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OFFSHOOT is a model of an online catalog that would be moderated by the public library community. Constructed as an alternate means to creating an OPAC, OFFSHOOT is cataloging from the "wiki" point of view. Traditional library catalogs, both the public side and internal side, have historically been "locked", giving library patrons little to no opportunity to annotate the library records. OFFSHOOT is the opposite extreme, giving library patrons complete control over the library catalog records. This enables two things within the library system: a veritable multitude of "catalogers" working on a volume of records that has been traditionally worked on by 3 to 10 people, and an intensive expansion in the amount of cross-referencing within the library catalog.

Welcome to Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. This wiki was created to be a one-stop shop for great ideas and information for all types of librarians. All over the world, librarians are developing successful programs and doing innovative things with technology that no one outside of their library knows about.

If you've done something at your library that you consider a success, please write about it in the wiki or provide a link to outside coverage. If you have materials that would be helpful to other librarians, add them to the wiki. And if you know of a librarian or a library that is doing something great, feel free to include information or links to it. Basically, if you know of anything that might be useful to other librarians (including useful websites), this is the place to put it. I hope this wiki will be a venue where people can share ideas with one another and where librarians can learn to replicate the successes of other libraries.

In January 2007, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) announced its second multi–year technology grant program for America’s public libraries. The purpose of Phase II, Keeping communities connected: The next step is to help public libraries sustain the public access computing infrastructure laid down during Phase I. Now, as then, the goal of the program is to bridge the digital divide. But it is a digital divide as defined by Bill Gates and not the public library community. Situating Gates’ philanthropy within a critical policy frame, this paper considers two alternatives to Gates’ problem definition of the digital divide, and how knowledge of these might benefit those communities served by public access computing (PAC) services as found in public libraries. The two specific alternatives considered come from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and Community Informatics (CI). Significantly, both social movements promote the potential of free and open software as an important part of any solution. Finally, the public library literature is reviewed for patterns in the community’s use of FOSS, and the argument is made for its use in the delivery of PAC services.

This article posits a definition and theory for "Library 2.0". It suggests that recent thinking describing the changing Web as "Web 2.0" will have substantial implications for libraries, and recognizes that while these implications keep very close to the history and mission of libraries, they still necessitate a new paradigm for librarianship. The paper applies the theory and definition to the practice of librarianship, specifically addressing how Web 2.0 technologies such as synchronous messaging and streaming media, blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, RSS feeds, and mashups might intimate changes in how libraries provide access to their collections and user support for that access.

Should the Library of Congress (LC) jettison Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), the longstanding professional taxonomy? That’s one of the provocative suggestions in a new report released last month by LC. “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools,” commissioned by LC and written by associate university librarian Karen Calhoun of Cornell University, was making waves weeks earlier, thanks to a critical review of a draft of her paper, written for AFSCME 2910, the LC Professional Guild, by Thomas Mann (author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research). It warned of “serious negative consequences for the capacity of research libraries to promote scholarly research.”

The American Library Association and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute (http://www.ii.fsu.edu) in the College of Information at Florida State University, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is surveying a national sample of public libraries regarding their Internet connectivity and computing access resources.

he data from the enhanced study will help you to identify the impacts of your library's public computer and Internet access on the community that your library serves.

The authors of the scheme contend that there was and is a need for a classification system for libraries of Judaica to classify and arrange their collections according to Jewish concepts based upon Jewish thought and terminology. This paper describes the history of A Classification System for Libraries of Judaica it's development, the process involved in preparing the 2nd and 3rd revisions, and its use in various libraries.Keywords: Librarianship, Libraries, Classification, Judaica

Creating a digital library might seem like a task best left to a large research collection with a vast staff and generous budget. However, tools for successfully creating digital libraries are getting easier to use all the time.

This annotated bibliography was commissioned to support the NSDL Evaluation Workshop (planned for October 2003) that will 1) explore the issues around evaluating the impact of digital libraries on education and that will 2) begin developing a strategy to evaluate the impact of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) on STEM education. The bibliography’s purpose, then, is to identify research to date on evaluating the impact of digital libraries on learning and teaching. It contains a Summary & Analysis section, which defines terms, makes observations about the literature, reviews the resources included, highlights issues, and suggests areas for further consideration.

Casey Bisson, with the help of Jessamyn West and Ryan Eby, reports on open-source software (OSS) and its use and importance in libraries in the third issue of Library Technology Reports in 2007.

NE2007 offers a full, diverse and challenging educational program, with 34 programs over the course of three days (Thursday, Oct. 18-Saturday, Oct. 20). The theme is “Libraries Without Borders”, emphasizing the internationalization of law, the globalization of legal practice, and the roles and responsibilities of librarians in the changing information environment.

In this emerging model, the library is no longer a destination.Instead, the library provides access to a destination… outside of the library!

In an online world of small pieces loosely joined, librarians are among the most well qualified and highly motivated joiners of those pieces. Library patrons, meanwhile, are in transition. Once mainly consumers of information, they are now, on the two-way web, becoming producers too. Can libraries function not only as centers of consumption, but also as centers of production?

The digital library in a box project was created to simplify and enable the creation of digital libraries.

The Lit Wiki is a collection of film, theatre and literature database resources available through Ohio University Libraries. It is designed to assist researchers in finding the best resources for their projects or topics. The Lit Wiki contains links to databases and websites. Nearly all of the resources will only be available to current members of the Ohio University community, as many of the resources are subscription databases.