Hurry up Please It’s Time - Karen Schneider Keynote
Feb 28th, 2007 by Karen
Hurry up Please It’s Time - Karen Schneider
State of Emergency
- We have given away our collections
- We don’t build or own the tools that manage them
- We provide complex, poorly-marketed systems
- We function like a monopoly service when our competition is thriving right under our nose.
Memory work - preserve and provide access to our culture’s memories
5-3-1 rule
- Pick 5 issues you believe are important
- Focus on 3
- Now make 1 happen
Five Things we can fix
- Digital preservation
- Standards adoption
- The sucky state of most library software
- Third-party library hegemony
- Scholarly awareness of key issues in LibraryLand
3
- Digital preservation
- The sucky state of most library software
- Scholarly awareness of key issues in LibraryLand
1
- The sucky state of most library software
4 Nifty Happenings with Library Software
- Evergreen
- Umlaut
- Scriblio
- The solr search engine you are all going to bolt on top of your geezy old ILS middleware as soon as you get home from code4lib
Renaissance of librarian built software
- Begins to restore the balance of power
- Reinstates the direction of our profession
- Puts emphasis back on the library as memory organization
- Sends the message that we means business
Other outcomes
- Creative decoupling of components
- Interesting re-use of tools, such as Wordpress
- Re-socialization of librarian artisans
My big 1 today: Evergreen
- Evergreen is big… really big
- Timing is perfect: an era of worrisome consolidation, even as … paradoxically…
- The centrality of the ILS is weakening
- in a better position to take risks, change software
Useful over-generalization
- Nobody cares about open source
- Nobody cares about standards
- Nobody cares about usability
- Nobody cares about Evergreen
- The ARL body count continues to drive too many decisions
- IT directors do not have the resources to take on underfunded mandates
- Most libraries cannot provide developer time
It is all about the experience they don’t care about the software
How directors see the world
- How much does it cost, and what are we getting for the money?
- What are other directors doing?
- What problems will it create?
- Why would I spend time/money on this rather than X?
- Is this thing fully baked?
Need to answer these questions ahead of time. Otherwise, you don’t have a prayer of getting resources/support.
What do directors “know” about open source
- One guy in a garage… probably in a torn tee-shirt
- One care accident away from orphan software
Open source software projects have a huge problems with marketing their “products”.
There is no such thing as free software!
5 Strategies
- The riveting lead
- The elevator talk
- The pre-visit background investigation
Search Analytics for Your Site - Lou Rosenfeld
[...] Getting the word out Karen Schneider gave the opening address at the Code4lib conference (you can get a copy of the presentation or read about it here, here or here). Part of her talk discussed restoring the balance of power between libraries and vendors, urging libraries take back control of their content and tools. This sort of set the tone for the conference which was an expose on of exciting new developments in library/information software. Libraries are getting creative, those who can’t replace their “geezy” old ILS systems are creatively remixing the data, creating mashups, and adding new features to old data. [...]
Do you know of any other local that’s using evergreen besides Georgia?
Thanks a bunch,
- Todd