New & Noteworthy

Article Type: New & Noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 27, Issue 8.

Libraries and Mobile Technology: An Introduction to Public Policy Considerations

“There's an App for That! Libraries and Mobile Technology: An Introduction to Public Policy Considerations,” is the title of a policy brief issued in June 2010 by the American Library Association Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP). The brief takes a look at how the adoption of mobile technology alters the traditional relationships between libraries and their users.

As the information revolution continues to unfold, libraries will experiment with mobile devices and services to support the information needs of their users wherever they may be. The adoption of mobile technology alters the traditional relationships between libraries and their users and introduces novel challenges to reader privacy. At the same time, the proliferation of mobile devices and services raises issues of access to information in the digital age, including content ownership and licensing, digital rights management, and accessibility. This policy brief explores some of these issues, and is intended to stimulate further community discussion and policy analysis. The policy brief, authored by OITP consultant Timothy Vollmer, explores the challenges to reader privacy,issues of access to information in the digital age (including content ownership and licensing), digital rights management, and accessibility.

Despite these challenges, Vollmer said libraries are embracing the growing capabilities of mobile technology and providing new, innovative services that extend the way libraries serve their existing patrons.

Full text of the brief: www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oitp/publications/policybriefs/mobiledevices.pdf

Europeana, the Next Steps

Strong support from the European Parliament for the further development of Europeana, Europe's digital library, archive, and museum, has been welcomed by European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes. The European Parliament's Resolution adopted in May 2010 has joined the European Commission in asking EU Member States to step up their efforts to make their cultural heritage available through the site that already gives direct access to millions of digitized books, maps, photographs, film clips, paintings, and musical extracts.

The European Parliament Resolution on “Europeana, the next steps,”based on a report by German MEP Helga Trüpel, underlines the potential of the site as a common access point to Europe's collective heritage and calls on Member States to bring more digitized content into Europeana.

The Parliament's Resolution also addressed other issues that have to be tackled to ensure the success of Europeana, including the need to:

• address a series of copyright related issues to facilitate the digitization and online accessibility of cultural content. The report highlights in particular the issue of orphan works (works for which it is impossible to locate the copyright holders);

• ensure sustainable funding for the site; and

• raise awareness about Europeana among the general public and potential contributors.

The resolution from the European Parliament was a response to the Commission's August 2009 Communication “Europeana – next steps.”The Commission will take account of the Parliament's Resolution in defining a future policy on Europeana and other areas, including copyright questions for the digitization and online accessibility of cultural material, and the re-use of public sector information.

Launched in November 2008, Europeana is a gateway web site that allows internet users to search and get direct access to digitized books, maps,paintings, newspapers, film fragments, and photographs from Europe's cultural institutions. Today, Europeana gives direct access to ten million digitized objects from Europe's cultural institutions, up from two million at its launch.

Europeana version 1.0 is a 2.5-year project that will bring the Europeana.eu prototype to full service. The Europeana v1.0 project began in January 2009 with eight staff members. In June 2010 the project passed its mid-term review and staff numbers had increased to 32. The Commission's reviewers commented appreciatively on how much had been achieved across such a complex set of tasks in a short time, while maintaining the backing of such a diversity of stakeholder groups.

Europeana's upgrade program, scheduled for spring/summer 2010 and known as the Rhine release, is being delivered to plan. Europeana has surpassed its target of providing access to ten million items, and has to date ingested over 12 million items from over 1,500 organizations. The main benefits that users now see are the improved timeline, built in response to their interest in browsing content, and the new mobile interface, which is the first step in the project's strategy to enable different methods of access to Europeana's content. The distributive strategy will be taken to the next stage with the release of an Open Search application programming interface (API), which will be piloted over the autumn by several partners, including the national libraries of Austria and the Netherlands. The second phase of the project will see the launch in 2011 of a fully operational Europeana.eu with improved multilinguality and semantic web features.

Europeana: www.europeana.eu

Europeana version 1.0 project home: http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/

Austrian Books Online: Austrian National Library Partners with Google

The Austrian National Library will be one of the first national libraries worldwide to digitize and make available online its complete holdings of historical books from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century – one of the five internationally most important historical book collections.

The project – unique in its size in Austria's cultural sphere –will be carried out in a Public Private Partnership with Google. In the next few years around 400,000 public domain works will be digitized and made available without restrictions and free of charge via the digital library of the Austrian National Library and via Google Books. In addition, users will be able to access the digital books via Europeana, the European digital library.

In the near future users will find the digitized books in the Austrian National Library's online catalog and will be able to access them via a single click, perform full-text searches, read them online or download the entire works.

The Austrian National Library follows the examples of renowned libraries like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, or the Bavarian State Library which have already been collaborating with Google in Google's Book Search program for several years. Google funds the digitization of the entire book collection of about 120 million pages, while the Austrian National Library covers the expenses for the preparation of the books and for storing and making available the digital copies in its digital library.

As in many cases it will no longer be necessary to access the original books,this project will also contribute to the protection of the Austrian National Library's precious historical book collection. The Austrian National Library will archive the digital copies in its digital archival system for the long term.

Austrian Books online: www.onb.ac.at/ev/austrianbooksonline.htm

The Future of Cloud Computing – Report from Pew Research Center

A solid majority of technology experts and stakeholders participating in the fourth future of the internet survey expect that by 2020 most people will access software applications online and share and access information through the use of remote server networks, rather than depending primarily on tools and information housed on their individual, personal computers. They say that cloud computing will become more dominant than the desktop in the next decade. In other words,most users will perform most computing and communicating activities through connections to servers operated by outside firms.

Among the most popular cloud services now are social networking sites (the 500 million people using Facebook are being social in the cloud), webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo mail, microblogging and blogging services such as Twitter and WordPress, video-sharing sites like YouTube, picture-sharing sites such as Flickr, document and applications sites like Google Docs,social-bookmarking sites like Delicious, business sites like eBay, and ranking,rating and commenting sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor.

This does not mean, however, that most of these experts think the desktop computer will disappear soon. The majority sees a hybrid life in the next decade, as some computing functions move towards the cloud and others remain based on personal computers.

The highly engaged, diverse set of respondents to an online, opt-in survey included 895 technology stakeholders and critics. The study was fielded by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center.

To read the full report, including details of the survey method, a list of some of the respondents, and a selection of the hundreds of written elaborations of their thoughts submitted by the participants, visit: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/The-future-of-cloud-computing.aspx

UKSG and National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Announce Endorsers of Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) Recommended Practice

In June UKSG and the NISO announced that the American Institute of Physics,Ex Libris, OCLC and Serials Solutions are the first organizations to publicly endorse the phase I recommendations of the KBART Working Group, a joint initiative that is exploring data problems within the OpenURL supply chain. KBART's phase I recommended practice (NISO RP-9-2010), published in January 2010, contains practical recommendations for the timely exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers.

In September, five additional official endorsers of the joint recommended practice were announced: Alexander Street Press; Annual Reviews; EBSCO Information Services; Innovative Interfaces, Inc.; and Royal Society Publishing.

Sarah Pearson, E-Resources & Serials Coordinator at the University of Birmingham and UKSG co-chair of the KBART Phase II Working Group, stated,“The joint NISO/UKSG working group is very pleased that the uptake of the recommendations is gathering momentum, as evidenced by the growth of formal KBART endorsements. We have been actively working to promote the benefits of implementing the recommendations, and are thrilled to see that our message is getting through. We look forward to seeing more progress in the future.”

All content providers, from major databases to small publishers, are encouraged to publicly endorse the KBART recommended practice by submitting a sample file to the KBART working group. Once the file's format and content has been reviewed and approved, and the provider has made it publicly available (in line with the recommendations), the provider will be added to a public list of endorsing providers. Knowledge base developers can endorse the KBART recommended practice by confirming that their systems can process KBART formatted files.

KBART has also made a contacts registry available for content providers and knowledge base developers to register their organization's information for downloading holdings metadata. The registry provides a list of contacts, URLs,and instructions relating to the transfer of e-resource metadata between content providers and link resolvers. Companies that have formally endorsed KBART are marked with a KBART logo on the registry.

KBART's phase II work is underway to develop a second recommended practice that will build on the phase I recommendations. Knowledge base providers and their customers (primarily academic libraries) will benefit from provision of higher quality data by content providers. Publishers will benefit from accurate linking to their content and subsequently the possibility of increased usage.

For more information on KBART and the current phase II work, visit: www.uksg.org/kbartor www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart

Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe

The sheer number of metadata standards in the cultural heritage sector is overwhelming, and their inter-relationships further complicate the situation. A new resource, Seeing standards: a visualization of the metadata universe, is intended to assist planners with the selection and implementation of metadata standards. Seeing standards is in two parts:

• (1)a poster-sized visualization plotting standards based on their applicability in a variety of contexts; and

• (2)a glossary of metadata standards in either poster or pamphlet form.

Each of the 105 standards listed is evaluated on its strength of application to defined categories in each of four axes: community, domain, function, and purpose. Standards more strongly allied with a category are displayed towards the center of each hemisphere, and those still applicable but less strongly allied are displayed along the edges. The strength of a standard in a given category is determined by a mixture of its adoption in that category, its design intent, and its overall appropriateness for use in that category.

The standards represented are among those most heavily used or publicized in the cultural heritage community, though certainly not all standards that might be relevant are included. A small set of the metadata standards plotted on the main visualization also appear as highlights above the graphic. These represent the most commonly known or discussed standards for cultural heritage metadata.

Work preparing Seeing standards was supported by a professional development grant from the Indiana University Libraries. Content was developed by Jenn Riley, Metadata Librarian in the Indiana University Digital Library Program. Design work was performed by Devin Becker of the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, and soon to be Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Idaho.

Seeing standards: www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap/

Announcing New Libraries in CLOCKSS: Community-Governed Archive is Growing

The CLOCKSS community of libraries has grown rapidly in the first half of 2010, with 21 new libraries supporting the archive already this year. The libraries to join in the past six months include Oxford University, University of Utah, Vassar College, University of British Columbia, and the European University Institute, as well as members of the COPPUL consortium in Canada and the VIVA consortium in Virginia. Since it was incorporated in October 2009,CLOCKSS has expanded its community to 60 libraries worldwide, with 11 archive nodes at major libraries in North America, Europe, and Asia.

CLOCKSS is a dark archive governed by the community of participating libraries and publishers. All supporting libraries have a seat on the CLOCKSS Advisory Council and help steer the archive's strategy and policies. In the words of Vic Elliott, University Librarian at the Australian National University and one of the CLOCKSS Founding Librarians: “Together we decide our own future – it is not decided for us.”

The new CLOCKSS supporting libraries are:

In the USA: Bates College; College of William and Mary; Emory and Henry College; Marymount University; Roanoke College; University of Pittsburgh;University of Tennessee, Chattanooga; University of Utah; Vassar College;Virginia Wesleyan; University of Mary Washington; Wake Forest University.

In Canada: Athabasca University; Concordia University College of Alberta; University of British Columbia; University of Manitoba; University of Northern British Columbia; University of Saskatchewan; Vancouver Island University.

In Europe: European University Institute; Oxford University.

To see the full list of CLOCKSS libraries: www.clockss.org

Portico Archive Reaches Milestone in Digital Preservation

Portico announced in June that 110 publishers, representing more than 2,000 professional and scholarly societies, are now participating in the Portico archive. Furthermore, nearly 15 million articles are now safely preserved in the Portico archive. “These are significant milestones for Portico and this substantial growth in a short period of time underscores the importance of digital preservation, and the commitment of the hundreds of Portico's participating libraries and publishers to ensuring long-term access to scholarly content,” said Eileen Fenton, Portico's managing director.

The 110 publishers who have entrusted their content to the Portico archive and signed formal agreements with Portico represent e-books, e-journals, and d-collections. Additionally, all publishers participating in JSTOR's Current Scholarship Program will now have their current content preserved in Portico.

Since 2005, the number of titles and types of content preserved in Portico has grown significantly. To date, over 11,000 e-journals and 33,000 e-books have been entrusted to the Portico archive.

For a complete list of Portico-related facts and figures, visit: www.portico.org/digital-preservation/the-archive-content-access/archive-facts-figures/

The complete list of titles and participating publishers is available at: www.portico.org/digital-preservation/who-participates-in-portico/

www.portico.org/digital-preservation/

S-Match Semantic Matching Update Released

S-Match is a semantic matching framework, which provides several semantic matching algorithms and facilities for developing new ones. S-Match was heavily used inside KnowDive group for several years to conduct experiments in semantic matching. The goal of this project is to make S-Match available for the community by releasing it under a permissive open source license.

S-Match applies as a solution in many fields, including:

• information integration;

• ontology evolution and alignment;

• peer-to-peer information sharing;

• digital libraries integration;

• web service composition;

• agent communication; and

• query answering on the web.

Currently, S-Match contains implementations of several semantic matching algorithms. It contains implementation of the original S-Match semantic matching algorithm, as well as minimal semantic matching algorithm and structure preserving semantic matching (SPSM) algorithm.

Original S-Match semantic matching algorithm is a general purpose matching algorithm, very customizable and suitable for many applications.

Minimal semantic matching algorithm exploits additional knowledge encoded in the structure of the input and capable of producing minimized mapping and maximized mapping. Minimized mapping is well suited for manual evaluations, as it contains “compressed” information and saves experts' time. Maximized mapping contains all possible links and is well suited for consumption by applications which are not aware of semantics of lightweight ontologies.

SPSM algorithm is an algorithm well suited for matching API and database schemas. It matches the inputs distinguishing between structural elements such as functions and variables.

The S-Match release of September 18, 2010 contains these improvements:

• new GUI with edit and advanced navigation facilities;

• SPSM integrated;

• additional knowledge bases;

• additional renderer; and

• precision and recall calculation filters.

S-Match comes from the KnowDive group in the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of University of Trento where it was developed under the supervision of Professor Fausto Giunchiglia.

S-Match homepage: http://semanticmatching.org

Download: http://semanticmatching.org/download.html

Documentation: http://semanticmatching.org/documentation.html

Digital Musical Notation Model MEI 2010-05 Released

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) Council has announced the release of the first collaboratively designed method for encoding the intellectual and physical characteristics of music notation documents and their scholarly editorial apparatus. The MEI schema release 2010-05 has the ability to manage complex source situations and will dramatically improve the search, retrieval, and display of notated music online, benefiting music scholars and performers. Because of MEI's software independence, the data format defined by the schema also serves an archival function.

The MEI Council is an international group of scholars, technologists, and educators representing a broad range of musicological, theoretical, and pedagogical interests. The Council was created through funding to the University of Virginia Library and the University of Paderborn from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The MEI model is free and available for download at the MEI web site. The site also offers tutorials, examples, and experimental software for MEI conversion – more will be available in the near future. Information about the future of the project and how to get involved are also on the site.

MEI home: http://music-encoding.org

CCLA Releases Open Source Code to Capture Electronic Resource Usage Statistics

The College Center for Library Automation (CCLA) has released open source code to automate retrieval of electronic resource usage statistics from vendor database web sites.

The code is a set of scripts designed to capture and store data and generate reports from the stored data. An additional web interface is used to manage data. Designed for a multi-college cooperative, the code captures data at the college level and creates statewide and college level reports.

The code runs in the Windows operating environment and requires at least Perl v5.10.0. It was tested with MS SQL Express 2005 and IIS. Reports are produced in PDF and CSV format.

While CCLA has made the open source code, instructions and usage information available, CCLA does not currently provide support or make changes to this code.

CCLA, located in Tallahassee, Florida, operates “LINCC,” the Library Information Network for Cooperative Content, used by more than one million college students and staff throughout Florida.

Open source code available at: http://code.google.com/p/automatedvendorstats

CCLA: www.cclaflorida.org

VuFind Publishes VuFind 2.0 Roadmap

VuFind is a “next generation” library resource discovery portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. It has a rapidly growing community spread across academic, public, national, and special libraries in over 12 countries. With the release of version 1.0 in July 2010, VuFind is a stable alternative for library resource discovery.

Until this moment, the VuFind community has been a loosely affiliated group working in innovative libraries around the world. While the project has a number of committed senior technologists moving development forward, it has lacked both a clear project management framework and a defined administrative structure. Looking to the future, it becomes clear that substantial initiative and discipline in governance and project management is required to make VuFind an even better discovery layer.

On September 15-16, 2010, a cohort of VuFind developers and implementers from around the world met at the Villanova University Conference Center to share ideas and to define priorities for the next stage in the VuFind project. Two days of meetings and conversations identified many opportunities for action,clustered in two distinct categories. Firstly, the group addressed issues of project structure, administration, and governance. Secondly, the group outlined a series of technical goals and functional enhancements for version 2.0 of the software. In each case, the group defined a list of objectives. Action plans for project organization and software enhancement will be refined and finalized by the community during the remainder of 2010.

A clear governance and project management structure will also make VuFind more appealing as a software option for library administrators and front-line professional staff who are interested in project stability and effective application support. Equally important, libraries that have adopted VuFind will have a direct path to affiliating with the project and to providing it with formal support. In October, VuFind made available its VuFind 2.0 organizational and software roadmap.

VuFind 2.0 Organizational and software roadmap: http://vufind.org/docs/roadmap2.pdf

FCLA Mango Discovery Service is Now Solr Powered

Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA), supporting the 11 State Universities of Florida, has switched search engines from Endeca to Solr. FCLA went live with the Solr version of their locally developed discovery application, Mango, in August. The motivation to switch to Solr was driven primarily by cost cutting efforts, not only to save the ongoing maintenance fees but additional fees that would have been incurred with increasing size of the FCLA database, currently 11 million records.

FCLA used Blacklight as a jumping off point for its implementation of Solr,changing it quite a bit to work with the existing Mango discovery application,and Mango required some modification to adapt the calls to the Solr search engine. Mango is a Tomcat application that also uses various APIs and data service layers to bring in outside content such as Google Book covers, journal article metadata, and real time ILS (Ex Libris Aleph) item availability.

FCLA works closely with public and technical service librarians at the 11 State University Libraries in Florida to develop new features and services in Mango that make it a useful and informative service for their users.

The State University Union Catalog can be found here with links to the 11 University Library catalogs: http://union.catalog.fcla.edu/

NISO CORE Protocol Facilitates Information Transfer between ILS and ERMS

The NISO has announced the publication of its latest recommended practice, CORE: cost of resource exchange protocol (NISO RP-10-2010). This recommended practice defines an XML schema to facilitate the exchange of financial information related to the acquisition of library resources between systems, such as an ILS and an ERMS.

CORE identifies a compact yet useful structure for query and delivery of relevant acquisitions data. “Sharing acquisitions information between systems has always been a difficult problem,” said Ted Koppel, AGent Verso(ILS) product manager, Auto-Graphics, Inc. and co-chair of the CORE Working Group. “The rise of ERM systems made this problem even more acute. I'm glad that we, through the CORE Recommended Practice, have created a mechanism for data sharing, reuse, and delivery.” Co-chair Ed Riding, catalog program manager at the LDS Church History Library, added, “The CORE Recommended Practice provides a solution for libraries attempting to avoid duplicate entry and for systems developers intent on not reinventing the wheel. I look forward to the development of systems that can easily pull cost information from one another and believe CORE can help facilitate that.”

CORE was originally intended for publication as a NISO standard. However,following a draft period of trial use that ended March 2010, the CORE Working Group and NISO's Business Information Topic Committee voted to approve the document as a recommended practice. This decision was in part based on the lack of uptake during the trial period as a result of recent economic conditions, and was motivated by the high interest in having CORE available for both current and future development as demand for the exchange of cost information increases. Making the CORE protocol available as a recommended practice allows ILS and ERM vendors, subscription agents, open-source providers, and other system developers to now implement the XML framework for exchanging cost information between systems.

A standing committee has been created to monitor the uptake of the recommended practice, provide support and outreach on the protocol, and conduct an annual review of the document with the aim of making future recommendation for re-release as a standard publication.

Anyone interested in implementing the CORE recommended practice, joining the standing committee, or in receiving additional information should contact NISO at: nisohq@niso.org

CORE recommended practice: www.niso.org/publications/rp/#core

CORE home: www.niso.org/workrooms/core/

CORE interest group discussion list: www.niso.org/lists/coreinfo/

Identify Database Reaches 200,000

Ringgold has announced that its Identify worldwide database of institutions,institutional entities, and their related metadata now exceeds 200,000 records,compared to the benchmark set late in 2009 when the database contained fewer than 125,000 records. This expansion reflects a wider scope from the increasing take up by the information industry, as well as a more granular approach to identification within institutions.

Each record in the database contains a unique identifier and other essential information about the institution, including its consortia memberships,affiliated purchasing groups, and its hierarchical relationships to subsidiaries and other organizations. Metrics include custom tiers describing the type and size of the organization, allowing comparisons to similar organizations worldwide.

Nearly all of the records in the database relate to organizations that purchase academic and research material, usually through subscription. Numerous small, medium sized and large publishers currently use Ringgold's database and its related services to organize their customer data, prepare quotations for licenses and deals, and also for market analysis. Ringgold's web service,OpenIdentify, supports extensive searching, standard reporting, market penetration surveys, and “gap” analysis for smaller publishers who use it to host their subscription data. For larger publishers Ringgold works with the software integration company, Data Salon, to use their MasterVision product to integrate multiple internal data sources with the Identify database.

The NISO is actively supporting the goal of creating a national standard for institutional identification. Helen Henderson, Ringgold's VP of marketing,research and development, acts as consultant to the NISO I2 Working Group on Institutional Identifiers, which is establishing standards for applications in e-resource publishing, e-learning, institutional repositories, and library management systems. The NISO midterm report can be downloaded from: www.niso.org/workrooms/i2/midtermreport

Pubget and CCC Bring Copyright Licensing to the Pubget Platform

In September Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), the rights licensing experts,and Pubget, the search engine for life science PDFs, launched a new “Get Permissions” feature across Pubget.com article pages. The addition of this feature, powered by CCC's Rightslink Permissions Direct technology, makes one click access to copyright licenses possible from the Pubget research platform and extends Pubget's copyright-compliance efforts.

“Pubget's primary mission is to make access to copyright-compliant content easier for scientific researchers,” notes Ryan Jones, President of Pubget. “We're pleased to add ‘Get Permissions’ links because they extend the value of each individual article to our users as well as to the article publishers.”

“Our integration with Pubget is exciting because it simplifies copyright compliance by embedding copyright permissions into the daily content discovery workflow of researchers,” said Diane Pierson, VP of marketing at CCC, “Pubget is simplifying the process of copyright by putting this new feature in the hands of the hundreds of thousands of scientists that use the site each month.”

While the “Get Permission” links on Pubget appear simple, they have far reaching benefits. Specifically, while reading, citing, or bookmarking articles from Pubget's 25-million article collection, users are now one click away from the CCC for obtaining permissions pertaining to that specific article. Permissions can be priced and purchased for any use, from republication to classroom handouts and are granted by the copyright holder.

Pubget delivers millions of PDF articles from thousands of publishers in one interface. As a standalone article destination, Pubget is creating an ecosystem of article-level tools around these PDFs making content discovery, access, and copyright management much easier for the user than traversing multiple platforms. The “Get Permission” link advances this mission by incorporating another workflow tool into the Pubget.com environment.

Pubget: http://pubget.com/

CCC: www.copyright.com/

Google Shuts Down Development of Google Wave

From the official Google blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html

Metadata and Technology in Libraries: Code4Lib Journal Issue 11 Now Available

The September 2010 issue of the Code4Lib Journal once again contains a solid line-up of useful articles, many of which discuss the interaction between metadata and technology in libraries. The contents include:

• A cataloger's perspective on the Code4Lib Journal (Kelley McGrath):On the Code4Lib Journal, technology, and the universe of library cataloging and metadata.

• Interpreting MARC: Where is the bibliographic data? (Jason Thomale). The MARC data format was created early in the history of digital computers. In this article, the author entertains the notion that viewing MARC from a modern technological perspective leads to interpretive problems such as a confusion of “bibliographic data” with “catalog records.”

• XForms for libraries, an introduction (Ethan Gruber, Chris Fitzpatrick, Bill Parod, and Scott Prater): XForms applications can be used to create XML metadata that is well-formed and valid according to the schema, and then saved to (or loaded from) a datastore that communicates via REST or SOAP.

• Why purchase when you can repurpose? Using crosswalks to enhance user access (Teressa M. Keenan). The Mansfield Library subscribes to the Readex database US Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994 (full-text historic reports of Congress and federal agencies). The process that the Mansfield Library used to obtain the Dublin Core records is described, including the procedures for crosswalking the metadata to MARC and batch loading the bibliographic records complete with holdings information to the local catalog.

• Hacking Summon (Michael Klein): When the Oregon State University Libraries selected Serials Solutions' Summon as its discovery tool, the implementation team realized that they had an opportunity to implement a set of“hacks” that would improve the overall user experience.

• Automatic aggregation of faculty publications from personal web pages (Najko Jahn, Mathias Lösch, and Wolfram Horstmann): Many researchers make their publications available on personal web pages. In this paper, we propose a simple method for the automatic aggregation of these documents.

• Managing library IT workflow with Bugzilla (Nina McHale): While designed with software development bug tracking in mind, Bugzilla, an open source bug tracking application designed by Mozilla.org developers, can be easily customized and modified to serve as an IT ticketing system.

Code4Lib Journal: http://journal.code4lib.org/

A Personal Librarian for Every Drexel Freshman

While the role of libraries on college campuses continues to change with the plethora of online sources available to students, Drexel University is aiming to personalize the experience by establishing the “personal librarian program.” Through this program, each of the 2,750 entering freshmen is assigned to a librarian. “The program is a natural extension of what libraries have done for a long time, but now we are adding a more personal element,” said Dean of Libraries at Drexel Danuta A. Nitecki.

Students can go to their personal librarian to learn about the information resources and people they need to succeed not just during their freshman year,but also throughout their college career at Drexel. More than 20 librarians,trained in understanding the curriculum as well as the resources of information in specific disciplines taught at Drexel, are each responsible for looking out for a group of at least 100 students. Personal librarians will maintain the relationship until students become more involved with their academic research. At this point, their primary contact at the library will become the subject specialist or a librarian with added expertise in specific disciplines that serve also as liaisons to Drexel's colleges and schools.

“This initiative complements librarians traditional role as subject liaisons to Drexel's schools and colleges, where they partner with faculty in designing assignments and preparing students to learn information literacy,”said Nitecki. “Through these partnerships every Drexel student masters how to identify, locate and evaluate resources for information needed to understand new concepts, explore diverse ideas and gain new knowledge.”

Students are encouraged to contact their personal librarian so that the librarians can guide the students on how to go about searching for available useful information. Throughout the term the personal librarians remind students of the library's personal support for undertaking research assignments or learning how to wisely leverage Google as a starting point, but not as the only place to identify sources of information. Personal librarians keep their students informed through email messages about new resources and programs, and are available to answer questions about library policies and resources.

Nitecki envisions the library as a learning enterprise, where librarians are deeply integrated as educators in the academic life of the campus, embracing Drexel's mission of educating the leaders of the future. Drexel's library will continue to serve students and faculty by offering reliable and convenient access to information, through services at its three campus libraries, and virtually through web sites and other internet “locations.” But it will also build partnerships with faculty and other experts in technology and pedagogies to develop tools, assess learning, and create new knowledge.

A space planning review is underway to identify learning environments the Drexel library needs to enable the above activities, including places to quietly study or build and practice presentations in groups, to build tools to teach classes with new technologies and consult with individuals, to discover electronic resources via the internet and build visual information-rich web sites on a topic of inquiry.

Drexel University Libraries: www.library.drexel.edu/