Community and Communicating

I tried to diversify this afternoon and attend sessions that dealt with SFX and MetaLib. Monica Metz-Wiseman of University of South Florida offered a presentation on building an SFX/MetaLib community within an academic library. She talked about the way USF created a help section in MetaLib, how they configured all of their ask a librarian sections (really cool!), and how they provide a forum with SFX for users to report problems with databases.

I also listened to John Little's presentation on creating Ask-A-Librarian feedback web forms for multiple locations. Most of that presentation can be found at http://www.duke.edu/~jrl/sfx.htm. He says it's five easy steps, so if this is something you need, have at it.

On the way out of that session, I stopped by the Q & A session with the folks from EL. Dale Snapp of UC Davis pointed out that the folks at Ex Libris could save $$$ by migrating to MySQL in Aleph. I don't know if the folks at Aleph will go this route. Their response seemed to indicate that it might be a possibility at some point. I don't think I would mind seeing that change.