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I was recently asked by Blake Carver, of LIShost, to answer a few questions for an upcoming presentation he was making. I thought that my answer might be interesting to others, so I'm reposting it here. He asked me what is in my "toolbox" (online and offline) that helps me do the following things:

1) Be more productive

This is an interesting and tricky question. I can answer for myself, but in
classic style I will have to say that "your mileage may vary" -- in fact,
I'm fairly certain it will. But I will try to call out those things that are
more broadly applicable.

As someone who is not employed as a programmer, but who has needed enough
technical skills to prototype and develop proof-of-concept services that can
then be re-engineered in a production environment, I've found the following
skills essential:

• Knowledge of a scripting language. I know Perl, but others may suffice as
  

Neil Godfrey recently posted an "INFORMAL Comparison of some institutional repository solutions" that anyone trying to make a platform decision may find useful. You will no doubt need to go much deeper before making a final decision, but at least this may serve as a good summary introduction to what each platform provides.

Also keep in mind that the landscape can be slightly more complicated than depicted here. For example, with the Digital Commons solution from bepress.com, you can easily add a full-featured peer review publication system to your institutional repository. This is something you cannot do with many other IR solutions, including the popular DSpace platform. This distinction is not covered in Godfrey's informal review. But overall it isn't a bad place to start in getting to know the various solutions.

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) are structured methods for one software application to communicate with another. APIs allow programs to interoperate and share data and services in a standard way. Here is a list of library-related APIs that library developers may find useful. If you have ideas for others that would be appropriate for this list, please contact me.

Only APIs that seem to be generally useful are listed here. However, almost any library catalog will have a search API (e.g., Z39.50) and may have others as well depending on the vendor and product. You can also find other APIs by using the directories noted below.

General Services

I saw a note come through recently about a server that the University of Cincinnati Libraries had set up to be a "sandbox". What this means is that it is a place where new software (particularly open source software) can be installed for staff to investigate.

The sole admonition is to "Play nice together" and it currently has such applications as Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, WordPress, phpWiki, Tiki, and Moodle installed, among others.

I think this ia a wonderful idea and I'm glad to see that the University of Cincinnati Libraries takes their responsibility to help its staff learn new technologies seriously. I wish that more of our institutions did so.

Jessica Hupp at VirtualHosting.com has put together an amazing list of web

In a soon-to-appear Library Journal column, I discuss strategies for an uncertain future. One of those strategies is the topic of this blog posting, since I wanted to both throw this out there for discussion as well as to discuss it more thoroughly than I can in an 800-word column.