TECHNOLOGY | In Practice selective about which records they bring into their system, similar to OCLC’s Connexion, except that LibLime is giving it away. Biblios .net has the potential to be a killer app and is worth keeping a close eye on. LibLime has also added the community digital repository software Kete to its service offerings. Kete was developed in New Zealand by the same folks who created Koha. For community-centric libraries, Kete may be an affordable and effective way to begin quickly building a repository of images, documents, and audio or video recordings. Innovative Interfaces showcased its new digital repository offering, Content Pro. Innovative has focused on ease of publishing with a one-step publishing process that takes advantage of Dublin Core data fields.
Cataloging at full tilt
The next-generation catalog interface mill is cranking at full tilt now. I’m still not convinced that companies that have traditionally specialized in building rock-solid back-office systems should suddenly be in the user interface business. Several have attempted that leap and fallen short of the mark. Yet a couple of new offerings caught my eye this year. One of the more innovative and bold approaches comes from AutoGraphics, which has just rolled out AGent Iluminar, a discovery tool built on Adobe’s open-source Flex framework. That does mean that visitors to AGent Iluminar catalogs will need to have the Flash plug-in installed, which could shut out a very small segment of a library’s user base. However, I can respect Auto-Graphic’s decision to use Flex on the premise that progress should not be held back by a small group of users who lag behind the technological curve. AGent Iluminar looks and feels great, incorporating some very attractive and intuitive user-
interface elements, such as the ability to drag and drop items into a holds queue and a new-books-cover browser. Auto-Graphics is clearly trying to position itself as a leader in the library-rich internet application business. TLC’s new LS2 PAC looks to be promising and sports an interesting book river, or collection of clickable book jackets, that slowly makes its way across the screen. Prior to Midwinter, SirsiDynix released Enterprise 2.0, the second generation of its new search solution. The OPAC add-on has enhanced logic and reasoning functionality (fuzzy logic) that will help prevent misspellings and promote successful search results despite diacritics and the omission of suffixes and prefixes. Enterprise customers can now also incorporate search results for selected websites into the catalog itself. SirsiDynix is expanding into the cloud as well—cloud computing, that is. Vice President of Innovation Stephen Abram told AL that the firm was looking to SaaS (software as a service), along with RFID and shelfreadiness, to help its customers save money during the current economic crisis. The savings, Abram said, come from libraries being able to eliminate costly server hardware, maintenance contracts, and staff time; instead, they can rely on one of SirsiDynix’s five “green” server farms to do the heavy lifting. This type of offering may foreshadow a day when the ILS is purely a cloudbased service. EBSCO’s interesting news centered on the forthcoming EBSCOhost Integrated Search, a federated search tool that will allow libraries to incorporate their other electronic information resources and present it all in a custom interface. EBSCO has also added a Biography Reference Center, three new historical digital archive collections, and a
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Summon is also equipped with an API (application programming interface) that allows developers to incorporate the product’s functionality into their own programs—good news, given the current revival of library-driven development. Another major splash on the showroom floor was made by the debut of Ex Libris’ bX, a Web 2.0 scholarly recommendation service. The first of its kind to draw on a massive amount of collective usage data from research communities around the world, bX also looks to be extensible and is based on open interoperability standards such as One offering on OpenURL and the Exhibits floor OAI-PMH. For may foreshadow those libraries that are rolling out a day when next-gen catalog the integrated systems, bX library system is should play nicely in the sandbox. purely a cloudLibLime, howbased service. ever, is building its own sandbox and inviting everyone to come and play. LibLime’s big Midwinter news centered around biblios.net, its free (as in beer) cataloging productivity suite. Biblios.net lets anyone in the world sign up to become a cataloger (in much the same way as Library Thing) and provides a professionalgrade cataloging tool with which libraries and individuals can create, share, and transfer bibliographic records. Catalogers can also pull in records from any open Z39.50 server, and modify and resubmit their changes. The whole idea behind biblios .net is wonderfully subversive and may change the way we think about cataloging forever. No, it will not let complete strangers update your catalog, but it will let you share your library’s records with complete strangers. Users of biblios.net can be
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