Three 20 minute presentations given on the afternoon of Feb. 15, 2006 at the code4lib Conference at Oregon State University in the LaSells Stewart Center, Corvallis, Oregon.
Lipstick on a Pig : 7 ways to improve the sex life of your OPAC : NJIT has used a variety of tools (but largely ColdFusion) to extend their library's OPAC to engage today's Millennial (raised in the Goozlezon†Web 2.0 environment) students: (1) book covers; (2) book reviews, (3) live circulation usage history, (4) recommendation engine, (5) RSS of journals tables of contents, (6) live librarian support, (7) shortcut, durable links (PURL's) to specific items. -- AHAH : When good is better than best : It can be difficult to enhance, fix or extend legacy/closed-source web applications such as online catalogs without being able to alter the web application directly.
Durfee discusses using AHAH (Asynchronous HTTPRequest and HTML) as a technique for doing so and compares it to AJAX, proxying and SSI. Examples from the Seattle Public Library's next generation online catalog will be presented. Performance and scalability concerns are also presented. -- Digital libraries are supposed to foster reuse of digital content but it is hard to combine content from different sources. We are building prototype software that (1) converts different types of courseware to an XML interchange format based on OpenDocument and other specs/standards (2) enables the content to be disaggregated, recombined, re-styled and endowed with SCORM reporting behaviors and (3) realizes instructional design through the use of the SCORM (or IMS) Simple Sequencing. Will demo, discuss and am happy to talk about the bigger picture of reusability in educational digital libraries and standards if given a longer slot.