Group items tagged

"How hard can it be" Katipo staff wondered, "to write a library system that uses Internet technology?" Well, not very, as it turned out.

Koha would thus be available to anyone who wanted to try it and had the technical expertise to implement it.

ensure the software writers did not miss any key points in their fundamental understanding of the way libraries work.

fairly confident that we already had a high level of IT competence right through the staff, a high level of understanding of what our current system did and did not do.

The programming we commissioned cost us about 40% of the purchase price of an average turn-key solution.

no requirement to purchase a maintenance contract, and no annual licence fees.

An open source project is never finished.

Open source projects only survive if a community builds up around the product to ensure its continual improvement. Koha is stronger than ever now, supported by active developers (programmers) and users (librarians)

There are a range of support options available for Koha, both free and paid, and this has contributed to the overall strength of the Koha project.

Vendors like Anant, Biblibre, ByWater, Calyx, Catalyst, inLibro, IndServe, Katipo, KohaAloha, LibLime, LibSoul, NCHC, OSSLabs, PakLAG, PTFS, Sabinet, Strategic Data, Tamil and Turo Technology take the code and sell support around the product, develop add-ons and enhancements for their clients and then contribute these back to the project under the terms of the GPL license.

FRBR [5] arrangement, although of course it wasn’t called that 10 years ago, it was just a logical way for us to arrange the catalogue. A single bibliographic record essentially described the intellectual content, then a bunch of group records were attached, each one representing a specific imprint or publication.

The release of Koha 3.0 in late 2008 brought Koha completely into the web 2.0 age and all that entails. We are reconciled to taking a small step back for now, but the FRBR logic is around and RDA should see us back where want to be in a year or so – but with all the very exciting features and opportunities that Koha 3 has now.

In the early days, the Koha list appeared to have been dominated by programmers but I have noticed a lot more librarians participating now

"Adopt technology that keeps data open and free, abandon[ing] technology that does not." The time is right for OSS.

population of users on a particular social bookmarking site influences not only the amount but also the type and quality of bookmarks in the system.

In all these examples, the community of users is an important factor in ensuring the quality of the resources bookmarked in the system.

Social bookmarking tools allow users to classify their bookmarks by assigning tags

With regard to information literacy instruction, Luo (2010) found evidence that librarians are using tags to present course-specific resources to students.

hey can also be used to engage students in resource discovery

This use of social bookmarking initiated from a need to simply collect and share resources but has yielded other benefits. Traditionally in projects of this type, librarians collate lists of resources that are then passed on to the web developer to turn into a web page. This is fairly labour intensive for the web developer and means that any time subject librarians want to add or edit links they have to submit the changes to the web developer. Scholar includes a tool that allows RSS feeds to be created from searches of Scholar tags. In this case, the web developer just created links to the Scholar feeds – rather than manually creating lists of links and descriptions in HTML. As well as saving the initial job of manually creating HTML pages, it allows the page to be dynamic. If a subject librarian wants to add a web resource to the page, all they have to do is to bookmark that page with the appropriate tags in Scholar. The new webpage is automatically added to the feed without the need for the intervention of the web developer.

librarians can share each other's discoveries.

Keyword classification: involves grouping records into broad, functionally based areas represented by keywords. Records are further classified by the use of activity descriptors and optional subject descriptors.

Classification: systematic identification and arrangement of business activities and/or records into categories according to logically structured conventions, methods, and procedural rules represented in a classification system. (AS ISO 15489.1, 3.5).

A thesaurus is a tool that supports the classification and management of records, usually at the file level. It ensures that classification terms are used consistently throughout a recordkeeping system. It is a 'controlled language' tool.

A thesaurus may have: multiple entry points to guide users to preferred terms and correct titles cross-referencing scope notes and tips strict control of language, and alphabetical or hierarchical presentation.

Functional classification establishes and documents the relationships between records and the business activities they document which is essential in understanding records, and in particular understanding over time.

The Memory Maker provides a taste of what is possible when collecting institutions modernise their practices for keeping and managing copyright information, using Creative Commons licenses or ‘no known copyright’ statements.

Learning about ‘hyperlinks’ today, these young New Zealanders will be the developers and creators of tomorrow.

The full set of contributions is accessible through a Coming Home search tool, occasionally on a google-like hosted search page (Figure 5), but more often through a search widget embedded on many New Zealand Web sites (Figure 6).

Digital New Zealand is developing and testing solutions that showcase what’s possible when we really focus on improving access to and discovery of New Zealand content.

Technically, the Digital New Zealand system is in three parts: a backend, a metadata store, and a front end.

The coolest thing to be done with your data will be thought of by someone else

“an API is basically a way to give developers permission to hack into your database”.