ALA TechSource Logo

ala-online-v1.jpg

 
curve Home spacer Publications spacer Subscribe spacer Blog spacer About  
    

Posts by Patrick Hogan

New Library Technology Report on Measuring Electronic Resource Use

Submitted by Patrick Hogan on August 25, 2010 - 11:02am

In the August/September issue of Library Technology Reports (vol. 46; no. 6), Rachel Fleming-May and Jill Grogg cover state of the art of electronic resources use measurement, offering guidance on presenting clear and meaningful measurement in research, assessment, and standards creation.

Topics Covered Include:

  • Assessing Use and Usage
  • Standards, Tools, and Other Products
  • Improving Understanding of Electronic Resources Usage
  • Practitioner Responses on the Collection and Use of Usage Statistics

An excerpt follows. Read More »


Conference View from #2605

Submitted by Patrick Hogan on June 30, 2010 - 8:49am

ALA’s sprawling conference leaves librarians dashing between hotels and meeting rooms, but I mostly stayed in one place--the ALA Publishing booth.  I let the conference come to me. My colleagues and I were there to tell people about the RDA Toolkit, Guide to Reference and of course, ALA TechSource.

ALA Editions editors used a small table for meetings with authors. The RDA Toolkit had launched only a few days before the conference, and visitors came in a steady flow. Most were familiar with RDA and had a few specific questions about functions. On the last day, folks came to gawk at the heft of the print version. Not to brag, but I’m familiar enough with any of those products to give a serviceable demo. While working on the RDA project and its RDA Vocabularies component, I learned about the
NSDL Registry managed by Diane Hillmann and Jon Phipps. Karen Coyle consulted on the project and has written a two-issue series of Library Technology Reports explaining the semantic web and how the RDA Vocabularies might be deployed with its technologies (by the way,you can get that two-issue set at 50% off at the ALA Store). Read More »


New LTR eBook Part of ALA Editions eEditions Initiative

Submitted by Patrick Hogan on May 21, 2010 - 12:29pm

April's issue of Library Technology Reports, Gadgets and Gizmos: Personal Electronics and the Library, by Jason Griffey is available as an ebook bundle in the ALA Store. Typically, single-copy purchasers have a choice between buying print (available in the ALA Store) or, for an ebook, a PDF version from our MetaPress site. As we prepared for Griffey's webinar, we realized that it would be a fitting, if not an expectation, for the issue to be viewable on a gadget.
Read More »


Implementing RDA: Call for the Alpha Geeks of Library Metadata

Submitted by Patrick Hogan on July 8, 2009 - 2:32pm

"Forget Silicon Valley," writes publisher Tim O'Reilly in a Forbes.com article:

It turns out that many of the great waves of creative destruction that have reinvented Silicon Valley didn't start there. More important, they didn't even start with the profit motive. Rather, they started with interesting problems and people who wanted to solve them, exercising technology to its fullest because exploring new ideas was fun. I call these people "alpha geeks." They are smart enough to make technology do what they want rather than what its originator expected.

  Read More »


Breeding on OCLC library automation strategy

Submitted by Patrick Hogan on May 12, 2009 - 3:35pm

This post is extracted from an article written by Marshall Breeding in the May 2009 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter.

Marshall Breeding writes that OCLC's announcement of its new library automation services "stands as a large milestone in the evolution of library automation."  Here is an early view of his June Smart Libraries Newsletter article. Read More »


Work on the RDA data model

Submitted by Patrick Hogan on January 20, 2009 - 9:38am

While munching on a sandwich, I asked Jon Phipps some questions about the Metadata Registry, while Diane Hillmann, Karen Coyle, and Nannette Naught (colored pencils in hand) pored over RDA's Entity Relationship (ER) diagram on 3 x 4 foot sheets. During my first week of the new year, I spent a couple days observing discussions on RDA as a data model.

ALA Publishing is working with Metadata Management Associates and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Metadata Registry project in the development of the software for RDA. The Metadata Registry has already developed key modules of software that ALA will need and has more in the works. With element lists and vocabularies for the new standard likely to change, the Metadata Registry can create a central, stable space for maintenance. The software can also generate schemas, which will be available for free download from the RDA website. Read More »


Gift ideas for the young geek reader

Submitted by Patrick Hogan on December 11, 2008 - 10:41am

You can always tease parents with the adage that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Assuming that ALA TechSource readers may want to share their sci-tech passions with youngsters on their gift list, I'm linking to this list from Booklist Online's free newsletter REaD ALERT: Top Sci-Tech Books for Youth: 2008.

 

  Read More »

Posted in

Happy Gaming Day greeting from an old friend

Submitted by Patrick Hogan on November 14, 2008 - 8:38am

Saturday, November 15, is National Gaming Day @ Your Library, and gamers are gearing up for major events around the country. Hasbro donated their game Pictureka to hundreds of libraries nationwide, an effort coordinated by ALA. Our goal is to get a mind-blowing number of people to play the same game on the same day. Wizards of the Coast offered 1,000 libraries a choice of their games Dungeon and Dragons or Magic: the Gathering. ALA Editions author Eli Neiburger and his colleagues at the Ann Arbor District Library will be running a national videogame tournament on their GT System.

At ALA TechSource, we recently heard from an old friend who is busy promoting gaming in libraries once again. Former ALA TechSource editor Teresa Koltzenburg launched this blog, recruiting Jenny Levine, Michael Stephens, and Karen Schneider. It was Teresa and Jenny who initiated the Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium.

Teresa quietly left ALA in March 2007. At best, our career paths take us on switchbacks where skill and knowledge gained is expressed in new ways. Here's what Teresa is up to now.

  Read More »


Hello ALA TechSource!

Submitted by Patrick Hogan on November 13, 2008 - 10:20am

I've been working backstage for some time now as manager of ALA Publishing's Online Resources unit, which in addition to ALA TechSource includes Guide to Reference and RDA: Resource Description & Access. With loads of help from Jenny Levine, not to mention Joe the Drupal developer, I coordinated the migration of the blog to the Drupal platform. I recruited Jason, Kate, and Cindi to the blogging team and hired Dan . . . but I've never posted to the blog! I'll be writing the occasional post, mostly reporting on other ALA Publishing projects. More soon. Read More »

Posted in
http://alatechsource.org/blogger/15?page=7
alatechsource.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-07
41513
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:T4D6CSTHS5N4T7PNPP74VZBDDS3W7EHS
<urn:uuid:41173895-8f35-4bee-92d7-5d1f16f40671>
2016-02-13T08:44:32Z
45.79.6.106
sha1:TONUKF7ZRTCT6RFYEOGLZP2IVHWFMIJR
<urn:uuid:667e3ff3-a0c9-4e04-80f1-28ab82a35783>
http://alatechsource.org/blogger/15?page=7
length
response
<urn:uuid:c916e266-5984-4515-8aaa-33ab71a968ae>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-236-182-209.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-07
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf