Peter Murray has an incredibly good selection of links about the Google Book Search Settlement on the Disruptive Library Technology Jester blog.  Really.  Spend some time perusing them.

Zotero 1.5 Beta has been released!

When I attended OneBigLibrary Unconference last summer, Trevor Owens gave a talk (un-talk?) on this version of Zotero and some of the new features and ideas that would be part of it (my post about it is here).  It has come to fruition, and it can change the way you do research (especially group research).  See the video for a great overview.

In addition,  Peter Murray (a.k.a. the Disruptive Library Technology Jester) has already set up a way to distribute your own Zotero citations via an RSS feed.  It is a great sign of success for a project like Zotero when people are creating mashups when your product is just a few days old.  Think of the ways that this could be used to promote library services, especially if your library software doesn’t do RSS.

Schemes to Add Functionality to the Web OPAC is a posting by Disruptive Library Technology Jester (a.k.a. Peter Murray of OhioLINK) in which he lays out a basic categorization of ways in which libraries can get their OPACs to do more.

This list is interesting in many ways, not the least of which is that on first read this seems to be a very good foundation for examining the options available to libraries.  So much depends on the current state of your library’s OPAC (which integrated library system (ILS) you have, how it is hosted, who has the authority to make changes, and your library’s human/technical resources), but this gives a starting point to see just what a library can do with the available resources.

Over the years I keep revisiting a desire to revamp OPACs that are sorely in need of improvement.  When I worked for a Voyager library, I set up this and this (each developed by someone else, but that I configured to work for my library).  I haven’t found anything like these for my current situation, but Scriblio sounds like a possible option.  The faceted searching alone would make it worthwhile.  I may get creative over the next couple of months…

found via Librarian.net