Repositories: Back to the Future

The annual Intrallect conference will be held on 28th-29th April 2009 at the Scottish Storytelling centre in Edinburgh.  I attended the event last year which was excellent and will be of interest to repository folk from accross the ukoer spectrum – not just Intrallect’s customers.

Image licenced under Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB

“Repositories?  Where we’re going we don’t

need repositories!”

The “Back to the Future” theme provides scope for considering how we got to where we are today, could we have done things differently, what have we done well, what would we never want to repeat? How should the future be shaped? Will it be driven by technology or by educational need?

For more information see http://www.intrallect.com/index.php/intrallect/news_events/events

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Resource discovery at Leeds Met Library

Just a quick plug for a new Leeds Met blog investigating Resource Discovery and Federated Searching systems for Leeds Met Library:

http://leedsmetlibrary.wordpress.com/

It is, er, blogged by my colleague @DebbieMN but will also include contributions from other library staff and recently, for example, our graduate trainee has posted about his first impressions of Serial Solution’s Summon which is billed as a “web-scale discovery service” that “allows the researcher to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content.” (http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon/)

I also attended the Summon demo last week and was pretty impressed by the Google style simplicity of the search interface – which I suspect will be very popular with students – though some of my librarian colleagues did express reservations about the potential impact on information literacy and were keen to see the advanced search functionality; it is still important to teach more sophisticated information retrieval skills even if students are likely just to head to the simple search box of Google (or Summon)!

One aspect I was particularly interested in was the apparent ease with which Summon can be configured to search an institutional repository – functionality that the University of Huddersfield, who are now running Summon, have already implemented to search their EPrints repository – Huddersfield’s @daveyp tweeted this example using the name of their repository manager @graham_stone – http://hud.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.q=graham+stone