Points North Newsletters

April 2008

Page 5

Professional Development Recipient Tells Of Experience By Mike Beccaria, Paul Smith’s College This year I attended the 3rd Annual Code4lib Conference in Portland, OR. As the name suggests, this was a conference of librarians and software engineers interested in how technology can help improve patron experiences in libraries. It was highly technical, and often involved presenters sharing their programming “code” in their presentations. The networking opportunities were great. I was able to meet people with highly technical skills and build relationships with them that will last into the future. Not having a lot of local access to technical expertise, I found this very valuable. These individuals will be an essential and rare resource available to me when I am trying to improve services to my library patrons. The conference presentations were a gold mine of information. I was able to walk away with a list of practical things I can do to improve services at my library. For example, Brewster Kahle, president of the Internet Archive, announce that the OpenLibrary project is planning on providing a scan-on-demand services to for books that would then be added to the OpenLibrary catalog for as little as $.10 per page. This would allow my library to scan some of our older books in our archives at a low cost and link directly to digital versions of them in our catalog. This would vastly improve the access to collections that are currently behind locked doors. Additionally, I learned about the open source Open Journal System. This software package allows libraries (or anyone else) to publish online open access journals and helps to facilitate necessary workflows in the publishing business such a revisions, editor\writer communication, and final publication. In a local context, this software would allow the library to offer our college faculty the opportunity to create and publish an online open journal, hosted and supported by the library. ------------ Information on the NNYLN’s Professional Development Program may be found here .

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