Hiatus over, summer's coming...

So, I have successfully lasted in my new position for about 9 months now, and can see the end of the school year. At some point around February, my schedule started to get crazier, and I knew that is a sign of my successes. Here's brief summary of our activities for the last 2 months.

DAM software -- Jury is still out, but we're getting close to a decision on how to proceed. After much deliberation, open source is out, as we just don't have the infrastructure to support it. CONTENTdm is still in the running. I am going to be looking at 3 more products -- VTLS's Vital, which runs on FEDORA, ArchivalWare and Olive. Hopefully we will have 1 -2 possible scenarios by next week.

OCLC's Dark Archive is another service that we are looking at, which would run complementary to the asset management system. I am not sure how widely publicized this is, as there are only currently about 30 customers for it. But OCLC will can be used as an outsourcing agent to manage the big wieldy masters, through a combo of tape and hard disk. They keep one copy of everything online on disk, and then keep 3-5 copies rotating through on tape. I feel really good about our possible adoption of this service.

I also successfully implemented our first distance library instruction service -- One of our prof's wanted me to go out to Buck's County to talk about the AV department, so I worked with our Academic Computing department to use recently acquired video conferencing equipment. It was a feel good experience for all, as the class was on new technology in the classroom, and we were able to lead by example. Also AC was excited to have an opportunity to use the equipment in a non-traditional environment, meaning not in one of the smart classrooms. I feel like in time library instruction will have to have this service readily available to accomodate the needs of further distance education iniatives.

I've been busy gallavanting around, too -- Attended the Computers in Libraries conference, Grant Writing at Palinet and a Web 2.0 / Scholarly Communication Symposium at Drexel. Comparable to drinking from a hose, I am fully information saturated. I will be excited to announce our new initiatives as they are fully flushed out in the next couple of weeks, though.