Your Needs and Technologies that You'd like to Use 

Laurie Needs:

• I need more server space and more ways to disseminate data.
• I want the library to have the super-cool image it deserves (I hate reading bad journalism that uses libraries/librarians as straw people for non-technical or generally old and stuck in their ways).
• Matching faculty profiles with electronic journals (like MIT does)
• Datamining WebCT, supporting teaching by mining WebCT

• Print-on-demand: I would like to use a print-on-demand service like Amazon+Booksurge or Lulu.com so that our old books can be hosted online on another site (and one that links to us and notes that the books are from us) with full-search inside and that allows people to print the books. This would be great for UF's reputation, the library, UF Press, and for the dissemination of knowledge.
• Blogs/RSS: I would like the library homepages (all of them) to have a news feature that's powered by a blog (like UF News is) so that it can be easily updated/maintained and it can auto-hook into RSS feeds.

  I'd also like to see a general investigation of who should be using blogs professionally within the library and who's willing to committ to doing it. Blogs are useful, but they're way more useful for certain tasks and so the personality and/or task need to fit to make the blog useful. I would think Outreach/Marketing folks could have information on orientations and common questions, and anyone dealing with grads and/or faculty and/or collection management could have a blog that notes new titles, new things under consideration.

  I would like a general library-emerging technologies blog that all library folks could subscribe/contribute to (and then we could tell students to use it to get feedback). We could use the "best" of this to have "tech tips from the library" that we could then regularly share with patrons. This would help encourage a dialogue about technology and the libraries.

• RSS: I'd like the catalog itself to be able to generate RSS feeds based on particular topics/subjects so that users can subscribe to those.
• Tagging: Along the same lines, I'd like users to be able to tag elements and then choose to use those as ways to subscribe to the RSS feeds.
• Mashup: I'd like us to pull data from other sources into the catalog, or to at least allow users to choose to pull from other places like LibraryThing.com, Amazon.com. Does Endeca have mutable fields like this that users can turn on and off and can choose where the information pulls from? We should be able to select a particular permanent field and then pull it in.
• Customizability: Can we do a MyLibrary page (like MyUFL) that students can log into and choose to have their favorite journals and arrangement on the page? Like iGoogle in Ajax style so it's easy to customize? If so, can we do this with GatorLink authentication? If we could do this, we could then make it into an applet that runs on iGoogle (with an additional login) and Facebook and whatever. This would be our design that could then be ported elsewhere (so we could get all of the sustainability and hip points).
• Youtube: I'd like to see us finding films in our collections that have clips on Youtube or the Internet Archive (or making our own) and then using those to promote the library collections. I'd also like to see short video clips listed in the library catalog, along with links to IMDB or wikipedia (or pulling from those in a user-customizable field).
• More: I like technology, so I always want more. I'm not sure what else I want yet, but definitely more!

Valrie's Comments:

• Sara and I have been considering the acquisition of a Cornell created ontology system called VIVO. (http://vivo.library.cornell.edu/) This ontology allows you to view the profile for a particular person, department, topic, etc. and then link to relevant people, publications, grants, facilities, etc.. A database such as this, here at UF, would potentially increase collaborations and assist in recruiting new graduate students. This runs along the same lines of matching faculty to their respective publications, but goes a bit further.
• I would like to further explore marketing and communication tools that would make marketing and PR a little bit easier for those of us trying to disseminate information to a wide variety of departments. Currently DCE uses an email newsletter to market themselves. I've been told this system is not very expensive and that once you buy the software you can create unlimited number of newsletters on the fly.  While I'm not so excited about buying a new boxed-system, I do think there must be options to help us package and deliver news/events/information.

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