Technology resources

I've been reading more professional literature lately.  It's an unexpected dividend of our relocation actually that I'm happy to take advantage of.  The library subscribes to several profesisonal journals, newsletters and circulars dedicated to libraries and libarianship. Not wanting them to go to waste, I told the staff that I would shelve them in my office as they came in during this next year in exile.  I got plastic magazine boxes out and put them up on a shelf that Id need a stool to access.  Which brings me to the benefit in all this.  The material gets put in my box and I put it on my desk. Being much too indolent to climb up on that stool every day, the material collects on my desk.  My personal curiosity being what it is, I read whatever new thing happens to be on my desk (usually while I'm on the telephone!) - which happens to be; the library land literature.

So what I've been reading about is this:
Bibliocommons has rolled out its latest product.  It's a discovery tool (alert to new library buzzword) like Aquabrowswer with lots of nifty Web 2.0 tools incorporated.  It doesn't replace your Integrated library system (ILS), just makes it more user-friendly.  To quote from Smart Libraries (August 2009) "...Bibliocommons opertes separetly from the underlying [ILS].....data are harvested from the ILS and used to populate a separate search and retrieval environment"  All of these tools claim to be so intuitive, users won't need much instruction to use them.  I sat through a demo of Aquabrowser recently and I say that's a debatable claim.
OK, what else:  another player in the Audiobook service came on the scene - Ingram Digital Myilibrary has an audi book service for library that they say is fully compatible "at Launch" with iPods, macs and iphones.  The pricing models include the availabiltiy of setting individual user selections as well as consortium wide collections. Again, see Smart Libraries August 2009) for a more in-depth discusion of the topic.
I've also read a discusison in the latest Library Technology Reports (vol. 45/ no.6) about  building a digital branch library.  Which has led me to thoughts of our ELIN consortium webpage.  we never decided or determiend what functions we needed it to serve for us.  My thinking is perhaps we ought to give some time to deliberating this concept and determine if it's doing all that we want it to do.

BTW, I've also read the last several issues of Library Journal, cover to cover, which is something I never do!  I read American Libraries and College and Reserach Libries (and its newsletter) but usually steer clear of LJ.  there are a few more, infrequent publications I've begun to discover again. 

There are some pretty amazing goings on out there in library land people, we've just got to make an effort to discover them.