Several years ago, National Public Radio (NPR) librarians began developing a new content management system (CMS). It was intended to offer desktop access for all NPR-produced content, including transcripts, audio, and metadata. Fast-forward to 2011, and their shiny, new database, Artemis, was ready for debut. Their next challenge: to teach a staff…

The author, a digital access architect in the information systems department of the Orange County Library System in Florida, was given the challenge of creating a library mobile app around the 2009 holiday season. At that time, Sheri Chambers, digital content manager in the information systems department, and Debbie Moss, assistant director of the…

Academic, government, and corporate librarians organize and leverage internal resources and content through institutional repositories and library catalogs. Getting more value and usage from the content they license is a key goal. However, the ever-growing amount of content and shifting user demands for new materials or features has made the…

The technology of the 21st century has had no shortage of challenges for libraries, but it has also brought opportunities. Operating systems, databases, and application environments that can use cheap off-the-shelf hardware to scale and handle hundreds of millions of transactions were not developed for libraries. However, libraries have taken…

In this article, the author describes his experience when Kathy Nichols contacted him seeking suggestions, recommendations--really anything he could think of--that might help her seize control of a bewildering and rapidly surging torrent of digital image files. The challenges that Nichols described interested him, and he felt they might be…

Most people don't realize how easy it is to improve library services with open source databases. Despite the fact that they are distributed free of charge, open source databases are powerful and stable enough for critical applications. With a little knowledge of HTML and some basic technical skills, you can quickly create databases to register…

Given the recent spate of library system vendor acquisitions and consolidations, integrated library system (ILS) migrations have become a hot topic again. Although ILS migrations happen all the time, they tend to be cyclical in nature. Today, people are thinking broadly about what options might be available to them. These include changing vendors,…