So you are an author.  You check your book’s entry on Amazon.com.  You see a review.  It is not good.  Someone bought a copy of your book and it was flawed.  You want to make it right.

What do you do?  You promise the reviewer that you will send a good copy via overnight delivery.  Then you realize that it is Christmas Eve, the reviewer lives in Ontario, Canada, you live in Ohio, and there is a massive snowstorm between the two locations.  The delivery services cannot deliver, bookstores are closed, and time is running out.

Then what do you do?

Perhaps what Whittenberg University professor Dan Fleisch did : You deliver it yourself.

via LISNews

Saw a shelf browse created for an Innovative (III) OPAC that is quite neat.  It lives on a development site for the Cambridge Public Library in Ontario, Canada and integrates Syndetic Solutions book covers into a pseudo-shelf listing.  Here is a direct link to a record.

Note that this has been done without resorting to Flash.  Try turning off the page’s CSS and you will see that it works just fine (just with a different scroll direction).  The page’s html still doesn’t validate, but I suspect that there aren’t any III opacs that validate properly, though I hope to be proven wrong someday.

Someday libraries will collectively understand what a good API can do for our web presence, and then the ILS companies will improve their products accordingly.  At least I hope so….

thanks to Mike Cunningham for posting the link to the Innovative User’s Group list

Nope, the list hasn’t been announced yet.  In fact, Library Journal is asking for nominations:

The editors of Library Journal need your help in identifying the emerging leaders in the library world. Our seventh annual Movers & Shakers supplement will profile 50-plus up-and-coming individuals from across the United States and Canada who are innovative, creative, and making a difference. From librarians to vendors to others who work in the library field, Movers & Shakers 2008 will celebrate the new professionals who are moving our libraries ahead.

I have been impressed with the Movers & Shakers lists over the past few years, and look forward to that supplement (which will arrive with the March 15, 2008 issue).  The people profiled are all putting themselves forward in the library world in interesting ways that benefit us all. 

The deadline has been extended to November 15th, so if you know of anyone deserving, be sure to fill out the online nomination form by then!

found on Catalogablog

ILS Assessment : A Background Document (Pdf) is an excellent overview of the Integrated Library System issues facing libraries today. Created by the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor (Canada), it is their first step towards “evaluating the current environment with respect to Integrated Library Systems (ILS).”

Drawing from blogs, journals and presentations, this paper should be read by anyone recognizing that the current state of the ILS is lacking, and that libraries are in danger of falling further behind if we don’t educate ourselves and take action.

Of additional interest to me was that this paper is written from an academic library perspective, and that they are currently using Voyager, the system I worked with until last October. Neither of these perspectives diminishes the usefulness of this document for those who work in non-academic libraries and/or with non-Voyager ILSs, however.

found in American Libraries, August 2007, p. 36.

Open Medicine is a new journal from Canada which is striving to be an online, open access alternative to the likes of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). 

There have been many new open access journals in the past couple of years (see the Directory of Open Access Journals for an idea of what is available), but this is one we should keep an eye on, because JAMA and NEJM are such high profile publications.

from Open Access News