Librarian Philosopher

February 27 & 28, 2008, Austin, Texas, the State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) sponsored another “Statewide Resource Sharing Summit”. These happen about every 4 years for as far back as 1987 that I know of.

The best thing that I can think of for Texas School Librarians to come out of this summit was that the majority of participants (Public, Academic, Special, and School Librarians and lay-folks) “voted” to move toward including School Libraries in TexShare. Essential, this will mean a greater sharing of resources for all Texans.

Aside from the purpose of the summit being accomplished, I also learned many other things through side conversations with colleagues.

A great model website using terms that patrons, users, constituents understand exists at the Columbus Metropolitan Library. Instead of listing “databases” they use the term “Premium Resources”. Thanks Julie Todaro.

I have heard the term “federated search” as applying to a “one search finds all”. At the summit, I also hear the terms “aggregated search” and “faceted search”. Now I will need to listen, read, and research to see if there is a difference between these terms.

I heard again about the video resource SAFARI Montage^®. Another resource I will need to research.

An open source integrated Library system, Koha, might be a solution for making our OPACs as user-friendly as Amazon.com. However, until I get more staff or can convince the Technology Department to do some soft programming for me, open source is beyond me. Unless, LibLime, a third party provider of open source solutions, may be my solution. If I understand correctly, I pay LibLime a lesser amount of money than I am paying for my proprietary OPAC and they use open source like Koha to build and maintain an OPAC for me that is user-friendly—what a deal! Thanks David Shuster.

For more information about the “Statewide Resource Sharing summit” see David’s posts at Follow up to Day on of Resource Sharing.