Chris Leach and I took Jerome to Loughborough University yesterday (24 November 2010), to an EMALINK seminar on next-generation OPACs. Here’s a copy of our presentation slides.
It was a particularly useful event, especially so for being packed into 2½ hours (and worth learning to drive an automatic in order to get there!), with a presentation from Loughborough about their project to select a next-generation OPAC system; group discussions around some of the factors involved in launching such services; and our own contribution, which led to some interesting conversations about the benefits and risks of experimentation in libraries.
Jerome itself passed something of a milestone this week: having finally crawled its way round the whole of Lincoln’s catalogue, it now contains a full set of our MARC records (all 214,006 of them!); each work with its own stable, persistent URL (/work/<bibnumber>). Nick Jackson has also started to play around with pulling in additional data and services from external APIs (e.g., book cover images).
(Yes, there’s a problem with authors being attached to the wrong records. We’re on it. In fact, Jerome will self-heal its “leaky array” problem over the course of the next week.)
Paul, your Powerpoint presentations are the best thing ever! Really inspirational use of CC images.
David, you’re too kind