Today was my time to check out the exhibits. Two things in particular: web-scale discovery/management systems and e-books.
But first a shout out to Lexis-Nexis (bet you didn't expect to hear that on this blog!) At the last ALA I whined at their both about the absence of a mobile site for their resources. Now they have one. We will add this to our own mobile site, so stay tuned. Elsevier on the other hand has taken a different tack and created apps for Science Direct and Scopus. Good, but they really need to create a mobile friendly site(s) as well.
Discovery
Even though we have Summon, I try to keep up with other major unified discovery tools. Someone from EBSCO finally explained to me why libraries would want to choose EBSCO Discovery Service even though they have to use federated searching to access none EBSCO resourses and those results are retrieved, late (of course, it is fed searching after all) and somewhat uncomfortably, to the left of the main results where students really aren't going to see them. The answer is; if you are a heavily EBSCO library EDS makes sense, particularly if you can swap even more resources to subscribe via EBSCO. EDS is basically EBSCOHost.
I also stopped by the OCLC booth to get an update on their Web Management Services, which get more impressive, comprehensive, and practical each time I check in. The big development at the moment seems to be in their electronic resources module at the moment. They are still pushing WorldCat Local as a unified discovery service and say it can provide discovery for all resources, but I think that is an over enthusiastic salesperson speaking. We shall see.
E-books
Checked in with EBL, whose non-linear lending model looks interesting. Also Project MUSE, who has a long way to go on the University Press Content Consortium, but it looks very promising. I also stopped by the Overdrive booth. They are mostly knowne for working with public libraries, but do also contract with academic libraries. Everyone is working on downloadable copies to e-reader devices, but Overdrive is way ahead in this.
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2 comments:
Re: "EDS is EBSCO." Yep, that's what we decided after becoming a beta site and messing around with EDS for a long time. We already receive every database we can from EBSCO; we like the interface and we never installed a link resolver, thus the importance of staying with EBSCO. In the end, we are just as well off with the "search all databases" function. Good thing, too--since we have a 5% G&S budget cut for the upcoming year, which ended the option of subscribing to any discovery service!!
We are having all kinds of fun at your old stomping ground these days. :-)
Our library at Union just signed a contract with OCLC WMS last week so we'll see how it goes.
Hope you are having a good time in NOLA. If you have a chance check out Lilette (where I used to work) for dinner. 3637 Magazine Street.
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