Technology Scouts At AALL

AALL Presentation

I’m honored to join Katie Bauer, of Yale University Library, in a program coordinated by Mary Jane Kelsey, of Yale Law’s Lillian Goldman Library.

The full title of our program is Technology Scouts: how to keep your library and ILS current in the IT world (H-4, 4PM Tuesday, room 274). My portion of the presentation will focus on how we’re fixing up our catalogs, with a big emphasis on how APIs can be used to continuously reinvent the way we look at — and thus understand and use — the information we have. The big idea here is that as we separate the systems that store and manage our data from the applications that display and manipulate it, we open the door to faster, cheaper development — and make room for a bunch of new ideas along the way.

Because it’s a short program, I’ll only be able to gloss over some of the discussion of what’s wrong with our catalogs and how we’re fixing them, and while there’s a lot to say about WPopac, I’ll have to leave it to Jenny Levine to explain most of it.

My slides are online. As usual, all the underlined text is hotlinked along with all the screenshots, so click them for more information and detail.