When I say "<blank> is a question answering system. A question can be posed in natural language and ... <blank> can come up with a very precise answer to that question" -- what comes to mind to fill in the <blank>? If you guessed a system developed by IBM to appear alongside …

Are we building the "next generation" catalog for us (librarians) or our users? As a read a report from the Next Generation Summit Search Interface Working Group of the Orbis/Cascade Alliance, I have to wonder. Portions of this report are dated ((Although the report itself does not contain a …

Schemes to add functionality to the web OPAC fall into four categories: web OPAC enhancements, web OPAC wrappers, web OPAC replacements, and integrated library system replacements. I'm outlining these four techniques in a report I'm editing for an OhioLINK strategic task force and a bit of a reality check on …

Earlier this week, Aaron Swartz of the Internet Archive announced the demonstration website of the Open Library project, a new kind of book catalog that brings together traditional publisher and library bibliographic data in an interface with the user-contributed paradigm of Wikipedia. Okay, I'll pause for a moment while you …

No Service Oriented Architecture posting today, but here is a glimpse of the topic of the next one -- the title is: "Web Services: A means to a Service Oriented Architecture end." In the meantime I wanted to thank everyone for their public and private comments, and to ask to keep …

This is part three of a continuing series on the application of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) design pattern to library systems. In the first part, the SOA concept was compared to a transportation network and the basic foundation for defining SOA was set down. The second part described what …

This post is the second in a series about the application of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) system design pattern to library services. The first post in this series focused on defining "Service Oriented Architecture" using the analogy of a transportation network. This post goes into some detail about what …

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 …

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 For those that have not yet encountered this idiom, "top billing" is a motion picture industry term that refers to actors whose …

Walt Crawford chided me — rightly so — for yesterday's Is the Writing on the Wall for the Integrated Library System? post. My choice of language was, admittedly, sloppy. I was fired up last night...distracted, if you will, by what was happening at a really good conference. Please allow me the …

While in UNC-CH for JCDL I've had occasion to rant with/at some people about the state of the integrated library system marketplace — including, of course, how we got into the spot we're in and how we might get out of it (and those people were kind enough to engage …