Save the Dates for Assessment: October 26 and June 4

During the 2012-13 fiscal year, CLIC will host a series of professional development workshops focusing on various assessment issues. The series will culminate on June 4, 2013, with a CLIC-wide Assessment Conference featuring Megan Oakleaf, author of ACRL’s The Value of Academic Libraries.

To kick off our “Year of Assessment,” CLIC is hosting A View from the Field: Overview of Recent Assessment Activities in CLIC Libraries on Friday, October 26, 2012. The Kick-Off Program will begin with an introduction to CLIC’s “Year of Assessment” by CLIC Board Chair, Dan Gjelten. Following Dan, each CLIC institution will provide a brief summary of local assessment projects to give the CLIC community a broad overview of what other CLIC libraries have been doing.  At the end of the morning, attendees will be asked for their feedback on what specific assessment topics they would like to see offered in the CLIC workshop series.  CLIC library staff not in attendance at the kick-off program will be able to submit their suggestions via an online survey.

Please mark the dates on your calendars and watch for updates re: location and times on CLIC-announce and CLIC News!

CLIC Chair Camp

The 2012-13 Chairs of CLIC's Operational Committees attended Chair Camp this morning to learn about Chair responsibilities and the new forms. Our thanks to all for volunteering to chair CLIC Operational Committees this year!

Gail Peloquin (ILL), Laura Secord (Serials), Jon Neilson (ASA), Katie Hagen (Acquisitions), Barbara Brokopp (Circ), Mary Lou Steiner (SysOps), Zachary Moss (Reserves), Kathy Lutz (Cataloging), and Donna Nix (OPAC). [Not pictured: Chris Schommer (Digitization).]

Library Trend: Linked Data

There’s been a lot of talk about Linked Data in libraryland recently.  In response to this growing trend, we’ve gathered the following information for CLIC library staff who are interested in learning more about Linked Data.

A good starting place for basic information is OCLC’s Linked Data Research page which describes Linked Data as “a term which describes an approach to exposing data in a machine-readable form where the data is "de-referenceable" (i.e. URIs are an integral part of the exposed data and external applications can use the URIs to perform various actions such as retrieving data, connecting same/similar/related data from multiple Linked Data stores).”  OCLC has also put together a helpful “Linked Data for Libraries” video on YouTube.  And earlier last week, OCLC provided a downloadable linked data file for the 1 million most widely held works in WorldCat.

Minitex and the Minnesota Library Association are also tackling Linked Data, and they invite Minnesota library staff to join their Linked Data interest group.  If you would like to join the group or learn more about it, please contact either Sarah Weeks at Rolvaag Library, St. Olaf (weekss@stolaf.edu or  507-786-3453) or Sara Ring at Minitex (ring0089@umn.edu or 612-625-6088). There will be a Linked Data dinner at the MLA Annual Conference (tentatively Thursday, October 4) as an informal kick-off for the interest group.  Minitex also plans to host a regional informational session which will be announced later this year.

At the national level, ALA LITA/ALCTS has a Linked Data Interest Group,  and the Digital Library Federation sponsors the LOD-LAM Zotero Group, a shared vehicle for providing links and references to tools and resources about library linked data.

Additional Linked Data Resources

The following Linked Data Projects are from Sara Ring’s and Sarah Weeks’ Linked Data handout from their ARLD presentation earlier this year (thanks Sara and Sarah!).

Schema.org  Google, Bing and Yahoo adoption of the Semantic Web. Use Schema.org’s vocabulary to tag your data in a way that search engines can understand.

CKAN  An open-source data portal. Lists 52 Library Data Sets (such as the British National Bibliography and Cambridge University)

VIAF  Virtual International name authority file. VIAF is hosted by OCLC, and a joint project of several national libraries.

id.loc.gov  Names, places and subjects published as URIs with links to other national libraries.

Europeana  An aggregate of cultural heritage object from through- out Europe, containing 15 million items from 1500 libraries, museums, and archives.

COMET: Cambridge Open METadata project  Converted bibliographic records in catalog to RDF triples, and published the data sets on the web. Also link to FAST and VIAF authority services.

CLICnet Enhancements

CLIC has implemented a number of new enhancements and fixes to CLICnet. Special thanks go to the OPAC Committee, Steve Waage, and Ben Durrant for these improvements!

Enhancements:

• Mobile version of catalog, reformatted for mobile display including all pages (login, request, search, result, and course reserves). Around 6500 visits to the site were mobile last fiscal year, July 2011 – June  2012.
• Google books preview and link added for titles available in Google Books.
• Link to a quick citation for an item.
• About the Author link added which links to other works and background info.
• Google analytics code added sitewide and showed that the above three enhancements were used almost 25,000 times in the past fiscal year!
• QR code added (links to record for users going to the stacks).
• OSF Library locations have a custom link to use for mapping the items location.

Fixes:

• Location on detail page changed to full school name rather than three-digit code.
• Tables on detail page fixed to stretch to the browser width.
• Fixed the “Page expired” error when someone searched from a page within the site and then hit the back button.
• Cover images link to the record now rather than the ContentCafe page.
• Request “Fill By Date” automatically set to 30 days out from the current day.
• Rollover color highlights search result items.

Welcome to CLIC News!

Cooperating Libraries in Consortium (CLIC) has created the CLIC News page to provide up-to-date information about CLIC and other news of interest to our CLIC member libraries.

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