In this continuation of my conversation with Tim Spalding of LibraryThing, we talked about LibraryThing for Libraries, achieving a critical mass of tags, and improving discovery in the library catalog.
Tag Cloud
Website development
OCLC
Tim Spalding
Wayne State University
Social bookmarking
Firefox
Drupal
Polling
Digital Commons
Instant messaging
PALINET
University of California Merced
LibraryThing
Koha
Social software
TurningPoint software
Code4Lib
Carl Grant
Central Piedmont Community College
Washington State University Vancouver
Greasemonkey
Classroom Performance System
University of Nevada Las Vegas
Georgia Perimeter College Decatur
Squidoo
Assessment
InterWrite SchoolPad
Plagiarism
Privacy
Virtual reference
Institutional repositories
Georgia Tech
Pennsylvania State University
Smart phones
Princeton University
Research
Open source
Podcasting
LibraryThing for Libraries
University of North Texas
Ohio University
Tagging
University of Pennsylvania
Classroom technology
Flash animation
When Tim Spalding created LibraryThing, he had no idea what it would become. He just wanted to catalog his personal library and share it with a few friends. But LibraryThing has exploded into more than 390,000 members, who have cataloged nearly 26 million books. This rapid growth is probably because LibraryThing is more than a big catalog; it is a social software site that feeds our mania for books, our joy in talking about authors and stories, and our need to share with others.
In Part 1 of our conversation, we talked about LibraryThing generally and what you can do with it. In Part 2 of our conversation, we talked about LibraryThing for Libraries, achieving a critical mass of tags, and improving discovery in the library catalog.
Don Hamparian is Manager of the WorldCat Grid Services Portfolio at OCLC. He has been in the IT and Software Development world for 25 years, starting with CDC mainframe programming. Since joining OCLC eight years ago, he has been working in product management, architecture standardization, and IT roles.
David Walker is Library Web Services manager for The California State University. His work focuses principally on interface design and system integration, particularly for library catalogs, metasearch systems, and link resolvers.
Don and Dave gave presentations at Code4Lib 2008 on the new WorldCat API. This new web service will allow library software developers to run searches and pull holdings information from the WorldCat database–from within their own local applications.
Joshua Ferraro is CEO of LibLime. His company offers installation, setup, data migration, and custom programming services for libraries implementing the Koha open source integrated library system. Josh founded LibLime in 2005, and already has 17 employees over 200 customers. He is an active contributor to the Koha project and release manager for Koha Version 3, the alpha release of which came out in January. We talked about Koha 3 at the Code4Lib conference in
Daniel Griffin is VP of Public Computing for Userful. He has experience in systems re-engineering, change management and team leadership. From 2000-2003, prior to joining Userful, he led the project to integrate LexisNexis’ print and electronic delivery departments and systems and managed a team of 11 FTE.
Collexis makes high end discovery tools and knowledge management software for organizations. Their products allow searchers to find experts, follow trends in scientific literature, or identify promising new areas for research. Moreover, they don’t just give you results in textual form. Their products’ user interfaces provide visual clues to the significance of particular concepts or relationships. If I were a biomedical researcher, I would want their products in my toolkit. At ALA, Collexis announced a new social software site, biomedexperts.com, for biomedical researchers which is pre-populated with profiles of published authors.
Steve Leicht, Collexis Chief Operating Officer, joined the company in 2006 after a career at IBM and experience founding and running his own telecommunications company. He has an MBA from
Prior to joining Collexis, Darrell Gunter, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Collexis, was Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing for the
To find out more about the technology and techniques behind their products, I spoke to Steve Leicht, and Darrell Gunter, at ALA Midwinter.
John Sarnowski is Director of the ResCarta Foundation. His long experience in system integration and software development cumulated in the position of Director, Imaging Products at Northern Micrographics. A regular speaker and presenter at library conferences, he has been featured at ALA, as well as Texas, Maine, Wisconsin, and Special Libraries Association events. I asked him about the ResCarta Foundation and its work promoting standards-based digitization at the LITA National Forum in Denver, Colorado.
In 2005, Library Journal selected Chip Nilges as of its library movers and shakers. Currently Vice President, OCLC Business Development, Chip has worked for OCLC since 1994, starting out as a FirstSearch Product Support Specialist. Recently, Chip has been one of the people helping to articulate OCLC’s strategic goals for the WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local products as well as various Web 2.0 initiatives.
Mary Madden is a Senior Research Specialist with the Pew Internet & American Life Project. A report she co-authored, “Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks” was published in April 2007. In May, she was scheduled to present “Young & Wired: How Today’s Young Tech Elite Will Influence the Libraries of Tomorrow” at the Mid-Atlantic Library Futures Conference but was unable to give the presentation due to an illness. PALINET was, however, able to post her presentation slides on the conference website.
Mid-atlantic Library Futures Conference - Mary Madden [26:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (275)Jeffrey Scherer is an architect and principal in the firm of Meyer, Scherer, and Rockcastle, Ltd. His firm has been responsible for designing at least 100 libraries as we as various museums and other buildings since its founding. Jeffrey gave a talk entitled “Library Space: Is it the Last Frontier in the Digital Age?” at the Mid-atlantic Library Futures Conference in May.
Mid-atlantic Library Futures Conference - Jeffrey Scherer [22:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (361)
