For those of you who might not be familiar with NITLE’s many mailing lists to foster communication around shared interests within the NITLE network, I thought it might be useful to share a link to a page where they describe the lists and how to join them. That page is at:
http://www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/the_network/peer_networks_and_communities
Of particular interest to some might be the NITLE-IT list, which of late has had some very interesting exchanges.
Submitted by Cynthia Watters
Cynthia Watters returned at the end of August from a summer travelling the western U.S. in a small camper/van. She had a wonderful time and now is readjusting to the normal working environment.
Japanese Collection
A major project for this year is the cataloging and processing of two Japanese gifts, one from the estate of Prof. Hiroshi Miyaji, and together comprising about 1200 volumes. To assist with this project, we have hired a college senior, Pamela Yeo, who studied Japanese at Middlebury. Cynthia Watters and Pamela are working together, calling on Pamela’s knowledge of Japanese and Cynthia’s of cataloging. Together they are making progress.
These materials are headed for the Japanese Collection and will increase it by about 50%. The Japanese Collection is currently classed according to an old system devised by a Harvard librarian in 1943. It is both outdated (try classing something on computers…), complex, indexless, and non-standard, but it’s what the original collection came with when we acquired it from the Japanese summer school.
Now seems the time to bite the bullet and reclass the collection in the LC classification used in the rest of the library. It’s a big project, but the new books can be classed in LC in much less time than in the current system. As Cynthia began the project, she realized that it was an opportunity to add Japanese characters to our older records. New records routinely include Japanese characters, but, until a few years ago, they were not imported into MIDCAT from the OCLC database. Since one way of determining LC call numbers is to search the record on OCLC, we can overlay our record with the OCLC record with Japanese characters.
In this way a project continues to grow in scope, but it should provide a great addition to our Japanese collection and its use.
Theater Orchestra scores
The Music Library completed cataloging and processing a gift of 215 theater orchestra scores acquired in Oct. 2007. A student assistant created the basic brief bib records for these, which were then reviewed by a staff cataloger. You can see the list of records by searching the local call no.: “Theater Orchestra Coll” or see an example at http://biblio.middlebury.edu/record=b2289425
submitted by Mike Roy
Peter Schilling, head of IT at Amherst, published an interesting index of IT factoids at Academic Commons (a site that I help to run) which the Chronicle picked up on. Look for a similar Midd-centric index coming soon to our magazine. Are the changes Amherst notices also happening here?
from Marcy Smith
Internet-based student written college guides are the Wikipedia-like resource for the prospective student on the proverbial college hunt. While the new site Unigo does not offer a radical or even new view of Middlebury, it will be an interesting site to watch develop in terms of how this particular use of technology may impact our Admissions processes, if it catches on with college seekers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21unigo-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
http://www.unigo.com/Colleges/UnigoReview/Default.aspx?CollegeId=112
via Elin Waagen
This quarter’s issue of “Reference & User Services Quarterly” features a guest post entitled “Taming Technolust: Ten Steps for Planning in a 2.0 World” that the editor of the journal — M. Kathleen Kern– introduces with the following:
“This quarter, Michael Stephens of the popular Tame the Web blog offers advice on dodging “technolust” and how to recognize and deal with “technodivorce.” It isn’t all avoidance, though, as he provides ten positive steps for your library’s technology planning. Michael has a pedigree in technology planning as the former Special Projects Librarian at Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Public Library. He now teaches in the LIS program at Dominican University and recently authored two Technology Reports on Web 2.0 for the American Library Association. If you’ve heard Michael speak, you will recognize his straight-from-the-hip style. ”
It’s an interesting diatribe, and one worthy of further discussion. (Hint hint… use the comments!)
The folks at Nature Magazine just published a special issue called ‘Big Data’. Within that issue is an interesting article entitled ‘Big Data: The next Google’. Here is their introduction to that article:
What will happen in the next 10 years?
“Ten years ago this month, Google’s first employee turned up at the garage where the search engine was originally housed. What technology at a similar early stage today will have changed our world as much by 2018? Nature asked some researchers and business people to speculate — or lay out their wares. Their responses are wide ranging, but one common theme emerges: the integration of the worlds of matter and information, whether it be by the blurring of boundaries between online and real environments, touchy-feely feedback from a phone or chromosomes tucked away on databases.”
Thanks to Shel Sax for the tip!