Libraries operate within a culture that posits collaborating towards a common good, through resource sharing, cooperative development of standards, and the building of common work tools. The semantic Web, and the recent rapprochement between RDA and DCMI, have the potential to advance our contribution to the common good in ways that have never been possible before, yet there are still economic, legal, technical and cultural hurdles that are likely to conspire to keep libraries working within institutional silos. This talk will look at how the NCSU Libraries' is trying to work toward a more open catalog platform by creating a web services layer to support features such as RSS and by integrating structured data from outside of the ILS, starting with classification and geographical hierarchies, and potentially extending to chronological hierarchies, FRBR "work-level" records, and academic discipline-related vocabularies. These efforts point to the need for access to additional data that is outside the local machine environment. We look at some of these data sources and assess the obstacles that will have to be overcome before library catalogs, and librarians, will be able to fully join the broader Web 2.0 discovery environment.

This paper discusses Google Scholar as an extension of Kilgourâ s goal to improve the availability of information. Kilgour was instrumental in the early development of the online library catalog, and he proposed passage retrieval to aid in information seeking. Google Scholar is a direct descendent of these technologies foreseen by Kilgour. Google Scholar holds promise as a means for libraries to expand their reach to new user communities, and to enable libraries to provide quality resources to users during their online search process.

This article seeks to shift the literature on chat-based reference services beyond the current spate of case studies and discussions of emerging standards and best practices in providing chat-based reference, to a higher level of discussion on the creation and discussion of theoretical frameworks to unite these standards and practices. The article explores the various steps in the process of providing synchronous, chat-based reference, as well as issues involved in providing such service at each step. The purpose of this exploration is twofold: First, this article presents some open research questions at each step in the process of providing chat-based reference service. Second, the entire process of providing chat-based reference is viewed as a whole, and a model of the provision of chat-based reference service is developed at a high level of abstraction. It is hoped that this model may serve as a conceptual framework for future discussions of and development of applications for chat-based reference.

A tutorial of basic Unix commands prepared for an introduction to technology course in a MLS program.

In this session, Dan Scott (the contributor of the schema.org microdata enhancement for Evergreen and a participant in the schemabibex effort to extend schema.org to better support bibliographic data) will discuss the origins of the microdata standards, explain how nominally machine-readable cataloguing data can fit into the machine-actionable semantic web, reflect on the impact that a microdata-enabled catalogue has had at Laurentian University to date, and offer some thoughts about the future of microdata – including the schema.org and RDFa Lite standards. / WARNING: you may come away with ideas not only for enriching your library system, but for your web site and other web-based library applications as well! Microdata enables search engines and other automated processes to make sense of the data on a web page — like identifying the title, author, and identification number of a book from all of the other content on a given page. Web pages enhanced with microdata contribute to the semantic web, and in turn are more likely to be incorporated into search engines and advanced web applications. If it sounds like we should publish microdata from Evergreen’s catalogue, you will be pleased to know that Evergreen was (naturally) the first library system to incorporate microdata in its default public catalogue with the 2.2.0 release in June 2012.

With the development of internet and the trend of information system technology, the object of digital library research has extended to the application of digital archives. Basically, digital libraries store huge amounts of data, including text, image, map audio, video and illustration via electronic formats. Further more, digital libraries could be conveniently accessed through the Internet. As the research intention of network information systems, the critical technology in digital library research could be how to let users effectively harvest correct information from the digital library. Digital library users could discover, present, and organize knowledge among these data of digital libraries. The traditional library automation system, related applying technologies and protocols, such as MARC, Z39.50 and ISO 2709, could not totally match the requirement of digital archives. The purpose of this research is to find out how to effectively manage and apply the related technology of digital archive to handle the existing operation processes in library and the management requirement of digital archives. This paper discusses an evolution model of the related technology of library automation systems.

Purpose: This paper explores the use of blogs as a platform for providing reference service, and discusses Lyceum, an open source software project from ibiblio.org, for this purpose. Design/methodology/approach: The following topics are explored: the evolution of libraries' uses of blogs, the advantages of conducting the reference transaction as a collaborative effort, and the use of blogs as an environment that fosters collaboration. The argument is made that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services Findings: It is argued that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services. Lyceum, an open source blogosphere application, is discussed as an environment for blog-based reference service. Originality/value: To date, blogs are not being used by a library reference services, and by few online reference service unaffiliated with libraries. This paper will be useful to libraries and other reference services interested in conducting the reference transaction as a community effort.

Purpose: This paper explores the use of blogs as a platform for providing reference service, and discusses Lyceum, an open source software project from ibiblio.org, for this purpose. Design/methodology/approach: The following topics are explored: the evolution of libraries' uses of blogs, the advantages of conducting the reference transaction as a collaborative effort, and the use of blogs as an environment that fosters collaboration. The argument is made that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services Findings: It is argued that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services. Lyceum, an open source blogosphere application, is discussed as an environment for blog-based reference service. Originality/value: To date, blogs are not being used by a library reference services, and by few online reference service unaffiliated with libraries. This paper will be useful to libraries and other reference services interested in conducting the reference transaction as a community effort.

The Public Libraries Survey is conducted annually by the National Center for Education Statistics through the Federal-State Cooperative System for Public Library Data. The data are collected by a network of state data coordinators appointed by the chief officers of state library agencies in the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and the outlying areas. Data are collected on population of legal service area, service outlets, public service hours, library materials, total circulation, circulation of children's materials, reference transactions, library visits, children's program attendance, electronic services and information, staff, operating income, operating expenditures, capital outlay, and more.

A 6 month Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded project on a terminology registry scoping study led by UKOLN in collaboration with Glamorgan and OCLC is just starting. This study aims to analyse issues related to potential delivery of a Terminology Registry as a shared infrastructure service within the JISC Information Environment. It will consider how a Registry might support development of terminology and other services within the context of a services oriented environment. The study is briefly outlined along with some previous work in this presentation. The author welcomes input and suggestions.