It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of BIBFRAME, it was the season of RDA, it was the spring of hope, it […]
American Museum of Natural History Launches Free Online Image Database
The American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) research library last month hosted the official launch of its new online image database for Digital Special Collections. Begun as a project to digitize 1,000 of the museum’s photos and rare book illustrations, the Digital Special Collections program has evolved into a long-term project that will offer the public free online access to the museum’s research library collection. The new database includes more than 7,000 archival images, including photographs from 19th century scientific expeditions and illustrations from rare books dating back to the 16th century.
EBSCO Opens Metadata to Third-Party Discovery Services
In a move that will enhance the functionality of discovery services available through its partners and competitors alike, EBSCO Information Services last month announced a new policy on metadata sharing that will make all metadata for 129 of its full-text databases, more than 550,000 ebooks and more than 70 historical digital archives available to third-party discovery services. The policy also outlines a commitment to provide assistance with linking technology that has been requested by customers. Previously, the company had required third-party discovery services, such as OCLC’s WorldCat or Ex Libris’s Primo Discovery and Delivery, to use an EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) API in order to search EBSCO content.
Stellar Databases: SLJ Readers’ Favorites and Other Essential Electronic Resources
Everywhere you look, librarians are on the hunt for databases, databases, and more databases. But which one is best? Which offers material that your students will use? And which one will be accessible to them? Wonder no more.
It Didn’t Start With You
Recently a couple things happened that make me despair of ever having prior work not be repeated. The first incident was at a large library conference at the beginning of the year, with a panel about aggregating metadata from multiple contributors. The room overflowed with attendees, as the topic was much more popular than the […]
The OPAC is Dead
Anyone who has heard me speak in the last decade or so has likely heard my mini-diatribe against the acronym “OPAC”. Besides being impenetrable jargon, it is thoroughly anachronistic. It owes its life to an extremely brief period of modern librarianship when we had automated circulation systems that didn’t have a publicly available instantiation. That […]
ProQuest Launches Free Version of Flow, a Cloud-Based Document Management Platform
A version of Flow— ProQuest ‘s cloud-based collaboration and document management tool—is now available for free to researchers, including those affiliated with non-subscribing institutions. Launched in mid-2013 as an alternative to Mendeley and Zotero, the platform helps researchers discover, store, and organize academic articles, citations, and metadata downloaded from electronic databases, and collaborate with other researchers in a cloud-based environment.
Colorado Library Consortium, SkyRiver Partnership Offers Bibliographic Services to Small Libraries
The Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC) recently announced an agreement with library automation software provider Innovative Interfaces to make SkyRiver bibliographic services available to libraries throughout the state. SkyRiver will facilitate a comprehensive audit of CLiC’s AspenCat union catalog, and ultimately, will offer the consortium’s 400 libraries a source of cataloging records.
The Post-MARC Era, Part 2, Where the Problems Lie, Part 3
Structured Data on Web Pages
By now the announcement of a collaborative project by the big search engines to create a vocabulary for encoding metatada for people, places, and things, is old news. Schema.org made a splash a while back, but it’s a bit hard to tell what the take-up has been like by web managers. However, since I recently […]