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Financial API Lessons

Speaking of Wesabe and their Firefox Toolbar, one of the other benefits of the add-on is that it allows you to automate the uploading of bank exports if the bank allows downloading of Money/Quicken files even if they don’t support automatic downloads. There’s a recent article on O’reilly Radar about some of the benefits of [...]

Zen OPAC and COinS

I’d been thinking about a Zen OPAC idea for quite awhile and now see that dchud thinks similarly. My first thought was to use some of the requirements being that it uses markup similar to what current template set-ups allow in commercial OPACs. I then scraped that and thought should be from scratch and try [...]

LibraryLookup Vendor Request

John Udell has a few requests for catalog vendors, including making it easier to search by ISBN and for related ISBN’s. Peter Murray commented that the url should probably be a bit more restful and mentioned PatREST. Talis responded that it would be quite simple except for the xISBN which could cost a lot with [...]

Data Bill of Rights

I’ve mentioned Wesabe’s Data Bill of Rights before. John Battelle has now posted on his formulation of a bill of rights:

So, I submit for your review, editing and clarification, a new draft of what rights we, as consumers, might demand from companies making hay off the data we create as we trip across the web

Some [...]

Sad State of Events

One the great things about libraries are the events some hold, be it author talks, workshops or movies. Unfortunately I’ve been rather disappointed by the way events are presented on most library sites. Some don’t even feature or list them on the homepage which is a shame. There are some other things I think would [...]

Why Add Social Features

Via the Bokardo blog:

I think that social features are bigger than many people view them. They are a long-term strategy that takes lots of resources. You can’t simply bolt on a feature here or there (well, unless it’s article sharing or something super simple like that) and expect to realize the benefits of making a [...]

Solr in Libraries

Note: Many of the examples below only include screenshots. As these are development versions I don’t want to overwhelm them with traffic. If you pop in #code4lib you’ll probably be able to get a peek at them.

What is Solr?

If you were at Code4Lib 2007 then you were probably beat over the head with Solr. If [...]

Code4Lib2007: Karen’s Keynote

I’m way behind in lots of things right now but I might as well post something. The keynote on the first day of Code4Lib 2007 was by Karen Schneider who writes at Free Range Librarian, among other places. You can view a video of her presentation on google and download links should be available soon [...]

Vendors, Silos and Sharing

I met some Talis people at code4lib and was rather impressed by their presentations. Here is one you should watch.

Changing Vendors

Liblime acquired Katipo Communications’ Koha Division. The press release reads like PR but had a nice tidbit:

The acquisition also highlights one of the unique features of an open-source business and development model: “Katipo’s Koha customers don’t need to worry about switching to a new ILS,” explains Rachel Hamilton, Director of Katipo Communications. “With open source, [...]

Open Letter to ILS Vendors

From Roy Tennant:

So what should you do? I’m sorry, but you get paid a lot of money to figure that out, so you can hardly expect me to give it away for free. But it may be sufficient to say that you can’t simply provide incremental changes to your legacy code. You need to think [...]

High Costs for Libraries

From ecorrado:

I was at a meeting that was discussing ILS issues yesterday and someone from a small college said that their ILS costs them over 40% of the total library budget. She even clarified the total library budget part. I’m assuming she is not including staffing, but still, that is a big chunk of change.

I [...]

Open Source Costs and Commitments

There’s a nice interview over at Nelsonville Public Library about their move to Koha back in 2003. Here’s a quote I think is worth reading:

It’s important that libraries do not look on Open Source as free software that they just download, press a button, and all their problems will magically be solved. Open Source requires [...]

ILS Data: Unicorn

Here’s another in the series.

Unicorn

Export
Built in. MARC21 or flat file formats. Unicode support is available as an extra.
Database Access
Mixed. No access to the embedded Informix database by default; API training is necessary for read-only access. Oracle is an extra option, but that only gives you a read-only license. For write access, you need a full [...]

ILS Data Series

So I got a few posts in the ILS Data series out. I’m not trying to cover many details, provide spec sheets or serve as comparison shopping. I’m just documenting some ILS users’ experiences using their data to see what the landscape looks like. Here are the posts so far:

ILS Data: Evergreen
ILS Data: Voyager
ILS Data: [...]