Brian Mathews, the Ubiquitous Librarian at the Chronicle, recently blogged about his friend Tara and her role in “forensic bibliographic reconstruction” in interlibrary loan. A number of commenters were fascinated by this peek behind the ILL curtain. From the Davidson library, I offer another: That article you got on “interlibrary loan” may not have come from another library at all. Joe Gutekanst and Jason Radcliffe are finding 100-150 items a week on the open web. It’s happened to me; I … [Read more...]
Institutional Repository Update
August 14, 2014 By
We are in the “dog days of summer” as we get ready for the semester in the heat and humidity of a Carolina’s August. This this is fine with “Flash,” but it means that while I want to write a meaningful blog entry, I’d like to minimize my effort. With this in mind, I’m going to offer an update on a project I am intimate with, Davidson’s Institutional Repository. Flash conserves energy during the “dog days” Our great summer students have made significant progress, and the hosting … [Read more...]
Revamped Archives & Special Collections Web Presence
March 4, 2014 By
We have introduced a revamped website for Davidson’s archives and special collections. If you visit the site you may not notice any differences at first glance. The banners, color schemes, rotating images, embedded Google search, and news & events all are essentially the same as they were a week or a month ago. You might detect that we’ve changed some of the information in the left hand column regarding our offices hours, but a bit of text change doesn’t really count as a revamping … [Read more...]
What to call it?
January 23, 2014 By
I’ve written several blog entries about creating an institutional repository (IR) for Davidson. Almost exactly a year ago, in January 2013, I discussed the effort in the context of preserving Davidson’s intellectual heritage, then back in June revisited the subject as we decided to go with a hosted solution using open source software. After a great deal of effort at Davidson (content and testing), and Lyrasis, the hosting vendor (programming and infrastructure), we are close to unveiling our … [Read more...]
The Digital Public Library of America Revisited
November 13, 2013 By
On May 1, I wrote about the new Digital Public Library of America (dp.la), a new portal bringing together digitized treasures from libraries, archives, and museums in the United States. At that time, though, searching for gems from or about Davidson College yielded pretty disappointing results. No longer! Now a search for “Davidson College” returns 481 results, including college catalogs, lots of pictures, and even two videos! What happened? The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center became a … [Read more...]
