SC State Library CMS Department

What's New at SC State Library

2007-08-27T09:25:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, there's been lots of new projects and events at the State Library this Summer. We will be doing a What's New session at SCLA in October to provide more detailed updates on these projects so I hope that you'll plan to attend if you're at the conference. As a quick Summary, here are the highlights:

The project to find and catalog born digital state documents has continued and we now have over 500 items (almost 400 titles) cataloged and linked in our online catalog.
We started a new digitization project and have scanned approximately 30 documents from our CPM (Certified Public Manager) collection. These are items requested often by state government employees and we hope they'll get a lot more use by making them available electronically. We are using this as a pilot to help us develop best practices for the future.
In July, our Director signed a contract with SirsiDynix Corporation to offer a statewide content portal to the K-12 community. The product is called SchoolRooms and it will be live at the State Library sometime in September. Following our go live and training, we'll be putting this out in public libraries and schools around the state.
The State Library Leadership Team has been going through extensive strategic planning thanks to some wonderful assistance from USC's Office of Public Policy & Practice. In doing so, we've identified several areas of change for the State Library. I'm very excited about the potential changes that I feel will improve the State Library in the way we serve our patrons and other SC libraries. So, stay tuned for more info about that!

There are many other exciting things occurring within our various departments but I wanted to share with you briefly the things I've been involved in this Summer. I will share more about these individual initiatives as we move forward. As always, if you have questions, please let me know. Have a great day everyone!

iAm Laptop Project

2007-08-27T09:06:00.000-04:00

Hey guys, I know I've been way out of the loop this Summer. We've been so busy with lots of great projects here at the State Library. I will update you on those shortly but I first wanted to share a posting from the LibraryTrax blog that I thought you'd be interested in. It was posted by Felicia Vereen on August 22nd to announce the schools chosen for the laptop project.

Senator James H. “Jim” Ritchie, Jr., Majority Whip, announced the six iAm Laptop Pilot Program grant recipient schools on August 13. $5 million in funding will go to six public schools to provide laptops to all ninth grade students. If this pilot is successful, it is anticipated to be expanded to all SC schools, providing laptops to all SC ninth grade students.

The schools chosen for the pilot are:

Midland Valley, Aiken School District
Scott’s Branch, Clarendon School District 1
CA Johnson, Richland School District 1
Lakewood High, Sumter School District 2
Bethune-Bowman, Orangeburg School District 5
Creek Bridge, Marion School District 7

Two alternate schools were also named:

Broome High, Spartanburg School District 3
Marion High, Marion School District 1

Senator Ritchie said, “The iAm Laptop Pilot Program provides a unique opportunity to couple cutting edge technology with modern teaching techniques to greatly enhance the competitiveness of all South Carolina students, especially those currently stuck in underperforming schools. No longer will our students be limited to traditional school hours and teaching methods. Instead, this program will provide our young people with the educational resources necessary to say ‘I am in charge of my future. I am the future of South Carolina.’ This program places South Carolina in the forefront of innovation and is an important strategy to improve equity and opportunity among all of our high school students.”

The program begins Fall 2007.

LibraryThing for Libraries

2007-05-29T15:34:00.001-04:00

This morning I was browsing through my routed journals and found an interesting article in Library Hotline (May 21st issue). It announced that Danbury Library in Connecticut is now using LibraryThing to tag items and offer user reviews and book recommendations through their catalog. So, I went to LibraryThing to find out more. Here's the link to their Thingology blog entry about it.

This is all part of a new service offered by LibraryThing called LibraryThing for Libraries. It embraces the concepts of social networks making your opac more user friendly and interactive. The hope is that all automation vendors will wise up and start offering some of these features in our online catalogs. But, until then... LibraryThing is offering some pretty cool options for a nominal fee. So, you might want to check it out!

Ready for Hurricane Season?

2007-05-08T14:38:00.000-04:00

If you've been in South Carolina for any amount of time you know that we're on the verge of Hurricane Season. The season starts in June so we only have a few more weeks. To gear up for this, Hurricane Preparedness Week is May 20-26. That means it's the perfect time to make sure you are prepared. The first step, of course is to make sure you have a solid (up to date) plan in place for possible hurricane related disasters as well as other disasters that may occur throughout the year. The second step is to make sure staff are educated about your procedures. I've recently provided suggestions for a couple of libraries in the state and I'm happy to provide assistance if you need any. So, please don't hesitate to contact me. If you need to create a plan, update one or just want a little more awareness, here are some sites I've found that you might also find useful:

ALA's Disaster Preparedness & Recovery Resources
American Red Cross -- They provide a variety of planning resources for families and organizations. Also, if you contact your local chapter, they are great about providing various brochures for any training you might have on site.
CalPreservation.org -- Site from California with a Disaster Plan Template as well as practical exercises you can try at your library.
dPlan: An online disaster planning resource that allows you to create and customize a disaster plan. Lots of great suggestions for what to include and it's very easy to use.
Library Support Staff.com -- This site has great resources for Disaster Planning & Book Preservation. Lots of other great stuff here for support staff. Definitely worth checking out!
Sample Library Disaster Plans -- Compiled by the SEAALL Institute in April 2006.
SCDAH Disaster Planning & Recovery -- Resources from the SC Department of History & Archives.
South Carolina Emergency Management Division

Hope these help and, don't forget... We have an email you can use to report any disasters you have in your library. It is disaster@statelibrary.sc.gov. All emails from this account go to myself, the Director and our Library Development Director. We want to know if anything is happening in your library so we can provide assistance as needed. Of course, you can always give us a call or email us directly. If there's anything else you think we can do to help you guys, please let us know. Have a great day everyone!

New DISCUS Site

2007-04-25T09:09:00.000-04:00

So, has anyone checked out the new DISCUS site? In case you haven't heard about it, let me tell you about some of the new features:

One of the first things you'll see is an audio guide to the site. You might also notice the new logo on the page. Very nice.
On the home page, choose a subject and find out which databases are relevant.
Also from the home page, join the DISCUS community. To find out more, choose the "take a peek inside" option on the right hand side of the page.
See recent news and events for DISCUS.
There's a DISCUS Kids section where you can indicate what you're looking for (encyclopedias, dictionaries, articles) and get a list of pertinent resources.
One of my favorite features is the tag cloud under the "How Do I Find?" tab. Keywords have been used to define databases, users' guides and other resources. Click on a tag to find everything that's been given that keyword.
The FAQ section addresses common questions relating to DISCUS. A couple questions relating to Web2.0 are also addressed here.
There's a training tab so you can see all upcoming trainings.
The Toolkit is a place to find promotional material for DISCUS. You can print out handouts, powerpoint presentations and get promo ideas for your library.
The Toolkit also provides you with technical information such as troubleshooting tips and how to get access to DISCUS from home.
Finally, there is a "What's New" tab and a "Contact" tab. Check these out to see what the DISCUS folks have been up to and to find out how you can contact them for further information.

I just had to highlight this new State Library webpage because I think our IT and DISCUS staff have done an awesome job making this more user friendly. It's also embraces a lot of Web 2.0 aspects, which I love. I hope you'll take a few minutes and check it out. And be sure to join the community so you can participate in discussions and get information from other libraries around the state. Have a great day, everyone!

Introducing the Book

2007-03-22T10:58:00.000-04:00

I just had to pass on this YouTube link called "Introducing the Book" or "Helpdesk." One of my co-workers passed it on to me and I think all of you will enjoy this. So, when you have a few minutes and just need a good laugh, take a look at it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pyjRj3UMRM

Way Overdue!

2007-03-14T16:58:00.000-04:00

Wow, I am way overdue on posting to this blog. Seems like 2007 is just destined to be my busiest year yet! Since my last posting, I've been busy with lots of projects, including teaching the podcasting/vodcasting classes for the TechTracks series. I just finished those last week. If you didn't get a chance to go to any of those classes, I have posted the PowerPoints, FAQs, Handouts and Recent Articles to the LibraryTrax blog. So, take a look http://librarytrax.wordpress.com! I hope to now start work on a digitization project here at the State Library so I'll be updating you on this in the future. We also have a new Director who starts next week. His name is David Goble. I hope you all get a chance to meet him soon. We are very excited about his arrival and hope he'll have lots of great ideas on how to improve the State Library and all of the public libraries. Well, that's all the news I have for now. I will post again soon. As always, if you have suggestions for things you'd like me to talk about, I would love to hear them. Just email me at stetterton@statelibrary.sc.gov or feel free to post a comment here. Have a great day, everyone!

Thanks for Participating!

2007-02-13T09:27:00.000-05:00

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!

Tech Services Exchange Agenda

2007-02-02T10:06:00.000-05:00

I've finalized the agenda for next week's Technical Services Exchange. You'll find it below. We have over 30 participants registered so I think this will be a great exchange. If you have any questions about the agenda or still need to sign up, please let me know. This is also a reminder that we are providing box lunches so if you have dietary restrictions, we need to know this by Monday. This information will also be going out to all registered participants.

I'd also like to direct you to the Library Development blog. Yesterday, Felicia added a great posting about making sure you have a plan in place for inclement weather. Given yesterday's snow and ice, I think we should all be thinking about creating or updating our plans and contact information. I will include a handout in your packets for the exchange that relates to disaster planning.

I look forward to seeing you all next week at the exchange! Have a great weekend!

Technical Services Exchange 2007
South Carolina State Library
February 7, 2007

10:00-10:45 Welcome and Introductions, State Library Updates

10:45-11:15 Series Authority Control: How are Libraries Handling LC's Decision?

11:15-11:30 RFID Project Update from Richland County

11:30-12:15 Library 2.0: Collaboration, Organization and Preparation for Libraries

12:15-12:30 BREAK

12:30-1:30 LUNCH (two demos - OCLC and the Aquabrowser Library)

1:30-2:00 Discussion of the Changing Nature of OPACs

2:00-2:30 Open Forum for Questions and Discussion

2:30-3:30 Option for Libraries to Stay and Meet in Smaller Groups, Three Meeting Areas Available

Technical Services Exchange on February 7th

2007-01-22T15:29:00.000-05:00

Good afternoon everyone! I know it’s been a while. I’ve been on the road the last couple of weeks offering a social networking class to the public libraries. I hope some of you were able to attend. The response from all of the TechTracks classes has been awesome so thank you for your attendance and participation. Don’t forget that Library Development will be offering three more TechTracks classes (Instant Messaging in February, Podcasting in March and Flickr in April). If you’re not signed up already, you can do so by visiting the State Library’s website.

I wanted to take this opportunity to remind everyone about the Technical Services Exchange, which will be held on February 7th from 10:00-2:00 at the State Library. We will have a working lunch, with a couple of demonstrations. Box lunches and drinks will be provided. If you have dietary restrictions and you have not already filled out the survey I sent out a couple of weeks ago (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=748973094512), please let me know ASAP so our continuing education folks can try to accommodate. Also, it’s not too late to take the survey and offer suggestions.

The feedback from the survey so far indicates the following topics as being of interest: The Changing Nature of OPACs, Library 2.0 Technologies and How to Handle Series Authority Control. Some other topics of interest: OCLC Services & Products, The Aquabrowser Catalog, RFID and Staff Cross Training. I plan to incorporate as many of these topics into the day as I can and still allow for some open discussion. Because large and small libraries will be represented and our serials librarians will also be joining us, I may break you into smaller groups near the end of the day. These are my thoughts so far. I hope to have a final agenda posted by the end of next week. I will post it here and e-mail to all registered participants. If you have further suggestions, please feel free to contact me at stetterton@statelibrary.sc.gov.

We will meet as usual in Room 309 of the 1430 building. I look forward to seeing you all there!

WorldCat.org versus Open WorldCat

2006-12-21T14:26:00.000-05:00

So, I know most of you have heard the words Open WorldCat batted around. We had an OCLC representative visit today and I finally learned the difference between Open WorldCat and WorldCat.org! Given that it's the holidays and my brain checked out a couple of days ago, I was pretty surprised to get this new tidbit of info today!

To make this as concise as possible. Open WorldCat is a project started to allow Google, Yahoo and Amazon (as well as other partners) users to see library holdings. So, when you do searches in Google, you'll sometimes run across a library's record and you'll have the option to go out to that library's site and request the item. What you should know, though, is that only about 8 million of the 70+ million records from OCLC WorldCat are actually available in this format.

This brings me to WorldCat.org. WorldCat.org actually includes ALL OCLC holdings. They even break it out by media type. It's actually a pretty nice search interface.

Now that you know the difference, what does this mean for you? It means, don't worry too much about Open WorldCat. You will run across these links occassionally when searching Google and Yahoo. This is a great thing for libraries in general because all those folks who think they can find everything in Google will soon start to see lots of links to library resources. Great press for all of us! You should, however, visit Worldcat.org. You can search some libraries in the state here but don't depend on this as a collection development or ILL tool. Most SC libraries are not here. If you are fairly certain that an item is not in the state, though, it's a great place to search and see who might have it in a neighboring state. In addition, there is an option to add the worldcat.org search box to your website. There is also a new option to add pre-defined WorldCat searches to your site. So, check it out at www.worldcat.org. You can also get a lot more information about this tool by clicking on the learn more link on the front page.

Happy holidays everyone!

A New Idea in Emergency Preparedness

2006-11-17T14:32:00.000-05:00

Looking for an easy way to prepare your staff for emergency situations and make sure they always have the information they need with them? Then you need to check out the Pocket Response Plan offered by the Council of State Archivists. I learned about this wonderful program at the PALMCOP Annual Conference yesterday and I couldn’t wait to tell all of you about it.

Here at the State Library, we’ve recently updated our Emergency Preparedness manual but I’ve worried about the fact that, in the event of a large-scale disaster, we may have absolutely no way to get to our print or electronic copies of this manual. The Pocket Plan would be a great way to ensure that everyone has the critical information they need in the event of an emergency.

The Pocket Response Plan was designed by the Council of State Archivists. You can go download the template from their website and customize it to meet your needs. The template is an 8 ½ X 14 sheet of paper, double-sided, that includes information such as institutional contacts, disaster team assignments, emergency services providers… and, on the other side, a response checklist. Once you’ve modified the template to include all the information relevant to your institution, you print it out and fold it into the size of a credit card. The Council of State Archivists sells Tyvek envelopes that the paper can be placed in so it’s protected, but it can still be carried around in your wallet. The envelopes are $1.00 a piece. Not a huge price to pay to make sure your staff have the information they need right in their wallets.

For all information regarding this plan, visit the Council of State Archivists online.

Aquabrowser, a Library Search Paradise?

2006-11-17T13:44:00.000-05:00

So, what exactly is an Aquabrowser? Well, Medialab, the owner of the Aquabrowser product, has branded it as a “Library Search Paradise” and two libraries in South Carolina are finding out. Saluda County and Greenwood County have recently implemented the Aquabrowser with their TLC systems.

To get back to the original question, a library using an Aquabrowser (as opposed to the traditional ILS interface) uses associations, stemming and spelling alternatives to help patrons who may not be familiar with the best approaches to searching. It uses relevance ranking to build the associations based on your catalog data. But it doesn’t present your standardized headings. Instead it pulls out keywords and presents them on a search map.

The visual search map is the key to the Aquabrowser’s success so far. Otherwise, it might be just like all other OPACs. This visual map, usually to the left of the search results, presents each association and spelling alternative as an active search link. When you select the link, it changes the scope of your original search and updates the associations and word variations.

Something else to note about the Aquabrowser is that it’s not vendor specific. Right now it works with TLC and SirsiDynix’s Horizon system. However, Medialab claims that it can work with any ILS system that supports MARC or OAI based catalog standards. I think it’s very likely that we will start to see this offered as an add-on feature for several automation vendors before long. So, check it out. Below are a few links to Aquabrowser catalogs, including those in SC:

Greenwood County Library: http://207.232.138.34/aquabrowser/
Lexington Public Library (KY): http://search.lexpublib.org/
Queens Library (NY): http://aqua.queenslibrary.org/
Saluda County Library: http://www.saluda.lib.sc.us/aquabrowser/

Finally, check out this FAQ: http://www.aquabrowseronline.com/faq.aspx?cat=1

If you decide you are interested in this product for your library, contact your vendor to find out where they are on testing this product with their ILS system.

Technical Services Exchange

2006-10-18T16:40:00.000-04:00

The date for the Technical Services Exchange has been set and it will be held at the State Library on February 7, 2007. What I need from you guys are some suggestions for what you would like to talk about or what kind of training you would like to receive. I've received some suggestions in house and they include:

Discuss Library2.0 technologies that relate specifically to Technical Services.
Talk about the future of cataloging and OPACs.
Provide a demo of the Aquabrowser that Saluda and Greenwood will soon be using for their OPAC.
Cross training technical services staff for public service functions.

If any of you have ideas for the exchange, please let me know. Also, I know some of you are doing exciting things in your libraries. I would love to hear about those projects and I'm sure everyone else would too! Are you starting a digital project? Are you trying out a new Web2.0 technology like blogging? I'd love to know what you're doing and give you a chance to share with everyone else.

You can make comments on this blog or email me directly at stetterton@statelibrary.sc.gov. Thanks everyone. Have a great day!

A Very Successful RLS Workshop!

2006-10-06T11:31:00.000-04:00

I am thrilled to report that our first rural library sustainability workshop on Wednesday was very successful. The group met at RCPL and everyone was full of wonderful ideas and information to share. I left feeling truly blessed to be involved in this project. I have posted the notes from our brainstorming session on the Librarytrax blog. Please check those out if you are interested. We focused on Outreach, Advocacy, Library Connections and Training. Some of my favorite ideas that came up over the course of the day included:

Directors and Managers should build in some flexibility to employee time so they can play with new technologies. If you want to make sure they are being productive, ask them to try out something new and then teach everyone else how it works. That's what we've done here at the State Library! A great resource for this is Charlotte's 23 Things project. Some of the libraries mentioned that they would be going through the 23 Things with their staff.
Some wonderful groups being reached via outreach programs in the state: Delinquent/abused teens, homeschoolers, seniors, mentally disabled adults, teens, children, college/tech school students and community service groups!
Some groups that really need to be reached: Business community, homebound and hispanic population. Coming in 2007-2008, a Spanish Language Outreach program -- the same type of training we are offering for Rural Library Sustainability.
Training ideas: Limit your computer training courses to 12 or less to allow for more individual time with attendees; pair teens with seniors to teach basic computer skills; teach patrons how to use downloadable audiobooks.

These are just a few of the ideas shared at the workshop. I hope that some of you will be able to attend one of our two other workshops in Greenville or Moncks Corner. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this topic. I'd love to hear from you and be sure to check out Librarytrax as I know the Library Development consultants will be posting much more information from this project. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Rural Library Sustainability

2006-10-03T13:57:00.000-04:00

I'm just checking in because I know it's been a while since I've blogged to you guys. It's been very busy and exciting here at the State Library. Tomorrow we kick off our Rural Library Sustainability workshops! I'm so excited about the three workshops we'll be offering around the state. Our theme is Harvesting Ideas and I know I can't wait to hear all of the great ideas that you all have, especially following on the heals of a very successful Technology Institute. If you haven't signed up yet, be sure to do that. We have two more: Greenville -- October 12th and Moncks Corner -- October 19th. Sign up here! Directors, you can send two staff members.

I also want to mention that we are currently offering Web2.0 classes to State Government Employees and they have been a huge success. We offered blogs the first week and last week talked about Flickr, MySpace and Instant Messaging. This week we'll be discussing bookmarking sites, Library Thing and Wikis. Once we finish with these courses, we will be on our way to you!

Please check out the registration information for TechTracks. We will be offering two-hour workshops around the state on topics such as blogging, instant messaging, podcasting, social software and tagging. The first classes start in November, so check it out soon.

I'll post more later after the Rural Library workshop tomorrow but please let me know if there are topics you are interested in hearing about.

New Library Development Blog -- Check it Out!

2006-09-20T09:18:00.000-04:00

Good Morning Everyone!

Sorry it's been so long since my last post. Things have been very busy and exciting around here. We're getting ready to start offering Web2.0 classes to state government employees, I'm getting ready to hit the road for the Rural Library Sustainability workshops and last week Library Development hosted an awesome technology institute. I hope that some of you were able to attend.

For those that did not get to attend, don't worry, you can still get all of the information in two ways. First of all, Library Development has started a new blog. You can access it by going to http://librarytrax.wordpress.com/. Felicia Vereen has posted a wonderful summary there complete with photos of the large crowd (more than 250 librarians!) and the speakers (Steven Abram, Jenny Lavine and Michael Stevens). It was truly one of the best events I've ever attended. If you didn't make it this year, be sure to tell your Library Director that you want to go next year because I know we will be doing this again.

The second way that you can learn more about these Web2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, rss feeds, etc... is to attend one of our sessions specially designed for public libraries. Library Development will be offering these after the first of the year so I will provide more updates on this once the session content and dates are finalized.

As always, please feel free to post comments here or to send me questions or topics that you'd like to see addressed. Have a great day!

Salvage at a Glance

2006-08-31T15:21:00.000-04:00

Given the fact that Tropical Storm Ernesto is making his way through the Carolinas today, I thought it was a good time to talk about Disaster Plans and Collection Recovery.

At the State Library this year, we revised our Disaster Plan. We formed an Emergency Preparedness Taskforce that met several times to pull together current information about hurricances, tornadoes, fires, flooding, power loss, evacuation procedures, workplace violence, etc... If your library does not have a plan, you should make it a top priority to put one together. Chances are, you already have a lot of the procedures in place, you just need to document them. If your library has a plan, check the date on it. Has it been over a year since the last update? If you're anything like us, it may have been ten years since the last update! So, here are some resources to get you started in creating or updating your plan:

ALA Disaster Preparedness
As with most ALA guides, this provides several links to valuable resources and federal regulation information.

dPlan -- The Online Disaster Planning Tool
This is a FREE online tool that guides you through the process of writing a disaster plan. It basically allows you to fill in the blanks. Then you provide site specific content where necessary. I've tried the demo and it's very easy to use. You can register from this page and you will receive more information about using the tool within 48 hours.

Writing the Disaster Response Plan: Going Beyond Shouting "Help, Help!"
This is an article taken from the Proceedings of the 9th Annual Federal Depository Library Conference. It doesn't matter whether you are storing federal documents or not. It provides a lot of great "things to consider."

Even if you are not the one responsible for writing a disaster plan, you may very well be responsible for recovering the collection should a disaster occur. Therefore, you may want to consider adding a "Salvage at a Glance" directory to your library's plan. This can provide a quick reference for anyone who may be assisting with disaster recovery. It should explain the salvage techniques needed for various types of items and highlight the areas of the collection that are highest in priority. In our plan, we added the Salvage at a Glance directory and a Salvage Priority List to the end of our plan.

Finally, you should consider attending a training on records management and/or disaster recovery. These are offered periodically by PALMCOP and by the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. They are generally low in cost and you will get hands-on experience with recovering water-damaged materials.

If you have further questions about writing a disaster plan or about disaster recovery, please let us know. In addition, the State Library has set up an email alias for public libraries to report any disaster that occurs in their library system. To report a disaster, write an email to disaster@statelibrary.sc.gov. This email goes to myself, as well as the Director of Library Development and our State Librarian. We are happy to assist you by sending supplies or by traveling to help your library should a disaster occur.

Thanks for reading and be safe getting home in Ernesto this evening!

SirsiDynix ISBN-13 TechTalk

2006-08-18T09:33:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I attended the SirsiDynix TechTalk on ISBN-13. They addressed how they will be handling the conversion to ISBN-13 in their Unicorn product. If you are not using this product, you should contact your vendor to find out what conversion features they are offering.

The features below are available only if you upgrade to version GL3.0 (ask for the ISBN-13 patch that goes with this version) or GL3.1:

· All ISBN-10 title control numbers will be converted to ISBN-13. This conversion will aid in the match and load process that takes place via bibload and smartport.

· Any bibliographic record that contains an ISBN-10 in the 020 field will be searchable by both the ISBN-10 and the ISBN-13. The system will perform a conversion that will index all ISBN-10s and will calculate the ISBN-13 so it can be indexed as well. This means both numbers will be searchable in a general keyword search. If you have set up a custom ISBN search index, both numbers will be indexed there as well.

· NOTE: Bibliographic information will not be touched in this conversion process. These features only effect the title control # field and the search indexes.

· If you have been importing records from OCLC and the ISBN-13 is in the 024, it should not matter. Remember that if your match point is on the ISBN, it will be converted to ISBN-13, no matter where that number is in the bibliographic record. In addition, it will be indexed for searching as long as you have the ISBN-10 in the 020 field.

· EDI users will also see a conversion process. It will not matter whether the vendor sends you information with just an ISBN-10, your response to them will show an ISBN-10 and an ISBN-13. This will happen automatically whether you have both numbers in your bibliographic record or not.

The EDI feature is actually available in 2003.1. It is the only ISBN-13 feature that was back ported to 2003.1 systems.

For all ISBN-13 features to work, you must run Rebuildtext after you upgrade to GL3.1 or after you've upgraded to GL3.0 and have applied the ISBN-13 patch.

If you are a Sirsi library and have questions about this, I'd be happy to help address those if I can. Also, there is an ISBN-13 FAQ on the client care website. I don't think it's as clear as the TechTalk was but it does address several questions you might have. Thanks and have a great day everyone!

For Those That Missed the OPAL ISBN-13 Session

2006-08-16T08:47:00.000-04:00

If you missed the OPAL ISBN-13 Session, it was recorded. Go to the OPAL Archives and select Library and Information Science. Right now, it's the first session listed. The slides used in the presentation are also available.

If you did attend the session and wish to share something you learned, please feel free to post a comment here. As we get closer to January, I hope everyone will start posting comments, particularly in relation to what your ILS vendor is doing about ISBN-13. This will hopefully help others who are using the same vendor.

At the State Library, we are using Sirsi's Unicorn product. I just received an email yesterday advertising SirsiDynix's TechTalk session on ISBN-13. I plan to attend and will share what I learn there. I know there are several libraries here in SC that are using SirsiDynix products, so if you didn't receive the information about this session, let me know. I would be happy to forward the email to you so you can register. If you aren't a SirsiDynix library, you should check with your vendor about sessions they may be offering.

Some Monday Humor

2006-08-14T12:00:00.000-04:00

I will write something more serious later this week but I saw this today and thought only catalogers will get a kick out of this:

From the site The Onion.
Dewey Decimal System Helpless To Categorize New Jim Belushi Book
August 14, 2006 Issue 42•33

DUBLIN, OH—Members of the OCLC Online Computer Library Center’s Editorial Policy Committee, which oversees the Dewey Decimal System library classification system, were no closer Monday to assigning a definitive call number to the recently published Jim Belushi book Real Men Don’t Apologize. "With all due respect to the author, we remain unsure how to categorize this particular work," said committee chair Leslie Buncombe, who, despite repeated readings, still wasn’t sure if Real Men was "an actual book." "What is it? Autobiography? Self-help? We can’t even tell if it’s fiction or nonfiction," Added Buncombe: "Too bad it can’t be shelved by its ISBN number. Maybe it’s Fantasy Biography? I don’t even think there’s a code for that." If no decision is reached within the week, librarians may be forced to shelve it in the "phantom zone" between Jenny McCarthy’s book of marriage tips and novels in which a cat helps solve a mystery.

ISBN-13 Session Being Offered August 15, 2006

2006-08-08T10:33:00.000-04:00

On August 15th at 3:00pm, the State Library will sponsor an OPAL session on ISBN-13. The title is Are you ready for ISBN-13? In January 2007 ten digit ISBNs will be replaced by a new numbering scheme. Is your library prepared for this change? This session will explore the following: Why will agencies across the world implement a new thirteen digit numbering scheme? What will the new ISBN-13 numbers look like? Is there a conversion tool? How will the new ISBN-13 impact your patrons at the reference desk, book purchases, interlibrary loan and beyond? Join us for an introduction to ISBN-13 and its impact on libraries. The presenter is Karen Swetland. She is the Reference Coordinatory at the University of South Carolina Upstate Library. This OPAL event will be held in the Auditorium.

If you have further questions about using OPAL or about ISBN-13, please contact me at 734-8663 or via email at stetterton@statelibrary.sc.gov. I have recently received a couple emails about ISBN-13 issues. I am doing some research on these and will post something else soon. I hope this OPAL session will address some of your questions, though, so be sure to check it out!

Charleston Conference 2006

2006-08-01T16:31:00.000-04:00

The brochure for the 2006 Charleston Conference just arrived on my desk. This is a wonderful conference focusing on serials and acquisitions. The best part is that it is offered in our state so it's much easier to get to this conference. Here's what you might want to know about it:

When: November 8-11, 2006

Where: Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston, SC

Cost: $350 for Early Bird Registration (Preconferences are Extra)

Selected Topics:

Open Access As a Movement
eJournals, eBooks and eResources
Planning for Emerging Technologies
Book Selection in 2006
New Publishing Models
Use of Vendor MARC Records

These are just a few of the topics proposed for the conference. To get more information about the conference, go to www.katina.info/conference. The official program is not usually posted until much closer to the conference. As a warning, I will say that it tends to be academic focused, but I still learned a lot when I attended last year.

TechExpress Sessions Explore Web 2.0 Technologies

2006-08-01T16:14:00.000-04:00

This Summer at the State Library, Friday mornings have become an exciting time! Thanks to our Library Development staff, we have enjoyed a staff development series called TechExpress. Each Friday morning, a different staff member presents information related to Web 2.0. Here's a list of some of the topics: Blogging, Social-Networking Sites (MySpace), Library Thing, Tag Clouds, Flickr and Bookmarking Sites (del.icio.us). These sessions have been very interactive and we've spent a lot of time discussing the potential uses for these tools within the library setting. What we've concluded: We must become part of the conversation that is Web 2.0 in order to stay competitive and move our libraries forward to meet our users' needs.

We will be offering these classes for public libraries via OPAL very soon but just to get you thinking, I would like to point you to a great source of information. OCLC's most recent newsletter is entitled Web 2.0: Five Experts Ponder the Future.

Here are a few highlights that relate to technical services:

According to Rick Anderson, the era of the "just in case" print collection is over. Users still expect access to everything, which is what started this collection in the first place. The difference now is that they want it electronically and not necessarily from the physical library. We must pay attention to our virtual users who prefer e-journals, ebooks, blogs and podcasts to printed materials. We are certainly considering this at the State Library and I hope you are too. It's time to dust off those collection development policies and start re-evaluating what our users really want!
According to John Riemer, the Head of UCLA's Cataloging & Metadata Center, the focus for the future is on libraries being able to "package and push" their content to users in the users' prefered environment. This means exploring RSS feeds, federated search tools and the expansion of metadata to give libraries a competitive advantage and to move forward with bibliographic services.

These are just a couple of the experts whose ideas are highlighted in this article. Michael Stephens is also featured here. He will be presenting at our Technology Institute in September. In addition to reading this article, you might consider subscribing to his blog: Tame the Web . It's a great way to get more information on Web 2.0 technologies and other related library news.

LC's Changing Nature of the Catalog Document

2006-07-06T09:18:00.000-04:00

Check out the document released by the Library of Congress on March 17th. The title is The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools. You can get to it by clicking here: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf

ISBN-13 Launch is Fast Approaching

2006-07-01T10:34:00.000-04:00

January 1st is fast approaching and we will soon be seeing only 13 digit ISBNs when we order and catalog our materials. What will this mean for technical services? Are you ready for the change?

Here are the main points you need to know:

Following January 1st, most publishers will only accept orders submitted using the new 13 digit ISBN for the requested item.
A few publishers may not be ready for the change over on January 1st. If unsure, check with your publishers to see how long they will continue to accept the 10 digit ISBN for orders, credits and returns.
Most items now will show both the 10 digit and the 13 digit ISBN on the bar code. The 10 digit is located above the bar code, while the 13 digit (beginning with 978) will show along the bottom of the bar code.
978 is a prefix that will be used along with the first 9 digits of the 10 digit ISBN. The last digit is a check digit which may vary from the original 10 digit ISBN. Once publishers have exhausted the 978 combinations, they will continue with a 979 prefix.
Some automation vendors have already developed conversion tools to convert your 10 digit ISBN to a 13 digit ISBN. Check with your automation vendor to determine whether their conversion tool is available and in what version of the software.
If you need to manually convert your ISBNs, there are tools available online. Here’s one example: http://www.isbn.org/converterpub.asp

Some Additional Resources:

BISG’s Webinars about ISBN-13: http://www.meetingbridge.com/seminar/Seminar.aspx?SeminarCd=40840587
ISBN Readiness Director: http://www.bisg.org/isbn-13/survey/isbn_directory.html
ISBN Transition by Bowker: http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/transition.asp#01
NISO’s FAQ -- Get Ready for the New ISBN: http://www.niso.org/standards/resources/ISBN.html

If you would like for the State Library to offer training or an open discussion of the ISBN-13 transition, please email me at stetterton@statelibrary.sc.gov or comment on this posting.