At the December CSUL meeting TAG presented some options for Elluminate licensing for the SULs. CSUL agreed to accept the option that covers 16 moderator accounts. FCLA volunteered to handle the purchase and be the initial administrator. The price that TAG received was good until 12/31/09, so we jumped on getting this done. I found out yesterday that the purchase order has been created and it will be sent to Elluminate. Next steps are for them to get in contact with us with the account information. Lisa Tatum will be set up as the Administrator. She will be able to set up the moderator accounts. We'll be asking the Deans and Directors who these moderators should be. Expect to see some action on this topic early in the new year.

Michele Newberry, Jennifer Kuntz and I gave an update on FCLA recent activities at the PSPC face to face meeting yesterday held in FSU's Strozier Library. I used a web page with many links for the talk. After we went over the topics on this page Jennifer gave an intro. to the UBorrow prototype. I always find face to face meetings extremely helpful. Not only can I put faces to names and voices, I find it easier to have a give and take with more people involved. Thanks to FSU, especially Becca Bichel, for the friendly environment. I also appreciate the FSU staff who helped me retrieve my cell phone from the locked room. They were so patient!

Notes from Serials Solutions presentation of Summon to FCLA 9/25/09

Summon now has almost 1/2 billion records.
They get lots of their article data from publishers directly.
90% of Academic Search Premier. Also data from Gale, ACM, Gale, Lexis/Nexis Academic, ProQuest, Science Direct, Web of Science, IEEE

Ingest and index full text but don't serve it.

User interface options:
1. Use theirs: private data (your catalog, your a&i data, private Digital Collections
public data (public Dig Coll)

2. Take their interface (Ruby on Rails) and adapt it to your environment

3. Use their API with your interface, Western Michigan is using VuFind. Options: host catalog or have catalog in local systems

same price for all 3.

There are four trends in library automation that Marshall Breeding considers the "top" ones in his blog entry/article : Top Technology Trends. I agree these are the top trends, although I'd add one about bringing the catalog to the interfaces that the users are in (Stealth OPAC). I've made a few comments about where we are within each trend:

Ex Libris announced a new service called Primo Central that sounds like something similar to Serial Solutions' Summon. A native search (as opposed to federated search) for e-journal article and e-books integrated into the same search interface used for print and locally digitized objects. Right now it looks like this service is only open to Primo users, but who knows. We also don't know which vendors' materials will be included or how the pricing would work. The beta release of this service will be later this year. Definitely something to watch...

One of the more interesting (at least to me) of the listservs that I follow is NG4LIB (NextGen for Lib). Recently a discussion of the new report from the Extensible Catalog folk at Rochester turned into a discussion of how to integrate article searching into next gen discovery tools. A few approaches were discussed on the list: federated searching; loading article metadata into your discovery tool repository or some hybrid of the two. The Mango team at FCLA has been doing work with the OPAC subcommittee on this very topic.

I attended Educause 2008 in Orlando last week. Closing session was Freeman Hrabowski, President of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Dr. Hrabowski was a truely inspiring speaker, his theme was "Why IT Matters". He gave the audience a view from the President's office of IT's importance on the campus.