On Wednesday, April 15th Barbara Herzog from Innovtive will be here to give a demo of their Encore product.  The demo will take place in LIB 145 at 10:00 a.m.  We saw a demo of this product some time ago but it has evolved a good bit since then.

This is just one of several products we are looking at which will enhance discovery of the resources we have to offer.

If you attended Carol’s budget meeting on Tuesday, you already know there are plans afoot to migrate away from Novell’s Netware to Microsoft Windows DFS (Distributed File System) for networked access to files.  Many more details will be available shortly but this post will serve as a heads-up.

To test the new system we will migrate all of the LIS/ITS files from Snowleopard, as well as all personal files for LIS staff from Tigercat (drive U:) to DFS on Thursday night, April 9th.  When you log in Friday morning you will be asked if you want to uninstall Novell — you should answer yes to this question.

As noted, more details will be available soon.  Meanwhile, please post any questions as comments to this post so everyone can see the answers.

Stephen Abram has a nice post on his blog Stephen’s Lighthouse called Compare and Contrast. It links to two powerpoint presentations from Lee Rainie at the 2009 CES Consumer Electronics Show. One is Baby Boomers in the Digital Age and the other is Teens and the Internet.

• How many times per hour does Midcat get searched, on average?  340
• What’s the busiest hour of the day for the catalog? 3:00 p.m.
• How many times did an EBSCO search refer our users to Academic OneFile for the full-text of the article last fiscal year? 378
• How many times did users go through WebBridge to get to Project Muse last year? 284
• Where did Mike get all these numbers from anyway? From statistics that Barbara has been compiling from various sources.
• Can I see them for myself? Sure. Just go to O:\ORGS\LIS\LISstaff\ILS III Millennium User Materials\OPAC statistics

Just a friendly reminder to please help us test our implementation of Libraryfind.  As mentioned in a post on August 30th, we are experimenting with this open source application which allows search across multiple resources.

It’s not ready for public consumption just yet, but we are making it available for testing by LIS staff.   You’ll see five choices: Digital & Print Undergraduate Theses, Images & Multimedia, Middlebury College Abernethy Collections, Library Catalogs and TEST Collection Group.   The first choice searches all of the NITLE Dspace thesis collections, as well as the Special Collections thesis database on Concerto.  The second searches 12 different collections, some in ContentDM and some in Concerto.  The third searches the Abernethy Collections on ContentDM.  Library Catalogs currently searches Midcat only.  We are testing various journal indexes in the TEST Collection Group, although currently none of those work.

Barbara is trying to identify and fix these problems, and Bryan Carson is working on making the interface more Middlebury blue.

Abstract: Long-term digital preservation is not the best available objective. Instead, what information
producers and consumers almost surely want is a universe of durable digital objects—documents and
programs that will be as accessible and useful a century from now as they are today.
Given the will, we could implement and deploy a practical and pleasing durability infrastructure within two years. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for durability without much burdening their users.
Moving responsibility for durability from archival employees to information producers would also avoid
burdening repositories with keeping up with Internet scale. An engineering prescription is available.
Research libraries’ and archives’ slow advance towards practical preservation of digital content is
remarkable to outsiders. Why does their progress seem stalled? Ineffective collaboration across
disciplinary boundaries has surely been a major impediment. We speculate about cultural reasons for
this situation and warn about possible marginalization of research librarianship as a profession.

Another interesting post, with audio, from Wired Campus.  The latest edition of Tech Therapy covers the differences and similarities between library and IT staff, and discusses why these two groups can’t get along.

Terry Reese visited us recently (thanks to Joe Toth) on his way to the 6th annual Readex Digital Institute.  He has just posted a nice summary of the event.