Mitis-Stanzel, Irene (2008) Social Tagging in Bibliotheken. MSc Thesis, Postgraduate programme in Library and Information Studies, Austrian National Library (Austria), University of Vienna (Austria).
# Perennial favorites open source, APIs, and mobile devices given as top trends, among others
# Technology glitches during streaming video, distracting chat room discussion during panel
# Karen Coyle: Future may not involve libraries "if we don't make some extreme changes."
Äußerst interessantes Thesenpapier über die Zukunft sog. Discovery Tools in Bibliotheken. Besonders (aber nicht nur) der Abschnitt über OPACs ist auch für Deutschland höchst relevant.
What the world needs now is not another metasearch engine. Mind you, having more and better and even free metasearch engines is a good thing, but there are already many metasearch engines, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and even some that are free and open source (e.g., see Oregon State’s LibraryFind). Metasearch isn’t an effective solution for the problem at hand.
Blacklight is an open source OPAC (online public access catalog). That means libraries (or anyone else) can use it to allow people to search and browse their collections online. Blacklight uses Solr to index and search, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently, Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MaRC records and several kinds of XML documents, including TEI, EAD, and GDMS. Blacklight was developed at the University of Virginia Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0 license.
DiscoverLibrary is a new search and discovery tool for the library’s vast collection of resources. A simple search box will bring back results from a number of different sources, including Acorn, the library’s catalog, and the Vanderbilt TV News Archive. Additionally, many of the library’s online article databases are searchable through DiscoverLibrary on the second tab.
This is the initial release of DiscoverLibrary, and its development is an ongoing process. Over time we will add new resources and features, as well as refine the user interface. Please help us make the new service better by leaving your suggestions and comments in the box to the right.
Nothing is more practical than a good theory. A banal statement, considering that a theory should always enable its users to easily derive the statements they need for practice.
But a theory for catalogs or cataloging? Is that really necessary? A question anyone is likely to ask who has never been confronted with the matter nor considered it with any seriousness.
Using Internet search engines, and knowing their operation is fully automated, people tend to view with skepticism all practical and theoretical effort invested in catalogs. Any good search engine, however, has to be be based on a good theory - though that one may differ quite a bit from a catalog theory.