Archive for February 27th, 2009

CISTI takes a hit

Friday, February 27th, 2009

It’s been talked about offline for a few weeks now, but I haven’t seen much on this sad news:  CISTI has taken on some big cuts, and I’m told that about 40-50 CISTI librarian staff – from locations across the country – were given the pink slip.

The  Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) is Canada’s national science library and is internationally recognized for its support to science, technology, engineering and medicine, mainly through National Research Council (NRC) programs and partnerships.

It comes down to this:   Strategic Review process + Budget 2009 = program review cuts.

This is not good. Sign of the times?

Footnote:  NRC (National Research Council) not to be mistaken for NRCan (or Natural Resources Canada).

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

NRCan Library selects Evergreen ILS

Friday, February 27th, 2009

It’s official – Natural Resources Canada Library (NRCan Library) has selected the Evergreen ILS.

Evergreen is one several open source systems on the marketplace, and was selected on the basis of functional requirements but with serious consideration given to several important marketplace trends:

  • one big library
  • vendor neutrality, especially in regards to discovery interfaces
  • strong support for a functional API (application programming interface)

The collaborative, open source development model used by the Evergreen ILS community is anticipated to give us better long term options and situate our library to respond to these and other important library trends. The move addresses duplicative ILS infrastructure as a result of a consolidation of departmental libraries.

Tags:
Posted in Integrated Library System (ILS) | No Comments »