TechEssence.info

Rachel Singer Gordon has launched a site, The Tech Static to "assist librarians with technology-related collection development." A press release about the launch says that the site contains:

* Reviews of current computer books
* Reviews of technology-related titles targeted at librarians
* Collection development articles (weeding, “must-haves,” balancing a computer book collection)
* Prepublication alerts
* Publisher press releases
* DVD and ebook reviews
* Announcements
* … and more!

There are already a number of book reviews of technology books available.

Neil Godfrey recently posted an "INFORMAL Comparison of some institutional repository solutions" that anyone trying to make a platform decision may find useful. You will no doubt need to go much deeper before making a final decision, but at least this may serve as a good summary introduction to what each platform provides.

Also keep in mind that the landscape can be slightly more complicated than depicted here. For example, with the Digital Commons solution from bepress.com, you can easily add a full-featured peer review publication system to your institutional repository. This is something you cannot do with many other IR solutions, including the popular DSpace platform. This distinction is not covered in Godfrey's informal review. But overall it isn't a bad place to start in getting to know the various solutions.

The VirtualHosting.com site recently posted an article titled "Test your Website: A 57-Point Checklist for Maximum Usability" that summarizes a number of things to think about, each of which is linked to a different source that discusses that issue in depth. For anyone wanting to make sure their site is up to snuff, it's worth checking this out.

While you're there, you may also want to poke around a bit. Other articles that may be useful to you include "Microformats University" and even "Top 25 (Non-Obvious) Ways RSS Can Make Your Life Easier".

All in all, a site worth keeping your eye on.

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.

"On September 5, 2006, over 250 libraries in the Georgia consortium, PINES, began using a next-generation integrated library system (ILS) they wrote from scratch. Within two months they racked up two million checkouts and half-a-million renewals for a collection of eight million items and 1.5 million borrowers." — "Dawn of a New Era," Library Journal, February 15, 2007.