JISC has released the Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS): Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The aims and objectives of OCRIS were to:

• Survey the extent to which repository content is in scope for institutional library OPACs, and the extent to which it is already recorded there;
• Examine the interoperability of OPAC and repository software for the exchange of metadata and other information;
• List the various services to institutional managers, researchers, teachers and learners offered respectively by OPACs and repositories;
• Identify the potential for improvements in the links (e.g. using link resolver technology) from repositories and/or OPACs to other institutional services, such as finance or research administration;
• Make recommendations for the development of possible further links between library OPACs and institutional repositories, identifying the benefits to relevant stakeholder groups.

Nancy Fried Foster has self-archived XC User Research Preliminary Report in UR Research.

Here's the abstract:

This report summarizes the objectives, methods, and major software design findings from the data collected in the user research portion of the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project. A full analysis and interpretation of the data is not included here and will be provided at the conclusion of the project. This report includes edited results from the brainstorming sessions and a list of the features that emerged from the analysis of those results.

The Blacklight 2.1 Release is now available.

Here's an excerpt from the Blacklight Frequently Asked Questions:

Blacklight is an open source OPAC (online public access catalog). That means libraries (or anyone else) can use it to allow people to search and browse their collections online. Blacklight uses Solr to index and search, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently, Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MARC records and several kinds of XML documents, including TEI, EAD, and GDMS. Blacklight was developed at the University of Virginia Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0 license.

OCLC has released Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want.

Here's an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

• The end user's experience of the delivery of wanted items is as important, if not more important, than his or her discovery experience.
• End users rely on and expect enhanced content including summaries/abstracts and tables of contents.
• An advanced search option (supporting fielded searching) and facets help end users refine searches, navigate, browse and manage large result sets.
• Important differences exist between the catalog data quality priorities of end users and those who work in libraries.
• Librarians and library staff, like end users, approach catalogs and catalog data purposefully. End users generally want to find and obtain needed information; librarians and library staff generally have work responsibilities to carry out. The work roles of librarians and staff influence their data quality preferences.
• Librarians' choice of data quality enhancements reflects their understanding of the importance of accurate, structured data in the catalog.

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project has released a six-part webcast that describes the software, which is expected to be released by the end of the month.

Here's an excerpt from the project home page that describes it:

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project is working to design and develop a set of open-source applications that will provide libraries with an alternative way to reveal their collections to library users. XC will provide easy access to all resources (both digital and physical collections) across a variety of databases, metadata schemas and standards, and will enable library content to be revealed through other services that libraries may already be using, such as content management systems and learning management systems. XC will also make library collections more web-accessible by revealing them through web search engines.

Scriblio 2.7 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from "Scriblio 2.7 Released":

Scriblio is an open source WordPress plugin that adds the ability to search, browse, and create structured data to the popular blog/content management platform. And WordPress adds great ease of use, permalinks, comments/trackbacks/pingbacks, and other social and web-centric features to that structured data. But that’s not news. The news is that Scriblio now has an internal data model that supports much more sophisticated uses. . . Whereas previous versions of Scriblio were mostly just display and social interaction interfaces to data that’s created or managed elsewhere, this new version supports soup to nuts creation and management of collections.

The California Digital Library has released Next Generation Melvyl Pilot: Update to the University Librarians, November 20, 2008, which describes the progress made in testing OCLC's WorldCat Local as a replacement for the existing Melvyl Catalog.

Here's an excerpt:

In the six months that the Next Generation Melvyl Pilot has been live, we have gathered information on the user experience, identified the strengths and remaining challenges of the system, and compared the pilot with UC’s goals as outlined in the 2005 Bibliographic Services Task Force (BSTF) Report. Users value the breadth of the service, the integration of journal articles, and the ease of use. Users find challenging the lack of Request integration, difficulties in emailing and printing, and problems in accessing materials, all of which are on OCLC’s roadmap for improvements in the coming year. The pilot is meeting many of the goals outlined in the BSTF report and OCLC has demonstrated the ability to make rapid improvements to the system.

Based on these data, we believe that the pilot shows sufficient promise that we should transition the project into a pre-production phase, in which both UC and OCLC will engage in the planning and preparation needed to position us for going to production in mid-2009 if we continue to see successful progress.

Presentations from VALE’s Next Generation Academic Library System Symposium are now available.

Ten vendors and application developers have agreed to support standard ILS interfaces that will permit integration and interoperability with emerging discovery services. These interfaces will be developed by the Digital Library Federation's ILS-Discovery Interface Committee. The participants are AquaBrowser, BiblioCommons, California Digital Library, Ex Libris, LibLime, OCLC, Polaris Library Systems, SirsiDynix, Talis, and VTLS.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

On March 6, representatives of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), academic libraries, and major library application vendors met in Berkeley, California to discuss a draft recommendation from the DLF for standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

At the meeting, participants agreed to support a set of essential functions through open protocols and technologies by deploying specific recommended standards.

These functions are:

1. Harvesting. Functions to harvest data records for library collections, both in full, and incrementally based on recent changes. Harvesting options could include either the core bibliographic records, or those records combined with supplementary information (such as holdings or summary circulation data). Both full and differential harvesting options are expected to be supported through an OAI-PMH interface.
2. Availability. Real-time querying of the availability of a bibliographic (or circulating) item. This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group.
3. Linking. Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it; for example, by a stable link to a page displaying the item's catalog record and providing links for requests for that item. This functionality will be implemented through a URL template defined for the OPAC as specified by the ILS-DI task group.

The University of Michigan Library has launched MTagger, which allows users to tag library web pages, online catalog pages, image pages, and locally published e-journal articles and to utilize tag clouds for these resources.

Read more about it at "New Tagging Tool at University of Michigan Library."