to involve more individuals in technology projects was raised. One individual made a particularly salient point – that librarians and library staff be given opportunities and encouraged to participate in technology projects, rather than being given a timed ultimatum to do so.

Reading the MIRACLE project report on institutional repositories today, I came across a survey question that asked respondents to rate various factors involved in choosing a repository platform. The exact phrasing of one factor: "Adherence to open-access standards."

This betrays a common and sometimes distracting confusion, which I will try to clear up.