For nearly a decade now, librarians have discussed and deliberated ways, for the sake of convenience, to integrate internet-like searching into their own catalogs to mimic what academic library patrons have been using outside the library. Discovery tools and web-scale discovery services (WSDS) attempt to provide users with a similar one-stop shop…

The year 2011 was the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium's "rookie season" for the implementation of Primo, the 2010 Discovery Layer 500 race winner. In this article, the authors report on their transition to the cloud within Ex Libris Ltd.'s Primo TotalCare environment: their preparation, the steps involved…

The overwhelming results were iPhones and Android devices. Since the library wasn't equipped technologically to develop an in-house application platform and because we wanted the content to work across all mobile platforms, we decided to focus on creating a mobile web-based platform. From the NLM page of mobile sites we chose the basic PubMed/…

Alcatel-Lucent has had an internal library website called InfoView since 1993. They always had pages for the various diverse resources they maintained for Alcatel-Lucent employees, such as books, serials, artifacts, market reports, and discounts. Each page had two search boxes: one for a "site" search on all pages and one searching the…

Today data is everywhere. Businesses, governments, universities, scientists, and individuals are creating it at an unprecedented level and pace. Everybody is talking about it. We were just getting used to the concept of gigabytes of data. Then, it changed to petabytes. Now, various technology firms claim that more than an exabyte of data is…

It seems, at times, that a frantic race persists to ensure that a child, in the crucial learning stages of early elementary education, acquires the appropriate reading level before he or she "gets behind." Though there are obvious issues with branding a book "Grade Level One" or "Reading Level 2.2," it is nevertheless…

This article presents the results of a comprehensive survey of integrated library system (ILS) vendors conducted by the author and commissioned by "Computers in Libraries" CIL. The survey was intended to: (1) provide an up-to-date comparison of functionality currently available in ILS products; (2) provide a comparison of support services…

This article describes the Project Lefty, a search system that, at a minimum, adds a layer on top of traditional federated search tools that will make the wait for results more worthwhile for researchers. At best, Project Lefty improves search queries and relevance rankings for web-scale discovery tools to make the results themselves more relevant…

Today's students have grown up in an information environment very different from the one that many people remember. They have been raised on the fast-paced edutainment of "Sesame Street" and have spent their adolescence watching 3-minute music videos on MTV. Their media environment specializes in short messages and multimedia, with news dispatched…

Pipes is an interactive data aggregator and manipulator that lets you mashup your favorite online data sources. Pipes could be used to "combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate to create your ultimate custom feed. In this article, the author describes how to use Yahoo! Pipes. The author shares what she has learned in…

What would technological librarians like to see in the next generation of Integrated Library Systems (ILS)? This question was asked of several well- known library technology experts, and their responses are presented in this article. Survey respondents expressed a clear desire for the following features and functionality: (1) Direct, read-only…

In 2004, Georgia State University (GSU) Library's Southern Labor Archives, located in Atlanta, began working with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) to plan for the digitization of the union's 105-year-old journal. With generous financial support from IAM, the authors, who are GSU staff members, began…

In little more than a decade, Web sites have become integral to many digital library collections and services. Even if a Web site is not the destination point for an information resource, library users often interact with Web sites in the process of searching for and discovering online collections and services. If a user is looking to find and…

In an attempt to make the Kansas City Public Library's Web site more user friendly, the Web team took an opportunity to completely redesign the site. This article describes the techniques that the team used to organize and design the new Web site. By adopting a guided approach to the Internet, they were able to streamline their Web links and…

In this article, the authors discuss ways one can create a digital library on a shoestring despite the current high technology costs. Here, they describe the University of South Carolina's digital library development. The cost associated with building and maintaining the digital collections seems to have been worth it based on the feedback that…