Libraries are successful to the extent that they can bridge communities and can leverage the diversity of the quest, the research, and the discovery. By building bridges among various sectors, libraries will be able to define themselves in the next generation.

The South Carolina Information and Library Services Consortium (SCILS) began with three public two-year college libraries in 1995. Since then, nine other public two-year college libraries have joined SCILS. In 2004, Sirsi's buyout of Data Research Associates (DRA) in 2001 was the impetus for SCILS to migrate to Sirsi. Migration to a more dynamic…

Things are failing everywhere. A few years ago, several large companies disappeared almost overnight in a series of scandals. This year, the mortgage industry imploded. More recently, stalwart financial and insurance corporations have been dropping like flies. Failures happen on a smaller scale too. Recently, the all-caps word "FAIL" became a…

The conversion of catalog records to machine-readable form is described. The conversion system is outlined. Conversion costs and actual and contemplated results are listed. (Author/NH)

Emphasis is placed on the automation efforts of the Federal Library Committee's Task Force on the Automation of Library Operations. (MF)

The on-line acquisition program (LOLITA) in use at the Oregon State University Library is described in terms of development costs, equipment requirements, and overall design philosophy. (Author)

A brief summary of the discussion, resolutions and a list of papers are given for this seminar, held at the University of Regensburg, Germany in April 1970. (AB)

This article discusses what SUSHI is and how it works. SUSHI stands for standardized usage statistics harvesting initiative. It was created specifically to solve the very problem of retrieving and having to reformat the usage reports. The promise of SUSHI is that, with wide adoption, it will drastically reduce the time spent collecting usage data…

This paper presents several methods to automatically detecting students' mental models in MetaTutor, an intelligent tutoring system that teaches students self-regulatory processes during learning of complex science topics. In particular, we focus on detecting students' mental models based on student-generated paragraphs during prior knowledge…

Planning is necessary in selecting the appropriate digital asset management system for your institution. Key issues one should consider in planning: the objects to be stored, where they come from, and how they will be accessed; the end users; and the needed staffing levels for system maintenance. During the development of the system requirements,…

There is a growing interest in making available and making sense of the data on the Web and trapped in databases. Rather than a web of unstructured documents, full of information understandable only to humans, there is a movement whose intention is to make these data structured, reusable, machine-readable, and interrelated. This approach to Web…

At the end of 2007, SirsiDynix introduced the first version of Symphony, its new flagship Integrated Library System (ILS). This article begins with a look at the evolution of Symphony, user reactions to Symphony, and Symphony's design and functionality. The authors, along with a team of librarians from various functional areas, have completed…