Professional Development

Lots of stuff for day 2 of lita. I would be remiss if I did not mention the spectacular views that I saw during an early morning run

After the run, we started the day with David Weinberger who likes to talk about *my* favorite topic. Both Lauren and Susan have talked about David’s presentation and I don’t have much to add except to say that my favorite quote of the talk “Metadata is what you know, data is what you are looking for.”

During the day I attended a session on the Extensible Catalog (http://extensiblecatalog.org). XC is in beta now and is aiming for a Jan 2010 release. While XC has a discovery layer built in drupal, the harvesting and normalization tools that they are working on have been designed to work with multiple metadata types and systems.

The final presentation of the day focused on usability testing at the University of Illinois for Vufind. As we are currently in the midst of our Vufind service I thought that it would be a useful session. UofI has a very similar implementation as WFU (Advanced Search, Voyager implementation). CARLI (Consortium of Academic & Research Libraries in Illinois) has implemented for their 76 libraries who share a Voyager based I-Share catalog. 6 of those have Vufind running as their primary catalog.

The rollout for CARLI of Vufind was “experimental” and “rapid” :). they froze modifications in Oct 2008 in expectation of Vufind 1.0. Since then they have been tweaking interface & re-indexing but no major development. CARLI is unlikely to implement future versions of Vufind but may continue development that may help them work towards the XC.

One problem that CARLI solved with Vufind was to integrate the holdings of 76 libraries into a single vufind, something we have been trying to do! To do this, they added a field which was bibid plus institutional identifier.

This morning kicked off code4lib 2009 with a series of pre-conferences. Both Kevin and I attended the Vufind preconference session which included an overview of vufind, install exercise, and a q&a session on vufind features and issues.

I documented lots of notes & tips on our Vufind project page in the library wiki and once we get back to WS we will be able to make some good progress on ironing out some of the features that we are interested in implementing.

Following an interesting lunch with some folks from Equinox (and a cold walk back to the hotel) I am getting ready for the Linked Data session. . .