At first, we tried to continue as before: hacking our cars free of the clutching tendrils which grew up every night, bumping along highways until our combined weight pulverized vines into a grimy sludge. One-by-one, buildings blacked out as the weight of growth downed power lines. We left our offices and tried to support the linemen. Then cell towers choked. Signal not found.
We drove plows 24/7 to keep the roads clear. We salted the roads. We salted the earth. The blacktop crumbled. Creepers curled into machinery and slowly cars, buses, trains all failed. Skyscrapers fell…
I’ve just had an article come out in Journal of Archival Organization. You can get a self-archived Author’s Accepted Manuscript, etc., here.
I thought I’d write briefly about what I intended to accomplish in it. I was invited as a (now-former) member of TS-EAS to write along the prompt EAD3 and linked data. This seemed extremely in line with my work and some upcoming plans, so I was excited to do so.
At Penn State, we’re planning a discovery revamp which will include presenting our catalog with a Blacklight layer over the MARC records and creating a Bento landing page for the front-page search, which currently goes to Summon. We’ve been reviewing other institutions who’ve implemented such approaches, determining their choices, and assessing how they do or don’t meet our own needs.
The box causing the most conversation right now has been our Summon search. We don’t plan to serve it up in Blacklight yet, as some institutions do, although that’s on the table for the future. But, if our Summon currently contains 1,000,324,214 records1 (whereas our library’s catalog contains almost 7 million…) what should we actually be searchingwhen we’re returning those results from Summon to the Bento page.