I wrote recently about Ellie’s review of Roy Tennant’s talk for the Texas Library Association. At the time, I couldn’t find a copy of Tennant’s presentation. So, I contacted Mr. Tennant, and he sent me a link to the presentation with a note that many of the slides are screenshots and, without the context of the verbal presentation, may be cryptic.

Cryptic slides aside, there is very useful material in a number of the slides.

Enjoy.

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Ellie of the Ellie <3 Libraries Blog recently wrote a remarkably comprehensive summary, with commentary, of Roy Tennant’s “The Future of Catalogs” presentation for the TLA (Texas Library Association). The gist of her review is that the monolithic library catalog (OPAC) is dying and is being replaced with tools that foster discovery, integration of disparate sources, and Web 2.0 elements such as sharing of information (for getting resource recommendations.)

The world is changing. Library patrons are global citizens. It doesn’t serve the patrons for libraries to remain islands and to cling tightly to their piece of global content. The future, in my view, is Web 2.0 and beyond. More sharing, more collaboration, more mashups, more multimedia, and more global. And, at the same time, everything should become more simple for the user.

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[ This article is one of a number of articles that explains concepts basic to federated search. You can find other such articles by clicking on the “basics” category or by clicking here. ]

OCLC acquired EZproxy a few weeks ago. For those of you unfamiliar with proxy servers, especially in a federated search environment, I thought it’d be (almost) timely to demystify them.

A proxy server, in the broadest sense, is an application that performs an action on behalf of a user. Consider the role of proxies in the business world. Shareholders in corporations will sometimes designate a proxy to vote on their behalf at a shareholders meeting. The proxy represents the interest of the shareholder who is not physically present at the shareholders meeting to vote. In the Internet, proxies may not be casting votes but they perform a myriad of tasks for users.
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