last day of ALA activities

In addition to my committee meeting (LITA Membership Development), I spent a lot of time during the day on the exhibit floor, picking up information and talking with vendor reps and colleagues.

In the early afternoon, I attended an OCLC CONTENTdm users showcase, which featured the use of CONTENTdm to support an IR; both institutions involved in the presentation, Claremont College and the University of Utah, employ CONTENTdm as an IR solution. I agree with the thrust of Kenning Arlitsch's (my WWDL colleague) remarks that the primary obstacles in building an IR program are non-technical. However, I do question whether CONTENTdm is robust enough on the digital preservation end to support an IR. I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about the DSpace platform in its preservation support, but it is clearly a stronger platform in preservation support in comparison to CONTENTdm. It has its issues as an IR solution, though, including the difficulty of customizing the solution thru an API. (While the base platform of DSpace has preservation support such as CNRI handle integration and a bitstream format registry, the current beta release, 1.5, is clearly designed to resolve lingering problems with its UI and the ability to extend the application, as opposed to building additional preservation support.)

In comparison to its competitors, especially to products marketed by ILS companies, CONTENTdm is a good value and a wildly successful product.

One of my institution's products that I'm worried about is Docutek ERes, which falls under the SirsiDynix umbrella. I had a very positive interaction with a SirsiDynix rep today, who noted that it's at least possible that there will again be a user listserv for ERes; this listserv previously existed when the product was owned by Docutek. SirsiDynix was lit up by its Horizon and Unicorn customers in an ILS survey performed by Marshall Breeding of Vanderbilt and released in the last week. The rep whom I spoke with described the company's long-term vision for ERes, which includes enabling its use for copyright management tasks beyond electronic reserves.

I just realized that I made it through the entire conference without hearing or seeing anything about Z39.50. Not true at the LITA National Forum just last October, when I spoke with a developer who made an impassioned plea for its use.