A Trove of Discovery and Digital Matters
The 28th National User Group Meeting for LIBERO Libraries is scheduled for August 6-8 in Gosford, NSW.
The annual two-day forum provides LIBERO customers the opportunity to connect with fellow users from libraries and organisations across the country and discuss future functionality with LIBERO Developers and Customer Services Staff.
This year’s Programme will focus heavily on Discovery, Digital Content and managing the relationship with various eContent suppliers.
“We’re very proud of the strength of the LIBERO User Group and activity within the customer base,” said Insight Informatics founder, Sam Patane. “The User Group is regularly identified as one of the key benefits of LIBERO by customers and I believe it is a critical advantage to LIBERO,” he said.
Indeed, LIBERO’s National User Group President, Peter Flemming from Great Lakes Library Service agrees. “Users of all level of experience get value from the event,” he said.
“I believe the main “value-add” of User Group is the networking. This is where we have detailed discussions about the way we perform processes in LIBERO, or we talk about new initiatives planned for the library, and why we enjoy a certain system features,” he said.
“The fact that we’re using the same product – sometimes in different ways – and share many goals means that delegates come away from User Group with fresh ideas, or knowledge that will support projects, or resolve challenges at our own library,” he said. “Even if you’ve been using LIBERO for years, this kind of discussion can be more effective than training – you can discover “new” functionality, or ways to use the system to solve old problems,” he said.
A key part of the Annual Programme is the LIBERO Roadmap session, prepared by the LIBERO’s founder, Sam Patane, who remains Head of Development at Insight Informatics.
2014 will reveal further developments in LIBERO’s Digital Library and eMaterials management capabilities, including Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) for Trove.
“We’re currently completing a digitization project at Great Lakes Public Library, using LIBERO to catalogue the Museum’s photographic collection and make this discoverable to library users,” said Peter.
“So I am looking forward to the work I know has been dedicated to further image discoverability, management and manipulation in LIBERO,” he said.
LIBERO Digital Library functionality was first released in 2013, and has continued to receive research and development investments to assist LIBERO libraries with the management of the many different formats and versions of items available in today’s ‘Digital Information Age’.
“Our team has been reviewing innovative ways to minimise the file size of an image, for instance, without detracting from the quality of the image for Library Users and their ability to review detail,” said Sam Patane.
“OAI-PMH functionality will allow Trove to automatically upload data from a LIBERO system. The item will then be discoverable in Trove, and further, will bring the user directly into the library’s database, thereby maximising the discoverability of materials and maintaining statistics for our customer,” said Sam.
LIBERO’s 2014 User Group will be held at Gosford, August 6-8.