NELINET is proud to present its 5th Annual IT Conference, “Open Source in Your Library.” This exciting event will show you how libraries are implementing open source products for a variety of uses and will expand your understanding of the advantages of using open source products in libraries. Listen to our panel discussion delve more deeply into this topic and learn first hand about implementation and maintenance of open source products from those who are using them! A fantastic group of open source innovators include:Dan Scott, Systems Librarian for Laurentian University, barista, library geek, and open source dabbler will be NELINET’s keynote speaker. You may know him from such projects as PHP (PEAR’s File_MARC package and PDO documentation), Apache Derby, and the Evergreen open-source ILS project.

Karen Coombs, Library Journal 2009 Mover and Shaker, trend spotter and Head of Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries, will discuss how her library is using Drupal for its intranet and for a pilot project involving digital library materials.

Joe Lucia is the University Librarian and director of Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University. His advocacy for open source led his library to develop VuFind, an open-source discovery layer for library catalogs.

Attention Accidental Webmasters!Accidental Webmaster Series: Just Enough MySQL – Just Enough PHP Starts July 14th – ONLINE SERIESIn this six-week series, you will learn just enough PHP and MySQL to explore, understand and implement dynamic tools and content. Each week, you will take part in a 1.5-hour online lecture and discussion to introduce new concepts and techniques. Between online live meetings, you will work at your own pace to practice what you’ve learned, share ideas with colleagues and receive individualized guidance and feedback in Moodle, our open source online learning management system.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2009/06/15/nelinet-it-conference-2009-open-source-in-your-library/feed/0Japanese Collection Developmentshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2009/06/15/japanese-collection-developments/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2009/06/15/japanese-collection-developments/#commentsMon, 15 Jun 2009 19:00:51 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/list/?p=318Large gifts from the late Professor Hiroshi Miyaji and from Robert and Take Dean have increased Middlebury’s Japanese Collection by 50%; we now have approximately 4500 items in the collection. (In addition, items containing some English as well as Japanese (including bi-lingual dictionaries) are in the regular stacks and video materials are in the video collections.)

While cataloging the new acquisitions, we recataloged the items already in the collection. The call numbers were changed from a non-standard system to the standard Library of Congress system used in the rest of the library. In addition the Japanese characters were added to the records so now the description contains both the romanized forms and the characters themselves. We hope these enhancements will make our catalog and our collection more usable and rewarding. Someday we may even be able to search MIDCAT using characters!

The Japanese Collection has extensive works of Japanese literature and works on Japanese literature, philosophy, religion, and history but also includes resources on almost any subject imaginable.<

For the first few weeks of the Japanese summer school, a significant selection of recently added titles is displayed in the New Book shelves section of the Main Library. Books we did not add to the collection or which have been removed from the collection will be displayed separately for sale beginning in late June; these books are chiefly duplicates of items already in the collection and may well be of interest to individuals.

The items on the new bookshelves are in call number order–even though bookjackets prevent the call numbers from being visible. If you or a patron needs to find a particular book, you need to partially remove the jacket to see the spine or to look in the back of the book where the call number is written in pencil. Note also that, although I say ‘back’ because we think of it as back, it is indeed the front of the book for Japanese and other languages written right to left.