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.

Excerpt: “Redlands resident Ken Goss just shrugs, not terribly impressed by decisions he made on the Colorado River that put him briefly in a hospital and might have saved a family of four outside Moab.  “I had to,” Goss replied, when asked why he chose to jump in the icy river to help a father, mother and two young children, ages 11 months and 3 years, who had flipped their raft Friday afternoon near Utah Highway 128, roughly 15 minutes east of Moab. “There was just no way I was going to be able to throw anything at them that far out,” Goss said. Goss, 38, a former firefighter in his native Pennsylvania and now a driver for Sentinel Express, a delivery service provided by The Daily Sentinel, was headed west around 2 p.m. with family on a day trip when he said he caught a glimpse from the roadway of an overturned raft.”

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Look what a fine and distinguished panel appeared at the CLiC Spring Workshops in Grand Junction this week. A great day of learning, networking, innovation, inspiration and fun is coming your way on April 8 in Fort Collins and April 22-23rd in Pueblo. Check out all the details and don’t miss your chance to be part of Kurtis Kelly’s workshop. Remember, the President and the Senator will be waiting…

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!”

VuFind was a very much a dark horse until a few stars aligned. When I joined Marmot last October, it was not clear we could implement let alone enhance an open source solution. When I visited Colorado State University to learn about the first implementation of VuFind with Millennium, I was encouraged that CSU could help Marmot get started. After we hired a new web developer, and identified a contract developer to expand our capacity for a few months, we had everything we needed to take VuFind seriously.

Lucene at the heart of VuFind is no stranger to supporting public and school libraries as well as academics. Lucene powers Encore by Innovative Interfaces, LS2 PAC by The Library Corporation, and many other web apps. The remarkable thing about VuFind for Marmot was how well it met overlapping and conflicting needs of 19 separate Marmot institutions in spite of its academic roots.

Mary Katherine told me how much fun she and CJ were having looking at the code where MARC tags and subfields get handled for indexing and faceting. “I can’t remember the last time I actually enjoyed reading MARC documentation and chasing down fixed field codes.”

Some of the fun comes from feeling in control, from the optimism of being able to solve unique local problems without waiting for a vendor to weigh our priorities with those of a thousand other ILS customers. Mary Katherine can see what’s happening inside the system instead of being shut out of a vendor’s black box. CJ can make changes without filing a bug report. Marmot library users will love the results.

Experienced trainer Carol Wagstaff (Douglas County Libraries) and Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy (CLEL) will review ECRR resources and coach you through how you can use ECRR techniques and plan a literacy-enhanced storytime. Come prepared to practice dialogic reading and give parent tips.

The workshop will be limited to 25 participants and priority will be given to Western Slope libraries. Additional registrants will placed on a waiting list.

Registration fee: $15.00
Location: Montrose Public Library
Date & Time: March 19, 2010, 8:30am-3pm
Questions: Patricia Froehlich, CDE – State Library, 303-866-6908

Register Now!

• * Share with you the latest services and resources we can offer Colorado libraries
• * Hear how libraries have transformed your lives

CSL at CAL 2009 – Schedule (PDF)

The Front Range-area workshop deadlines are next Wed-Fri:
–Greeley workshop on 10/14 – REGISTER WEDNESDAY, 10/7
–Pueblo workshop on 10/15 – REGISTER THURSDAY, 10/8
–Westminster workshop on 10/16 – REGISTER FRIDAY, 10/9

Visit http://tinyurl.com/YSWorkshops for more information and to register.

Please contact Michelle Gebhart, 303-866-6894, if you have questions.

Teams of grant reviewers, composed of librarians of all types from throughout Colorado, scrutinized every word within each proposal. For a library or library service organization to prepare a top-notch proposal is no small feat, and reviewers took their task just as seriously.

The breadth of proposals, both in terms of content and reach in Colorado, was impressive.  All grants awarded addressed the long-range goal “that Colorado’s residents will be able to access resources and services electronically through libraries to meet their information and learning needs.”

A list of 10 grants awarded for 2009-10 follows below. For more information about the LSTA grant submission and review process, your questions are welcomed by Jean Marie Heilig, LSTA Grant Coordinator (heilig_j@cde.state.co.us)

Grants awarded:

• McClave School—Improving Technology Integration and Student Writing Skills through Digital Scrapbooking, $3,923. This grant will provide training, instruction, equipment and inspiration necessary for students to create curriculum based digital scrapbooks and/or similar projects. Projects include local history writing for sixth-grade students; handbooks on internet safety for eighth-grade students; literary criticism handbooks and school history projects for tenth- and eleventh-grade students.

• Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy (CLEL)—Creating an Online Road to Reading, $23,500. In partnership with Rocky Mountain Public Broadcasting Services, CLEL will create online video clips that model songs, rhymes and finger plays appropriate for babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Each clip will include early literacy tips to increase understanding of child development and pre-literacy needs.

• Southern Peaks Public Library—San Luis Valley Libraries Technology Learning Project, $72,559. Nine public libraries are collaborating on this project to offer technology training, information literacy resources and improved access to technology in the San Luis valley. A part-time bilingual technology trainer will be hired to teach computer classes via new laptops and PC’s at each participating library.

• Pikes Peak Library District—Play and Learn, Colorado, $15,000. Every elementary student in Colorado studies state history to meet the Colorado model content standards, including over 8,000 fourth-graders in El Paso County. The Pikes Peak Library District will provide students with historical information to assist in their studies by developing an interactive, Web-based Colorado history game for fourth-grade students.

• Westminster Public Library—Online Access Expansion, $19,856. The Irving Street Community Library will offer computer usage classes (computers for absolute beginners, Internet skills, Microsoft Word, e-mail) and job search classes (creating e-mail accounts, applying for jobs online, creating resumes, searching for jobs online) to their adult and senior population. The existing Homework Help sessions will be enhanced by increasing the availability of computer stations to students from Westminster School District 50 who attend the successful after school program.

• Salida Regional Library—Mobile Computer Education Lab, $12,000. As a way of improving access to educational materials for its patrons, the library will purchase computers for a mobile community lab. The library will also purchase the Learning Express database that provides instructional tutorials in such areas as GED preparation, job skills and preparation for citizenship and civil service examinations. Computer class series will be designed to meet the needs of both current patrons and other community members who wish to learn how to use computers and access information electronically.

• High Plains Library District—Southeast Greeley Literacy Center, $20,000. The Literacy Center will serve as a connection to information, education and inspiration for people of all ages by providing computer services and enabling users to properly utilize the technology. Patrons will have access to read and return book racks and delivery of library materials placed on hold.

• Auraria Library—Latinos in Colorado: Research Sources and Research Strategies, $20,000. The project will digitize a collection of images representing the experiences of Latinos in Colorado. It will focus on identifying, describing, and hosting primary materials about the Latino experience. An instructional video will be produced on Colorado history research methods and materials which will guide users on how to research and use the collection and other resources.

• Adams State College, Nielsen Library— San Luis Valley Historic Digitization Project, $12,739. The Nielsen Library Archives houses rare books, manuscripts, sound recordings and thousands of photographs. These collections are used for their historical significance of the San Luis Valley. This project will digitize photographs from the collection and make them available to the Adams State College Community, residents of the San Luis Valley and those living outside of the valley.

• Automated Systems Colorado Consortium—The Power of Synergy in Action, $200,000. Funding will allow the migration of data from 43 separate member library systems (24 public, 15 schools, three academic, one special) into a single, open-source union catalog. This union catalog will provide the infrastructure for patron initiated interlibrary loan requests and enhance connections between Colorado libraries and improve services to almost 300,000 residents.