Thanks for Participating!

Good morning! I wanted to thank everyone who made it to the Tech Services Exchange last week. We covered a lot of material in a very short period of time. I hope everyone learned something new. If you have any questions from the exchange, please let me know. I'd be happy to address those.

I also wanted to follow up on a couple of things. I asked Doug Potts to address the question about series authority control that came up. Here is what I received from one of his collegues at OCLC:

"Last summer, OCLC issued a statement outlining a number of steps that we had taken in response to the LC decision to stop creating and maintaining series authority records and to discontinue putting controlled series access points in their bibliographic records. That statement can be found at http://www.oclc.org/news/announcements/announcement191.htm.

At present, the ability to create and maintain series authority records in OCLC's Authority File is limited to participants in the NACO program who have received training from the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. Most of the libraries that are part of the PCC have committed to continuing to create new series authority records and to maintain existing ones even though LC has stopped. Libraries that are not part of the PCC can certainly continued to include controlled series access points in new bibliographic records and, as noted in the announcement, can change tracing practice in LC records based on existing authority records."

If you have questions about this response, let me know and I will communicate back and forth with OCLC and all of you.

Also, someone asked at the end of the day whether blogs and wikis can be private. I looked at both Blogger and Wordpress and they both have privacy settings. For Wordpress, you'll find it under Options and then click on Privacy. For Blogger, there are a few settings. In your settings, you can say that you DO NOT want your blog added to their public listings. You also have the choice when publishing to publish the postings to your server using FTP or SFTP. Finally, you have the option to NOT publish a site feed so people will not be able to add your blog to something like bloglines.

For wikis, I created a wiki using pbwiki and it asked me when I created the wiki whether I wanted it to be public or not. There is also a settings menu once you create the wiki where you can set it to public or private. On wikispaces, there are permissions that indicate who can read, who can contribute, etc... I think these settings are similar for most sites where wikis are being generated.

I hope this information helps. Please let me know if you have other questions and I hope to see you in March at the podcasting classes! Don't forget to sign up for those and for the Flickr classes being offered in April. Registration is available at http://tinyurl.com/kbxpn. Have a great day!