Collection Development for My Random Life.

I will be at the Online NW conference this upcoming week. I will be giving a presentation on the Western Writers Digital Editions that I helped get up and running last year. I am still working on the presentation. I hoping to incorporate an online scavenger hunt within the digital collection as well as doing some crazy bingo thing when I am talking. Trying to liven it up a bit since I have an hour to fill. An hour is a lot to work with… might have show a movie or something to fill up the time… just kidding.

If you are at the conference, drop by and say hello!

Abstract of presentation:

Wrangling a Digital Collection into Existence: The Boise State Western Writers Series Digital Editions
Rick Stoddart, Boise State University

Wrangling a Digital Collection into Existence: The Boise State Western Writers Series Digital Editions. The distance between identifying an opportunity to implement a digital collection and actually getting it off the ground and onto the web is about as wide as the Grand Canyon. Learn about the trials, tribulations, and tears experienced in willing the Western Writers Series Digital Editions into an online existence. Navigating a new digital collection between multiple departments, server upgrades, and quirks in online hosting platforms is a hair-pulling thrill-ride! The audience will come away with a sense of what obstacles to look for and anticipate when creating digital collections for their libraries. The WWS Digital Editions are a collaboration between Albertsons Library Special Collections and the Boise State University English Department to bring out-of-print Western Writers Series titles to the public.

So my categories to tags conversion resulted in permanent casualties, in that all my categories were erased. Boo! They were converted to tags though. Categories… tags, pretty much the same difference. It took me awhile to figure out how to get tags completely enabled on the posts. I think I did that. So now, for better or worse, there is a tag cloud on the side of the page to help navigate. The top of this page is an example of a wordle tag cloud (I wish I could make it bigger, but I can’t figure that out without blurring it… yeah I am not the perfect blogger…). You can see it better detail here: http://wordle.net/gallery/L1BRAR1AN

Microsoft Shuts Down Book Search – NYTimes.com

or strictly Google?