I have long puzzled over the fact that in the golden age of the library function, there has been a systematic failure of library institutions. By “library function†I refer to the functions and institutions that maintain the memory of the human species. This function includes those institutions and people who save, organize, and provide … Continue Reading about So we beat on, boats against the current… →
A Riff on Big
I have alluded in several posts to the disparities one finds in looking at distributions of library data. By “distributions†I am talking here about making observations and generalizations when one looks at all the data from a set of libraries. I am going to discuss a fact of library life we all know about, … Continue Reading about A Riff on Big →
Birds Gathered, No Feathers Ruffled
No, despite the title, this isn’t a belated April Fools joke. 🙂 We had around 50 people descend on the Marriott City Center during PLA for the Evergreen Birds of a Feather gathering. Evergreen stakeholders seemed to be well distributed around the room and it was just an informal gathering with food and much chatting. … Continue Reading about Birds Gathered, No Feathers Ruffled →
Evergreen Scales Down. Way down.
Much ado has been made about Evergreen’s ability to scale up with both its service-oriented architecture and consortia-savvy interfaces, and as folks witnessed at PLA, it can also scale down to the size of a laptop. Well, now we have really done it. We have taken the n-tier concept to the extreme and have introduced … Continue Reading about Evergreen Scales Down. Way down. →
Laundry List
It’s been a while, but here’s just some of what I’ve personally been doing during this latest stretch of radio silence: In-database circulation permit calculation — ~5ms instead of ~100ms for arbitrarily complex circ rules In-database hold permit calculation — ~5ms, down from about 50ms In-database relevance rank adjustments — configure relative weights and have … Continue Reading about Laundry List →
“We want to emulate the PINES experience”
One of the interesting aspects of working with Evergreen is the phone calls from large consortia or state libraries wishing to start large resource sharing networks like PINES. I believe there was a latent demand by the library community–particularly from library users–for ILS software capable of managing large networks that has now been met by … Continue Reading about “We want to emulate the PINES experience” →