Skip to content

Category Archives: Economies of Scale

Automating Withdrawn Actions: Maximixing the Long Tail of Acquisitions

Libraries place a good deal of emphasis on collection development policies — a written statement of a library’s intentions for building its collection. It describes the collection’s strengths and weaknesses and provides guidelines for the purchase (”acquisition”) and disposition (”weeding”) of content. This is an activity that sets libraries apart from other organizations.

This is a preview of Automating Withdrawn Actions: Maximixing the Long Tail of Acquisitions. Read the full post (1131 words, estimated 4:31 mins reading time)
Tagged , , , ,
2007 07 05 Comments (0)

Seeking Information about Regional Digitization Centers

I’m looking for information about the formation and management of regional digitization centers for one of the OhioLINK strategic task forces. For our purposes, a “regional digitization center” is a place that has the hardware, software, and human expertise to convert a variety of media to digital form. (We’re primarily looking at small format imaging, but could also include broadside imaging, audio capture, and video transformation.) There is plenty of information to be found about the services that centers provide and even more evidence of regional groups wanting to create these centers, but precious little about the operation of the centers themselves. (As in zilch in professional literature searches, and only a few hits via general web searching.) The kinds of things I’m looking for are:

This is a preview of Seeking Information about Regional Digitization Centers. Read the full post (429 words, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)
Tagged ,
2007 05 18 Comments (3)

Brewster Kahle on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization

Brewster Kahle, Director of the Internet Archive, was interviewed this week in a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization. Among the many interesting points in the interview was that one of the biggest challenges is to such a mass digitization effort to believe that to digitize massive numbers of books and make them available is actually possible. The Open Content Alliance has put together a suite of technology that brings down the cost for a color scan with OCR to 10 cents per page or about $30 per book. He then goes on to perform this calculation: the library system in the U.S. is a 12B industry. One million books digitized a year is $30M, or “a little less than .3 percent of one year’s budget of the United States library system would build a 1 million book library that would be available to anyone for free.” He also covers copyright concerns including the more liberal copyright laws in countries such as China.

This is a preview of Brewster Kahle on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization. Read the full post (194 words, estimated 47 secs reading time)
Tagged , , ,
2007 03 30 Comments (2)

MaintainIT Project Gears Up to Support Public Access Computing

I got an e-mail tonight from Franziska Marks, Senior Communications Manager at CompuMentor (and home of TechSoup & the TechSoup NetSquared Initiative), about the newly created MaintainIT Project, promoting sustainable best practices and models of technical support for public libraries. They have just launched their “Share your story” campaign to collect stories on the challenges surrounding keeping public access computers running as well as successes and lessons learned. The information collected will be distilled into a series of how-to guides tailored to the specific technical support needs of different types of public libraries.

This is a preview of MaintainIT Project Gears Up to Support Public Access Computing. Read the full post (496 words, estimated 1:59 mins reading time)
Tagged , ,
2006 11 09 Comments (0)

Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries to build a consortial repository using FEDORA

On Friday, the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries announced the creation of a consortium-wide digital repository project similar to that of the Ohio Digital Resource Commons.

Colorado Alliance Digital Repository Project Approved

The Board of Directors of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries has approved initial funding for a consortium-wide digital repository project at its October 19, 2006 meeting.

The Board of Directors of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries has approved initial funding for a consortium-wide digital repository project at its October 19, 2006 meeting. The project will use the Fedora open source software which was selected after a long evaluation process by the Institutional Repository Implementation Team, chaired by John Culshaw from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

This is a preview of Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries to build a consortial repository using FEDORA. Read the full post (215 words, estimated 52 secs reading time)
Tagged , , ,
2006 10 25 Comments (1)

Just In Time Acquisitions versus Just In Case Acquisitions

What of a service existed where the patrons selected an item they needed out of our library catalog and that item was delivered to the patron even when the library did not yet own the item? Would that be useful? With the growth of online bookstores, our users do have the expectation of finding something they need on the web, clicking a few buttons and having it delivered. When such expectations of what is possible exist, where is the first place a patron would go to find recently published items — the online bookstore or their local library catalog? Does your gut tell you it is the online bookstore? Would it be desirable if the patron’s instinct were to be the local library catalog?

This is a preview of Just In Time Acquisitions versus Just In Case Acquisitions. Read the full post (1511 words, estimated 6:03 mins reading time)
Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
2006 08 02 Comments (3)

Appreciating our Heritage while Embracing a Future

Tom Wilson, LITA past president and all-around insightful LITA Top Technology Trendster, posted a commentary to the “Where have all the programmers gone?” post that deserves top billing 1. Please read and digest it before coming back here. And it’s not late to the party at all, Tom — I believe it is only now just getting interesting.

This is a preview of Appreciating our Heritage while Embracing a Future. Read the full post (812 words, estimated 3:15 mins reading time)
Tagged , , , , , ,
2006 07 13 Comments (2)

Electronic Resource Management Systems in Consortial Environments

This is a summary of the discussion of the LITA Library Consortia / Automated Systems Interest Group meeting on Monday morning of the ALA Annual Convention in New Orleans. The meeting consisted of a managed discussion of the use of Electronic Resource Management (ERM) systems in consortial environments. In some cases, comments from the two primary speakers and discussion among the commingled and unattributed. Inaccuracies and comments taken out of context are the responsibility of the author of this posting, and corrections or embellishments are welcome in the form of comments to this post or as private e-mail messages.

This is a preview of Electronic Resource Management Systems in Consortial Environments. Read the full post (1130 words, estimated 4:31 mins reading time)
Tagged , , , , ,
2006 06 26 Comments (1)

Evergreen Goes Beta, Signals the End of the World As We Know It

I’ve got a ton of work to do, but I couldn’t let this announcement from Brad LaJeunesse via Dusty Gres on Pub4Lib via Karen Schneider on the newNGC4LIB list go by without comment:

The Evergreen software development team is proud to announce the Evergreen ILS Beta release. Evergreen is an open-source ILS being developed by the Georgia Public Library Service for PINES, a consortium of over 250 public libraries. The Evergreen ILS is scheduled to go into production in PINES this fall.

This is a preview of Evergreen Goes Beta, Signals the End of the World As We Know It. Read the full post (230 words, estimated 55 secs reading time)
Tagged
2006 06 07 Comments (2)

“Archiving and Preserving the Web” from the Internet Archive perspective

In case you were wondering what some of the back-channel discussion on the #code4lib IRC channel was on Tuesday, Ed Summers and I were watching an EDUCAUSE webcast on the Internet Archive’s Archive-It project. Archive-It is a subscription service that allows institutions to crawl and search their own web archive through a web application. On Tuesday, the EDUCAUSE Live! webcast included the project manager and Senior Crawl Engineer (what a title!) from the Internet Archive to talk about not only the server, but the open source web crawler and ARC access tools (copied from the project home page):

This is a preview of “Archiving and Preserving the Web” from the Internet Archive perspective. Read the full post (513 words, estimated 2:03 mins reading time)
2006 04 20 Comments (0)
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Thursday the 22nd of May 2008 at 4:16:27 PM EDT (-0400). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/category/economies-of-scale/

[Creative Commons Logo] This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.