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| | When indexes are not enoughPublished on 20100430 At the Computers in Libraries conference in April two trends seemed important to me. · Digital Literacy · Federated Index Digital literacy is according to Wikipedia “the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology”. Libraries have for a long time trained and supported their communities with these skills but having “Digital Literacy” on the same importance level as “Literacy” it will surely for the libraries mean changes in strategies, policies and the overall efforts. It will start an explosion of planned and structured activities when the goals are formulated in ways of having the whole community being able to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology. That is somewhat undermining the other trend “Federated Index”. A novelty last year, a trend this year. A Federated Index, in opposite to “federated search”, collects all possible metadata beforehand and indexes it for the one point of search purpose. Ebsco Discovery, Summons and Primo Central are examples of this. Axiell Arena has the possibility to do the same. A “One stop shop” federated index is of course an attractive model. “Giving up” your local data to central indexing machines (WorldCat is another example) you lose possibilities. Possibilities to explore, interact, enrich, collaborate, mash up, “serendip” with your data. That is if you fully give it up. Go for the option of the smartness of the one stop shop federated index. You use it when know exactly what you want and that media it is not available to you physically/electronically from your own library. When keeping the power of your data locally you can use it with your preferred tools to electronically build your site where your community enjoys a rich end user experience combined with the full opportunity for you and the community to exploit the digital literacy path together. Note: See more about "Federated index" in the blog article from 20090423.
Federated index, Flickr Commons, Open Source and Graffiti (Computers in Libraries conference 2009:2)Published on 2009-04-23 Federated search is dead, long live the Federated index. The Elin product from Lund University, the Summa project in Århus statsbibliotek and the Axiell Arena product has the possibility to index different sources, not only the ILS catalogue. Building on this technology Serial Solutions and Ebsco now are working on a new kind of product, Summons respectively Discovery Service, where you change from searching different databases to include these databases in one single index. Then huge connector databases will be obsolete. In theory anyway. If this kind of a mega index covers the most will it then be good enough with a linked search to the rest of my sources, databases? Those sources which cannot be indexed by this "Federated Index" products because it is too expensive, to inefficient or lacks the “local touch”. It will be very interesting to see a combination of this kind of resource combined with a locally driven and locally populated service with user interactivity (like Arena). Proprietary image sites are dead, long live Flickr Commons. The deposits are still there and available with the full quality of the files but the exposition, their “shopping window” is in Flickr. It started a year ago with Library of Congress and now even a Swedish institute is on track (Swedish National Heritage Board). One of the big advantages, besides the “window”, is the community involvement where people can enhance the information about the pictures. Open Source Software is not dying, but not flourishing either. Marshall Breeding in his speech about the “Global Library Automation Scene” still sees OSS as a trend if not as strong as it seemed a year before. API:s are essential and more in focus than e g changing the ILS. Breeding sees cooperation (consortia etc) as a strong trend, gaining economy and efficiency. A facet of that; SaaS (Software as a Service) is coming strong. Buy a service via the net, do not bother about hardware and software. Breeding mentioned SaaS even in conjunction with OSS. On a direct question from me about this “contradiction” he answered that libraries usually are not “tampering with the code” but want freedom in deciding on the vendor. As I have understood it a lot of libraries in US who have chosen OSS either had no ILS before or have been very displeased with the development and possibilities of their OPACs. I think that we need a lot of attention from vendors (like us) on the API:s breeding mentioned.. Please make some graffiti! The Darien Library has writeable (and erasable) glass walls as part of their interior architecture in the youth department. Appreciated by teenagers who among other things use it for school work. The library has some restrictions of the use but it seems to work very well. Why not use this idea in physical 24/7 libraries? Leave a question on the wall, it will be answered till the next day, by the staff or other visitors. Reversing the virtual world by making a physical representation? Or(/and) even, let the writable glass wall show the virtual bulletin board.
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