Nothing is more practical than a good theory. A banal statement, considering that a theory should always enable its users to easily derive the statements they need for practice.
But a theory for catalogs or cataloging? Is that really necessary? A question anyone is likely to ask who has never been confronted with the matter nor considered it with any seriousness.
Using Internet search engines, and knowing their operation is fully automated, people tend to view with skepticism all practical and theoretical effort invested in catalogs. Any good search engine, however, has to be be based on a good theory - though that one may differ quite a bit from a catalog theory.
This bibliography has been compiled by Brenda Chawner, School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, as part of her Ph.D. studies. It includes announcements, journal articles, and web documents that are about open source software development in libraries. It also includes articles that describe specific open source applications used in libraries, in particular dSpace, Koha, Greenstone, and MyLibrary.
Imagine a future when you go to the library with a 5 minute video you've just made about last night's Presidential debates and that librarian says to you:
Noa Aharony asks whether library and information science schools in the United States are underestimating the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 applications.
Äußerst interessantes Thesenpapier über die Zukunft sog. Discovery Tools in Bibliotheken. Besonders (aber nicht nur) der Abschnitt über OPACs ist auch für Deutschland höchst relevant.
If you’ve heard the buzz about Library 2.0, but don’t quite understand how to implement it, you’ve come to the right place. The Internet is full of helpful webinars, presentations, and tutorials designed to help you take your library to the next level, and we’ve highlighted some of the most useful of these here. Read on to learn how your library can get with the times.
# Perennial favorites open source, APIs, and mobile devices given as top trends, among others
# Technology glitches during streaming video, distracting chat room discussion during panel
# Karen Coyle: Future may not involve libraries "if we don't make some extreme changes."
As research and scholarship move increasingly into the digital arena, the processes and organizations involved in the publication of this work must evolve as well. The changing landscape of libraries, publishers, and scholarly societies; university views on tenure and digital scholarship; the emerging role of search engines; and the continuing development of information technology have created a need for radical rethinking of the roles of the major players in scholarly communication. We need to understand how users create, discover, and evaluate information, as well as the real and virtual environments in which they do their academic work, in order to plan our scholarly communication and e-publishing strategies for the future. In the past, discussions of change in scholarly communication have often focused on the use of new technologies. Going forward, the conversation needs to focus on the less technical, but perhaps even more complex, issues of changing user needs, different organizational structures, new kinds of jobs, and partnerships among the key organizations involved in knowledge dissemination.