DigitalKoans

LITA has formed the Next Generation Catalog Interest Group. There is also an associated mailing list.

Here is an excerpt from the LITA-L announcement:

NGCIG gives LITA a discussion space devoted to developments in the library catalog, its nature and scope, and its interfaces. It provides a forum for presentations and sharing of innovation in catalogs and discussion of future directions. Collaborations with other LITA interest groups, such as in the areas of emerging technologies and open source software, will provide opportunities for programming.

OCLC Openly Informatics has announced a free link checking plug-in for Firefox called Link Evaluator.

Here a brief description from the Link Evaluator page:

Link Evaluator is a Firefox extension designed to help users evaluate the availability of online resources linked to from a given Web page. When started, it automatically follows all links on the current page, and assesses the responses of each URL (link). . . .

After each link is checked, it is highlighted with a color based on the relative success of the result: green for fully successful, shades of yellow for partly successful, and red for unsuccessful.

It requires Mozilla Firefox version 1.5 (or later).

PC Magazine’s special double issue on Microsoft’s Vista operating system (26, no. 1/2 January 2007) is worth a look. Here are the key articles:

• The Insider’s Guide to Windows Vista
• Vista at Work

You might also be interested in their Top 20 Wired Colleges piece, which has some surprising results (e.g., Villanova University tops MIT).