Category Archives: news

I Knew It!

By IRIS Posted on by

Remember last year when I wondered what letter would become popular next? Remember I said it would be “s” for “social?” Looks like there’s a possibility I was right. John Blyberg is working on the SOPAC — the social -er- catalog. And man, oh man, does it look good. And you don’t even have to be a library card holder to participate!

But that’s not even the good part. No, the good part is that he’s made his code public.

So let me be among the first to say, “Me too! Me too! I like this idea too!”

[Update: As I suspected, this is getting major buzz in the biblioblogosphere, so I've created two ways to keep up with it. You can see (and subscribe to) the posts I've read on the topic here. And you can see (and subscribe to) a libworm search for the topic here.]

SirsiDynix and Vista Equity Partners are an Item

By IRIS Posted on by

During that dead week between Christmas and New Years, almost as if hoping that nobody would see the announcement, Vista Equity Partners bought SirsiDynix. I haven’t blogged about it for three reasons:

  • I don’t normally blog news just for the sake of blogging news (though I have done so in the past on occasion just because I felt like it… nobody ever claimed I was consistent).
  • I’ve been busy.
  • But most importantly, I’m not sure what this means or if it means anything. I’m just plain ignorant, and I know so little that I’m having trouble even having an opinion. Believe me, this is rare.

So what does this mean? Will things change? Will SirsiDynix be able to keep doing what they do? Wouldn’t it be nice if investment companies started to each want their very own ILS to promote and sell? But would this kill the (admittedly slow) innovation of ILS vendors, or would it spur them to change in order to see the value of their stocks go up? Somebody please help me have an opinion.

Round Up

By IRIS Posted on by

I’ve been oddly busy lately. I can’t exactly figure out what’s been taking up all my time, but what with one thing and another I’ve been getting behind on my blog reading. Consequently, I’ve got a tremendous backlog of “to read” posts piling up.

But tonight I made my way through a few of them, and here are some of the more current posts that caught my eye:

And now on to some of the older reading…

Open Book Cover Images?!?

By IRIS Posted on by

The amazing people who actually contribute to NGC4lib (as opposed to pure lurkers, like me), got tired of talking about license agreements, money, license agreements… oh yeah, and license agreements when it came to getting book cover images into library catalogs. So they’ve decided to create an open database of book cover images.

At first, when they put together a wiki page to think about the project and then started thinking about how to match images with books, I figured it would be like most of the other discussions that happen on listservs: it would unearth a whole bunch of interesting questions, start a plethora of interesting discussions, and then die a slow and painless death.

But then Tim Spalding from LibraryThing and Rob Styles from Talis both offered to host the database. Spalding is checking to see if he’d be able to contribute his hundreds of thousands of user-generated images to the database, and everyone is talking about easy ways for libraries to contribute new images to the database. This could happen, folks! And if it does, I would LOVE to add images from it to our catalog.

[Update: Since this remains my most frequently visited blog post, I thought I'd just mention here that as of 8/7/2008, LibraryThing is offering free user-generated book cover images to libraries and bookstores. See the LibraryThing blog post for details.]

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Thomson (of Thomson Gale) No Longer in the Education Business

By IRIS Posted on by

Thomson Gale is probably one of the most recognized names in library and reference resources, but the day before yesterday Thomson Corporation announced that it would be selling off it’s Thomson Learning business as of January 1st, 2007. Here’s what they say:

The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC) today announced a realignment of operations to sharpen its strategic focus on providing electronic workflow solutions to business and professional markets and better position the company for future growth. As part of the realignment, which becomes effective January 1, 2007, Thomson intends to sell its Thomson Learning businesses, including those serving the higher education, careers, library reference, corporate e-learning and e-testing markets. (From their Oct. 25th Press Release)

They’re splitting Thomson Learning into three parts, and the bidding for the higher education part has not yet started.

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