Yesterday, while the Mock Senate was taking place in the Library's Main Room, I decided to upload some of the MARC cataloging records for magazines and journals from EBSCOhost to our library catalog (home access/school access). It's turned out to be a more exhilarating and complicated process than I had anticipated.

I had already uploaded the records from Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center (a Gale product which we've had for a number of years). There weren't very many of them since I had only downloaded those for periodicals with full text. I was able to quickly check the records to make sure they were compatible with ones already in the catalog.

I had downloaded the records from the Advanced Placement Source database the previous week and they were just waiting on my desktop to be uploaded to the catalog. I knew there were thousands of them because I had looked at the lists which EBSCO makes available from its website. I was concerned that they not overwhelm the approximately 35,000 records in my catalog. About 30,000 of those records are for books, the rest are for audiovisual items, websites, other electronic resources, print periodicals, pamphlet files, maps, etc.

Anyway I decided to take the plunge and went through the fairly simple process of importing the records into the catalog. In the end I believe just over 2,000 record were added to the catalog through this process. In the long run I think this is a great addition to the catalog because each record has a link which lead directly to the particular periodical in the Advanced Placement Source database. In other words, if I want to see Atlantic Monthly, I just click on the link which says "Available on EBSCOhost" and I'm instantly taken to a list of all the issues available (back to 1985).

Now, of course, most of the periodicals imported into the catalog are a good deal more esoteric than Atlantic Monthly. How about the IBM journal of research and development? Or The International journal of African historical studies or APMIS acta pathologica, microbiologica et immunologica Scandinavica?

My next task is to go in a clean up the records, many of which come with multilingual subject headings and other anomalous fields. I started editing an alphabetical list and was able to get through the As, the Bs and most of the Cs, by end of today.

In the long run I think this will really enhance the usefulness of the OPAC by giving access to such resources as seventeen law reviews, scores of scientific and medical research journals, dozens of literary journals, and many other periodicals published all across the world. This access should enhance our application for the International Baccalaureate program and help our Advanced Placement and other students find good, reliable, accessible sources of information for all the creative research projects their teachers challenge them with every day.

Technology--can't live with it, can't live without it!

I got remote access to my web catalog back today after a short hiatus when my IT guru, Becky, who I couldn't live without, was able to convince the district-level folks they need to open a port on the server so that users could see the catalog.
One of the issues we all face as we improve access to resources which are more and more digital is that we are part of a larger community and that most of us don't control every aspect of our environments as much we think we'd like to. In fact, I'm very happy leaving the technical side of things to those whose job it is to handle it.
This just hearkens back to the time when we initially set up the web OPAC and had the same issues about remote access. Many schools/school districts don't allow remote access to their OPACs for various reasons centering around security and hacking threats. There is evidently a real concern that people outside the system can bypass the security firewalls by accessing our OPACs. As I said I don't know enough about security to be able to say whether this concern is well-founded but I do trust those who say it can be a problem. In any case I'm glad to work for a district which values my professional judgment about such matters and is willing to make the system work for our libraries.
I'm sure I've mentioned AquaBrowser on this blog before. I'm hoping soon to be able to share this new interface with everyone. The same issue which arose with the web OPAC was also holding up the deployment of AB so I think we'll see some progress soon.

Why the OPAC sucks

The three previous posts were added from another blog where Karen Schneider has conveniently listed all the reasons she thinks OPACs suck. I happen to agree that they suck but it will take me some time to go though her reasons and see exactly what she's thinking.
In the meantime I am still in the process of getting AquaBrowser installed at school and will let everyone know when it's available. I'm not only installing AB but my tech has also set up a new server for the library which I will be able to use for library wikis, etc. Sometime next year I'm expecting the district to migrate to Follett's Destiny and the whole shebang will move to a server at the district office. I do feel I'm pushing the boundaries but that's nothing new.

Catching up and a blog Link about Web 2.0 on YouTube (Week 4, #s 7 and 8)

It's fascinating to me how many ways we get info these days and how hard it is (for me at least) to keep things organized. I use Google Notebook (now out of beta) to note websites I'm interested in. I've tried delicious but haven't really caught the bug. I used A9 for a while and loved it because it was basically a bookmarks tool that I could use at home or at school--but they went belly up recently and I haven't seen anything that I like as much since then.
I've been away from the blog for a while because I've had my annual nasty winter cold and haven't really felt like writing. But I haven't been idle. I'm working on my presentation for IASL in Taiwan on the OPAC and new discovery tools and it's definitely proving to be a moving target. I got approval to purchase AquaBrowser software and a new server for my library automation system (still Follett Circ+). I'm hoping I'll be able to demo my new catalog interface at the conference but if not, there are many others elsewhere I can use. I told a class just today that I expect to have our library's collection on WorldCat before too long--the teacher seemed impressed!?
I did double check my news feeds on my Bloglines blog, Bessie's Blog, which I started almost a year ago but which I've been very spotty at adding to. I was surprised to find out I had 19 news feeds on the site and I decided to organize them a bit.
Finally, I just found and interesting blog called Learning and Teaching in the 21st Century and specifically a post entitled What is the Web 2.0?. In the blog the author, Jo Schiffbauer, points to several YouTube videos which help explain Web 2.0. I was able to view three of the five videos and all were pretty fascinating, short takes with comments by folks in the field about the business and technology of Web 2.0. I particularly liked the definition given by Andi Gutmans in the video called "What is Web 2.0" (catchy title) in which he defines the concept as comprising three things: rich Internet applications (RIA) like Flash and Ajax (need to investigate); service oriented architecture (SOA including feeds, rss, web services and mashups; and finally social interactivity like tagging, wikis, blogs, and podcasts.
Another of the videos had the following comment by (I believe) Gautam Godhwani which I liked. He said that the successful companies (read libraries) of the future will involve search, tools/applications, content (some user-generated) and community.
It seems to me that we need to get these kinds of thing integrated into our catalogs so that patrons looking for information get what they need but are also encouraged to interact with the information and add to the information.
That's a lot--it's challenging--especially when many of us are still struggling to get access to materials for our patrons but I think it's a challenge we must meet if we are to remain relevant.