May 11, 2011
The Marmot Council of twenty library directors elected four new members to the Marmot Executive Board. Eve Tallman (Director of Mesa County Public Library District) continues in the role of Treasurer. New Board members include President Barb Brattin (Director of the Wilkinson Public Library in Telluride); Vice President Nancy Gauss (Director of the Savage Library at Western State College); Gayle Gunderson (Director of the Fowler Library at Colorado Christian University); and Sherry Holland (School Librarian in Steamboat Springs School District).
About Marmot
The Marmot Library Network (www.marmot.org), based in Grand Junction (CO), is a non-profit organization providing information technology services to public, academic, and school libraries. Marmot hosts software and a database shared by 20 institutions comprising 90 library sites in Colorado; and provides internet, hardware, and software support services.
“Similar Titles” in the upper right is NoveList content in the OPAC, right where readers can use it, instead of parked off on the side in some database of titles that may or may not be in this library catalog.
“Also in this series” shows this title’s position in a series. Most importantly, this is a proper series list from the NoveList database rather than an attempt by OPAC software to make the best of series data which is typically dicey in even the best bibliographic records.
“Similar authors”, under jacket art on the upper left, is more NoveList content.
These NoveList features are now available to open source developers like us as the “NoveList Select” add-on product. We’re still working on the print function, so a page like this will print nice instead of goofy. Watch for that improvement in a couple weeks.
CJ O'Hara, Keith Dedman, Mark Noble
After 3 guys worked on it part time for 3 months, the Western Slope Libraries Catalog is now live. We started with open source VuFind, developed at Villanova U and first implemented in Colorado by CSU.
This month the team is fine-tuning relevance ranking, correcting links to electronic books, evaluating new catalog enrichment options, and developing an admin console to support a variety of configuration options for our multi-type consortium.
This summer Marmot will work with members to brand, configure, and launch library-specific flavors of the catalog. Academics and schools should all be ready in time for fall term; publics will launch throughout the summer.
We’re certainly taking advantage of the openness of open source to do cool things for library users that no sane vendor would want to do in a commercial product. Give us a call at 970-242-3331 to hear more about it.
Published by
JTMarmot on
February 28, 2010 in
Academic Libraries, IT, Innovation, Public Libraries, School Libraries and Western Slope.
Tags: discovery layer, Lucene, MARMOT, opac, open-source, VuFind.
My son Peter illuminated a Colorado road atlas one day on our way to a pet store. His inscriptions are as gleeful as some of the comments I hear lately around Marmot, where we’re implementing VuFind as a next-gen OPAC.
In this and future posts I’ll tell the story of how we selected VuFind from a list that included AquaBrowser, Encore, Drupal SOPAC, and WorldCat Local. I’ll write about testing and launching open source software originally developed at Villanova University. We might blaze a few interesting trails, taking software currently running in university libraries, and adapting it to our multi-type consortium on the Western Slope.
“We’re getting open source!”
Continue reading ‘“We’re getting gerbils!”’
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