Report from the Beach

Posted by Max on 19 October, 2007 in Academic Libraries, Conferences, Digital Libraries, Library News, Products and Services, Public Libraries

Today is not over and I am exhausted already! Ever feel like that at a conference? This morning I attended two sessions and one this afternoon. Here is the breakdown on them:

Lip Smacking Good: Web 2.0 Technologies and Your Library Blog, by Robin Fay and Amy Watts of UGA. They gave a short but sweet description of Web 2.0 and then more on how they at UGA use blogs. An example given was using comments as a vehicle for responding to questions from students, like “Why do you close early on days there are football games? Not everyone goes to football games!” They showed an interesting chart that showed four areas and an arrow going up through them; the web as connecting information up through the metaweb as connecting intelligence, and above and below this respectively were semantic web as connecting knowledge and social software connecting people. It made a lot of sense, I thought. They did mention that Blogger has a pay-for-service but I don’t think they have had that service for a long time. Then they talked about reasons for blogging; PR, marketing, RSS, ease of use, etc. and then finished up by talking about how you can integrate Flickr and del.icio.us into your blog.

Creating Policies for Results by David Singleton and Julie Walker of GPLS. Their session was based on the book: “Creating Policies for Results: From Chaos to Clarity” by Sandra Nelson and June Garcia. They gave a great sessionon what is and what is not a procedure, policy, and regulation. You can use the workforms that come with the book to really take control over all of what is going on policy-wise in your library. Some of the things that struck me were:

give a good “why” statement in your policy
look at policies from other libraries - don’t reinvent the wheel!
do a policy audit - which after their explanation does not sound as painful as it sounds.

I would definitely take a look at that book - full of useful information.

The last session I went to was The Art of Evergreen Acquisitions by Art Rhyno of the University of Windsor. He gave an update on the development process and progress on the Evergreen Acquisition Module. Art talked about the building blocks including OfBiz.org. He showed some fantastic abilities of the module made possible by OfBiz like:

different currencies
vendor information
relationships between vendors
add notes or create communications
generate an order from an existing order (great for repetitive orders)
a chart of accounts

He said that OfBiz adds a lot of layers to the invoice process which they are still working out. It does have some interesting uses, like for non-acquisitions (i.e. e-commerce). It also has a customer relationship management tool for promotions. Art also reported that Laurentian University has committed to Evergreen.