Vufind

Jared, the UML webmaster, pointed out Stanford Library's implementation of Vufind today. They're calling it SearchWorks and doing something I hadn't considered - presenting the entire collection in facets. So, you can browse the entire collection of English language materials, or of books, and so on. The nice thing is that it shows immediately how much stuff is in each category. I wonder, though, how many people would use this... Seems to me that searching is still the way to go for most people, and the facets would be a nice add-on to search results, helping you refine your final list. Still, I'm very glad to see a full-bore implementation of Vufind by a large research library like Stanford.

Thumb drives from the library

How would undergraduates make use of small thumb drives, free from the library? The library could load up an HTML file based on the home page, and maybe something like KeePass to help manage passwords. We could also put a list of "top ten" open source tools such as openoffice.

These would be more expensive than bookmarks and the like, but I wonder if they'd have a greater impact....

Linux in the Library

Setting up a linux-based mini network inside Dafoe would be interesting. Some of the distros have low equipment specs, and we could set up a little word processing "farm," for instance. Or, we could have some machines that would only search the catalogue. Neither of those tasks require the power that our public machines have now. Printing and finding call numbers are two primary uses we should be supporting.