The Future of On-Line Browsing

There must be a better way for us to show off the collections in the OPAC, especially for the person at home that we are looking to deliver items to in the future. I had a really "thats it" moment when I saw zoomii.com.

Built to interface with Amazon books, zoomii shows you virtual bookshelves to browse online, just like you would in a bookshop or library. It just seemed right to me. You can interact with the "books" by zooming in & out in a way that feels natural.

If you look at the site, and I recommend you do, you can watch a video about zoomii. Then just imagine LibraryThing and zoomii-type browsing together in our OPAC.

Load Profile training

While here in Washington, DC for the Innovative User Group conference, I am also attending Load Profile training. This is a 2-day intensive workshop on building data manipulation tables for importing records into Millennium.

The training content is excellent - an in-depth approach to a very useful topic - and the presentation is an effective mixture of lecture and hands-on. I only hope to have opportunity to put it in to practice before it falls out of my brain.

The most obvious use of this new skill is in improved import of bibliographic records from cataloguing suppliers - but there are other applications including migration from other systems, and data cleanup/enhancement not possible inside Millennium. If you are interested in hearing more about this, or would like to explore possibilities for a project, please get in touch with me

Cheerio for now,
Sarah Cox