Category: ‘puters

mergers and aquisitions – SirsiDynix + Vista

Posted on by jessamyn

You know, if you want to bury some news, make sure to announce it between Xmas and New Years. So SirsiDynix says “investment partnership” in the article headline (their pdf) but “acquisition” in the article. Vista hasn’t announced it at all as of this typing. Press releases are usually vapid and devoid of content and this one is no different. The letter from Sirsi-Dynix CEO is also not really forthcoming. “The partnership validates the contributions libraries and SirsiDynix make to our communities.” What? Dan Scott has some analysis on his blog, Coffee|Code and makes a few predictions.

You heard it here first: expect lots of news from SirsiDynix in 2007. I’m predicting more service fees (100% confidence), increased annual support fees (100% confidence), and the beginning of the end of Unicorn with an announcement that Horizon is the strategic product for new development efforts going forward (75% confidence). I’ll go out on a limb and say that a merger or acquisition of SirsiDynix in 2007 is unlikely (33% confidence), but after proving their new business strategy and the nice spikes on their revenue and profit charts, I’ll say that it’s quite likely in 2008 (80% confidence).

I’m not into the industry enough to make any predictions or even any observations, but it seems to me that if a non-library company sees fit to buy a library services company it’s probably because that company is making money hand over fist. And if Sirsi-Dynix is making money hand over fist, it’s because libraries are paying them boatloads of money. Sirsi-Dynix says they expect no staffing changes. A little more over at Library Journal.

Don’t miss this amazing graphic showing “the history of mergers and acquisitions in the library automation industry” over at Library Technology Guides.

Google Co-op @ your library

Posted on by jessamyn

There have been a few Custom Search Engines made lately using Google Co-op. Let’s look at a few of them. I did searches for librarians, im, and jessamyn.

LISZEN — library blog search engine. Sexy wiki title list. Works like Google, looks like Google, keeps my settings from Google so I see results in sets of 50, nice! Actually, something weird is happening. If I search for a word like librarians, I only get the top 10 results, Google’s standard results. If I add a refinement by clicking on a link, then I get results 1-50 which includes my custom number of search results. However, there is something weird about the set-up, I can’t see any results after the top ten or so, the rest disappear into what I assume is an I-FRAME and I can’t get to the next page of results or see the nav at the bottom that would take me to the other results. Big trouble. Results seem to be sorted by currency instead of relevance. Results are also returned under the attractive, but large header which means you’re going to do a bit of scrolling. The results refinement is a little clunky. Limiting to “special libraries” just adds the string “more:special_libraries” to the query string, and I also got weird results limiting to academic libraries. The refinements are all just set up like radio buttons so you can only use one of the refinements and the interface is a little counterintuitive. I like the set of blogs represented.

Librarian’s E-Library from ALA, or “Vetted resources on Libraries and Librarianship from the American Library Association (ALA) Library” — I think every time we call something an e-something it’s subtly implying that the normal version of that thing is not electronic. So when we say ebook we are saying if it’s electronic, it’s not a normal book. I think this is wrong thinking perhaps. Their interface is nowhere near as sexy as LISZEN’s but it does seem like they are trying to add some neat widgets like a list of some representative sites and other contributors. The results list is clean, looks just like Google’s with a little touch of red to remind you that you’re searching ALA’s version. Results seem to be sorted by relevance. I didn’t see any blogs represented except for official type blogs, so the results here complement LISZEN’s fairly well.

A few others I saw in the line-up include the ARL Libraries Search, Phil Bradley’s Librarian Weblogs and the Library 2.0 Feed Search

goodbye google answers

Posted on by jessamyn

Google stops accepting questions over at Google Answers. They’ll stop accepting answers by the end of the year. Ten to one they roll out some freebie service a la Yahoo Answers or Askville within the next six months (I have heard through the rumor mill that it may be much sooner than that). Interesting discussion over on MetaFilter about it which briefly compares and contrasts some of the Ask services with library services. I was also interviewed for a short article about Google Answers today on ArsTechnica. It’s a weird sort of power law that if your site comes up high on a Google Search for a topic, and you’re contactable, you wind up talking to more reporters about it.

three hours at the library

Posted on by jessamyn

I spent a few hours at the library yesterday, somewhere between three and four. Almost all of this time was spent doing Windows updates to the three semi-public machines. The library got broadband a few months ago and updates were basically impossible before then. So I came in, unlocked the Centurion Guard (quick aside, can anyone tell me if this is really in any way more secure than a good software firewall like Deep Freeze if you’re just using the machines as PACs?) and did the updates which involved downloading the updater, doing an express install of the most urgent updates, and then doing a more complete install of the 53 updates that had been made available since the last update.

I also installed Firefox on the exec and patron-facing profiles, did some helpful configging of it, taught the librarian how it was different (tabs!), and hid Internet Explorer as much as I could without uninstalling it since I still need it for more Windows Updates! While all these downloads were happening, I ordered a $40 wireless router, replaced the “you can not IM here” sign with one that said “Use Meebo for IM” and explained to the librarian how Meebo worked, and even used it to IM with someone the librarian already knew, who happens to be a local buddy of mine.

Since the downloads were still going on, I gave the librarian and the trustee I was working with a pep talk about the importance of having a website and my firm assessment that once we built a little website, most of the maintenance and updating could be done by them. The library was a little hub of activity the entire evening. 1,300 people live in the town and probably twenty of them came into the library in a three hour period. I got introduced to almost all of them.

Nothing else really to add here except that a lot of this work just fell under the heading of 1) good advice and 2) deferred maintenance. Neither of them always seems like the best way of spending your limited time and money. Yet at the same time, the whole “getting to yes” part of library tecnology may be, at the end of the day, the most important part of a solid technology foundation.