Management and Support of Shared Integrated Library Systems, by Jason Vaughan and Kristen Costello

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) University Libraries has hosted and managed a shared integrated library system (ILS) since 1989. The system and the number of partner libraries sharing the system has grown significantly over the past two decades. Spurred by the level of involvement and support contributed by the host institution, the authors administered a comprehensive survey to current Innovative Interfaces libraries. Research findings are combined with a description of UNLV’s local practices to provide substantial insights into shared funding, support, and management activities associated with shared systems.

Benign Neglect: Developing Life Rafts for Digital Content, by Jody L. DeRidder

In his keynote speech at the Archiving 2009 Conference in Arlington, Virginia, Clifford Lynch called for the development of a benign neglect model for digital preservation, one in which as much content as possible is stored in whatever manner available in hopes of there someday being enough resources to more properly preserve it. This is an acknowledgment of current resource limitations relative to the burgeoning quantities of digital content that need to be preserved.

Seeing the Wood for the Trees: Enhancing Metadata Subject Elements with Weights, by Hong Zhang, Linda C. Smith, Michael Twidale, and Fang Huang Gao

Subject indexing has been conducted in a dichotomous way in terms of what the information object is primarily about/of or not, corresponding to the presence or absence of a particular subject term, respectively. With more subject terms brought into information systems via social tagging, manual cataloging, or automated indexing, many more partially relevant results can be retrieved. Using examples from digital image collections and online library catalog systems, we explore the problem and advocate for adding a weighting mechanism to subject indexing and tagging to make web search and navigation more effective and efficient. We argue that the weighting of subject terms is more important than ever in today’s world of growing collections, more federated searching, and expansion of social tagging. Such a weighting mechanism needs to be considered and applied not only by indexers, catalogers, and taggers, but also needs to be incorporated into system functionality and metadata schemas.

Building an Open Source Institutional Repository at a Small Law School Library:,Is it Realistic or Unattainable? by Fang Wang

Digital preservation activities among law libraries have largely been limited by a lack of funding, staffing and expertise. Most law school libraries that have already implemented an Institutional Repository (IR) chose proprietary platforms because they are easy to set up, customize, and maintain with the technical and development support they provide. The Texas Tech University School of Law Digital Repository is one of the few law school repositories in the nation that is built on the DSpace open source platform.1 The repository is the law school’s first institutional repository in history. It was designed to collect, preserve, share and promote the law school’s digital materials, including research and scholarship of the law faculty and students, institutional history, and law-related resources. In addition, the repository also serves as a dark archive to house internal records.