Digital Technologies
Current development focuses on the creation of simpler, smarter and more inclusive interfaces to high quality information resources. Announcements of pilot services will be made as they are released.
There are many names for the rapidly evolving technologies of potential use to libraries seeking to bring the highest quality information resources to their users. "Web 2.0", "Library 2.0" and "Library Next" come immediately to mind. There are no firm definitions here that are likely to hold up for more than a month or two, however.
From the Maine InfoNet perspective, the key functional elements of these technologies that make them so attractive are these:
- They are web-centric and therefore tend to present the user with a familiar, easy interface
- They are centrally managable by staff and on servers that already are in place to support other library services.
- The code syntax tools to develop and modify a site are relatively easy to learn and use
- Changes can be made easily and quickly by someone with modest technical acumen
- They enable one to take a modular approach to link existing services to create something new and more capable without having to work from the ground up
- Performance and flexibility approaches that formerly only available with desktop software
- They are open source, freeware or very inexpensive, yet supported by highly energetic and engaged individuals
- One may work interactively, testing and tweaking before committing to a given approach
- Moving existing code to a new context is often relatively easy.
Faceted Search
Tools in this category make search "smarter" by presenting users with means to interactively narrow initial results in terms of categories or characteristics associated with those results.
Endeca
A commercial product used my leading web merchants, this toolkit was adapted by North Carolina State University to improve user access to its online catalog.
Encore
Innovative Interfaces' entry in the genre.
Federated / Aggregated / More Comprehensive Search
OJAX
An open source approach to federated search.
LibraryFind
"In a nutshell, LibraryFind is metasearch software developed in Ruby on Rails, and released under the GNU General Public License. It does both federated and local search, provides the ability to harvest metadata collections into a local index, provides an integrated OpenURL resolver to allow for linking to full-text resources, and allows for the ability to customize the user interface (or even to build new user interfaces!)." Released by Oregon State University in Feb, 2007.
Collaboration Tools
Backpack
General organizer tool featuring to-do lists, calendar, configurable reminders, selective sharing with others.
Campfire
Web-based real-time collaboration tool. Think chat for groups of coworkers or colleagues.
