This Thursday AskColorado is celebrating its seventh anniversary. Since Sept. 2, 2003, AskColorado, your statewide cooperative virtual reference service, has quietly and efficiently answered nearly 300,000 questions from students, parents, business owners, military personnel, and other residents of Colorado. Thank you to all Colorado librarians, who, over the years, have helped us to make AskColorado the high quality, personalized service that it is today. Continue reading ‘AskColorado Celebrates Seven Years, Nears 300,000 Questions’
Archive for the 'Innovation' Category
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Erie (High Plains Library District) wins $5,000 from HISTORY™.
NETWORK’S LARGEST EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVE CONNECTED TO THE TV SERIES AMERICA THE STORY OF US.
HISTORY™ announced the winners of a special contest for libraries connected with its landmark 12-part television series, AMERICA THE STORY OF US. The series, which premiered on April 25, 2010 and concluded on Memorial Day, was accompanied by the largest education outreach effort in the network’s history. The Library Outreach Contest encouraged libraries to create themed exhibits, media projects, and public programming about the role their community played in the broader national story.
Continue reading ‘Erie wins $5,000 from HISTORY™’
We’ve done a nice job integrating NoveList content with the new “VuFind at Marmot” OPAC. Take a look at Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.
“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.
Hats off to local artist, Mary Jean Fowler, who created a paper Mache frog, which is now displayed in the local grocery store (Charlies) in La Veta, CO . The frog encourages folks to visit the public library. What a wonderful display of cooperation and collaboration between local business people and the library. Thanks go to Library Director, Sandy Hackbarth, for submitting this photo and other photos of figures throughout the town.
I am thrilled to announce that the Horizon Middle School in Colorado Springs is Colorado’s first public school Plinkit site as part of our Plinkit Expansion Pilot Project (PEP)! The Colorado State Library is currently investigating the need for website creation and hosting services for public school libraries in Colorado.
Like its public library counterparts, Horizon Middle School is now able to offer its students improved access to the online catalog and library account information, library databases and homework resources, and much more! Continue reading ‘Plinkit: Library Websites Made Easy’
I am thrilled to announce the launch of two new Plinkit libraries. Please offer a warm welcome to the Salida Regional Library and the Colorado Supreme Court Law Library!
Over 20 public libraries in Colorado are using Plinkit to provide 24/7 online access to their library catalog, as well as to other online resources, a calendar of events, information about their services and much more. Plinkit is also being used by special and school libraries.
Learn more about what Plinkit can do for your library, sign up, or contact us for more information.
Due to the diligent efforts of library director, Monica Birrer, board, staff and many townsfolk – Walsenburg now has a very unique and beautiful library. Instantly famous because of preservation efforts (saving a vacant school) and energy efficient features (Geothermal), the Spanish Peaks Library District has won the 2010 Stephen H. Hart Award, which recognizes outstanding projects and individual achievements in archaeology and historic preservation throughout Colorado. Kudos, Monica (dressed in red) for devoting these past few years to this inspiring project! Read more.
There were 11, and now there are 14!
Welcome to 2010, the year when Colorado added THREE new Movers and Shakers to the inductee ranks. This annual honor is sponsored by Library Journal. Congratulations go to CLiC’s own Judy Van Acker (who also blogs here regularly on Colorado Libraries, in her “free” time…), Matt Hamilton at Boulder Public Library, and Steve Lawson at Colorado College.
“They are nominated by their colleagues, friends, bosses, or just plain admirers; these innovators are shaping the future of libraries. They hail from all corners of the library world and several nations. With this year’s group of 50, they now number some 450,” says Library Journal.
For a full geographic look at how all the Movers & Shakers over the years are distributed, see this LJ web page.
Colorado has good fortune to be considered the stompin’ grounds for the likes of fantastic people like Judy, Matt and Steve!
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!”
What You’re Saying