

ACRL TechConnect

ACRL TechConnect
	Broken Links in the Discovery Layer—Pt. II: Towards an Ethnography of Broken Links
This post continues where my last one left off, investigating broken links in our discovery layer. Be forewarned—most of it will be a long, dry list of all the mundane horrors of librarianship. Metadata mismatches, EZproxy errors, and OpenURL resolvers, oh my! What does it mean when we say a link is broken? The simplest &#8230; Continue reading "Broken Links in the Discovery Layer—Pt. II: Towards an Ethnography of Broken Links"
	Broken Links in the Discovery Layer—Pt. I: Researching a Problem
Like many administrators of discovery layers, I&#8217;m constantly baffled and frustrated when users can&#8217;t access full text results from their searches. After implementing Summon, we heard a few reports of problems and gradually our librarians started to stumble across them on their own. At first, we had no formal system for tracking these errors. Eventually, &#8230; Continue reading "Broken Links in the Discovery Layer—Pt. I: Researching a Problem"
	ORCID for System Interoperability in Scholarly Communication Workflows
What is ORCID? If you work in an academic library or otherwise provide support for research and scholarly communication, you have probably heard of ORCID (Open Contributor &#38; Researcher Identifier) in terms of “ORCID iD,” a unique 16-digit identifier that represents an individual in order to mitigate name ambiguity. The ORCID iD number is presented &#8230; Continue reading "ORCID for System Interoperability in Scholarly Communication Workflows"
	Creating Presentations with Beautiful.AI
Updated 2018-11-12 at 3:30PM with accessibility information. Beautiful.AI is a new website that enables users to create dynamic presentations quickly and easily with “smart templates” and other design optimized features. So far the service is free with a paid pro tier coming soon. I first heard about Beautiful.AI in an advertisement on NPR and was &#8230; Continue reading "Creating Presentations with Beautiful.AI"
	National Forum on Web Privacy and Web Analytics
We had the fantastic experience of participating in the National Forum on Web Privacy and Web Analytics in Bozeman, Montana last month. This event brought together around forty people from different areas and types of libraries to do in-depth discussion and planning about privacy issues in libraries. Our hosts from Montana State University, Scott Young, &#8230; Continue reading "National Forum on Web Privacy and Web Analytics"
	The Ex Libris Knowledge Center and Orangewashing
Two days after ProQuest completed their acquisition of Ex Libris in December 2015, Ex Libris announced the launch of their new online Customer Knowledge Center. In the press release for the Knowledge Center, the company describes it as “a single gateway to all Ex Libris knowledge resources,” including training materials, release notes, and product manuals. &#8230; Continue reading "The Ex Libris Knowledge Center and Orangewashing"
	Managing ILS Updates
We&#8217;ve done a few screencasts in the past here at TechConnect and I wanted to make a new one to cover a topic that&#8217;s come up this summer: managing ILS updates. Integrated Library Systems are huge, unwieldy pieces of software and it can be difficult to track what changes with each update: new settings are &#8230; Continue reading "Managing ILS Updates"
	Blockchain: Merits, Issues, and Suggestions for Compelling Use Cases
Blockchain holds a great potential for both innovation and disruption. The adoption of blockchain also poses certain risks, and those risks will need to be addressed and mitigated before blockchain becomes mainstream. A lot of people have heard of blockchain at this point. But many are unfamiliar with how this new technology exactly works and &#8230; Continue reading "Blockchain: Merits, Issues, and Suggestions for Compelling Use Cases"
	Introducing Our New Best Friend, GDPR
You&#8217;ve seen the letters GDPR in every single email you&#8217;ve gotten from a vendor or a mailing list lately, but you might not be exactly sure what it is. With GDPR enforcement starting on May 25, it&#8217;s time for a crash course in what GDPR is, and why it could be your new best friend &#8230; Continue reading "Introducing Our New Best Friend, GDPR"
	Names are Hard
A while ago I stumbled onto the post &#8220;Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names&#8221; and was stunned. Personal names are one of the most deceptively difficult forms of data to work with and this article touched on so many common but unaddressed problems. Assumptions like &#8220;people have exactly one canonical name&#8221; and &#8220;My system will never &#8230; Continue reading "Names are Hard"