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I was recently asked by Blake Carver, of LIShost, to answer a few questions for an upcoming presentation he was making. I thought that my answer might be interesting to others, so I'm reposting it here. He asked me what is in my "toolbox" (online and offline) that helps me do the following things:

1) Be more productive

This is an interesting and tricky question. I can answer for myself, but in
classic style I will have to say that "your mileage may vary" -- in fact,
I'm fairly certain it will. But I will try to call out those things that are
more broadly applicable.

As someone who is not employed as a programmer, but who has needed enough
technical skills to prototype and develop proof-of-concept services that can
then be re-engineered in a production environment, I've found the following
skills essential:

• Knowledge of a scripting language. I know Perl, but others may suffice as
  

I recently undertook an analysis of the cost savings (if any) of a client's use of automated checkin. This was an interesting project for me because I wasn't sure how it would turn out. Although I'm a big fan of automated checkin for many reasons, I wasn't sure that it would result in clear cost savings for this particular client because they were already using automation in their central sort operation. The automated central sort system included a tote checkin feature -- this means the receiving library only had to scan a tote (or bin) to checkin all the items in the tote. So, to justify the cost of the AMH equipment installed at the individual library, we had to compare it against another similiar sized library that was pretty darn efficient already.

There was a chance that I would find that the cost of their in-library sorter and the automated checkin system wasn't justified. Wrong.

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.

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) are structured methods for one software application to communicate with another. APIs allow programs to interoperate and share data and services in a standard way. Here is a list of library-related APIs that library developers may find useful. If you have ideas for others that would be appropriate for this list, please contact me.

Only APIs that seem to be generally useful are listed here. However, almost any library catalog will have a search API (e.g., Z39.50) and may have others as well depending on the vendor and product. You can also find other APIs by using the directories noted below.

Services

I've been using the expression "learned helplessness" a lot lately because that's how I see the situation libraries have found themselves in after a decade of integrated library systems.

I find it particularly disturbing because so much of the work I do seems to bump into roadblocks that point squarely at the ILS. And worse than the roadblock is the shoulder shrugging of so many of the library folk using that ILS software.

Too many worthy projects have died because the currently available integrated library systems (ILS) available today from commercial, proprietary vendors don't and won't support libraries and the services they've like to be providing to their customers.

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

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.

Executive Summary

People have had the ability to put audio content on the Web for over a decade, but not until the term “podcasting” was coined (two years ago) did so many people start taking advantage of this. This can be attributed to both the incredible ease of use of newer recording and syndication tools and the incredible popularity of the iPod and other MP3 players. Go to almost any place where young people congregate and you will see the ubiquitous white iPod earbuds. Podcasting became popular so quickly that, at the end of 2005, podcast was named the Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary.

In a soon-to-appear Library Journal column, I discuss strategies for an uncertain future. One of those strategies is the topic of this blog posting, since I wanted to both throw this out there for discussion as well as to discuss it more thoroughly than I can in an 800-word column.