Saturday, January 20, 2007

At The "heart" of BIBSYS

After the workshop on Thursday I was given a tour of the Dragvoll Library and the Main Library for Technology. (More on those visits in a later post)

After that I crashed on my bed for a couple of hours and hooked up with Second Life later in the evening. While talking to a visitor at the Consumer health Library I got IM-ed by someone called Dewey Dix, who said -to my great surprise- that he had attended my presentation in Trondheim. I offered him a TP (teleport) to have a talk a.v.a. (avatar versus avatar).

It turned out that he was working at BIBSYS. They supply library and information systems to over 100 libraries and institutions of higher education in Norway, such as the university libraries, the National library, college libraries, and a number of research libraries and institutions. I gave him a quick news flash on some nice new things we have in the medical Library, like Healthy, the chatbot and the 3d Virtual Reality Room. We became friends (that's an offical activity in Sl -;) and agreed on a meet in Real Life the next day, because their office was just a few blocks away from the Auditorium in Trondheim.

So I got to meet the people from BIBSYS in their office next day! Jan Erik Garshol gave me a great tour and included the "heart" of BIBSYS , the main computer room in the basement. Nils explained how they organized computer systems, power and explained how the cool back-up and updating robot was working. I met Dewey Dix again, but this time " in the flesh" and he is called Erlend Gutteberg. BIBSYS guys from Development TeamTogether with Sverre Magnus Elvenes Joki we sat down and talked about federated searching, their products and services. I got to see BIBSYS Mime, their federated search product, a modification of OCLC Sisis Elektra. It was really good of them to take the time for me.

See the rest of the pictures. BIBSYS Control center by Nils

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