OCLC Research, on behalf of the OCLC Research Library Partnership, has launched a series of webinars to teach library staff new technology skills and educate them about new products to help increase their productivity in today's changing library, archive and museum environment. The goal of these webinars is to highlight specific innovative applications, often locally developed, that libraries, museums and archives may find effective in their own environments, as well as to teach technical staff new technologies and skills. The series, titled Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions (TAI CHI), has two tracks:

  • Instructional Track:
    The instructional track will provide a practical, efficient overview of key details for technical staff so they can get up to speed on new technologies. Webinars in this track will focus on topics such as OCLC Web Services APIs, Solr indexing platform, XSLT, XPath and XQuery, Java, Javascript and the Google Books API.
  • Product Demo Track:
    The product demo track will provide overviews and demonstrations of new and useful products for staff at cultural heritage institutions who are interested in increasing their general product understanding as well as in making informed purchase and use decisions. Webinars in this track will include products such as Library à la Carte and Backlight.
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Participation is free and open to all but advanced registration is required.

These webinars are recorded and made available below, as well as through iTunes.

Past TAI CHI Webinars

2015

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Nov 5

05 November 2015

OCLC Research TAI CHI Webinar: How You Can Make the Transition from MARC to Linked Data Easier

View this webinar recording to learn what metadata specialists can do now to make it easier to transform text strings in MARC data into the entity-“things” we later expose as linked data that others can consume. #oclcresearch #linkeddata

  • Venue: Online via WebEx
  • Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, North America [UTC -5]

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2014

2013

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May 23

23 May 2013

ArchiveGrid and Related Work Webinar

This webinar provides an overview of ArchiveGrid, a collection of nearly two million archival material descriptions that is now freely available from OCLC Research, as well as related work. Tweet: #archivegrid

  • Venue: Online via WebEx
  • Time: 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time, North America [UTC -4]

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2012

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Aug 1

01 August 2012 - 01 August 2012

OCLC Research TAI CHI Webinar Series Presents Umlaut

In this webinar, Jonathan Rochkind, Senior Programmer/Analyst at the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University, demonstrated how Umlaut allows you to de-couple your "link resolver" user-facing UI from your underlying knowledge base products. #orumlaut

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Date Speaker Title
3 November 2011

Bruce Washburn
Consulting Software Engineer
OCLC Research

Ellen Ast
Research Assistant
OCLC Research

ArchiveGrid    #archivegrid

ArchiveGrid, an OCLC discovery service that provides access to detailed archival collection descriptions, is transitioning into a free service. Its interface has a new look and will make finding primary source materials held in archival collections worldwide even easier for researchers.

In this short and lively webinar, Bruce Washburn and research assistant Ellen Ast provided an overview of ArchiveGrid's history along with a demonstration of the new beta ArchiveGrid discovery system in development in OCLC Research. They also reviewed the processes behind the growth of the new system and talked about future research and development plans, including the goals to promote it both as a sought-after information resource and as a model for archival discovery practices.

This was the eleventh webinar in the OCLC Research Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions (TAI CHI) Webinar Series.

Links to the webinar recording, slides and chat transcript are available below. The webinar recording is also available in iTunes.

26 April 2011

Christopher Schmitt
Author and Web Design Specialist

Using CSS3 in Web Design    #orcss3
Co-sponsored by OCLC Research and the OCLC Developer Network

In this follow up to the well-attended TAI CHI HTML5 and CSS3 webinar on 8 March, author and Web design specialist Christopher Schmitt continued the discussion with a more in-depth look at how CSS3 is being used to improve the design, layout, and functionality of modern Web sites. The advent of CSS3 allows for greater control and creativity in Web design. Attendees in this workshop learned about using colors through RGBa and opacity, border images, text and box shadows, animations, transformations, and more.

Christopher Schmitt is the founder of Heat Vision, a small new media publishing and design firm, and an award-winning Web designer who has been working with the Web since 1993. As a sought-after speaker and trainer, Christopher regularly demonstrates the use and benefits of practical standards-based designs. He is co-lead of the Adobe Task Force for the Web Standards Project (WaSP) in addition to being a contributing member of its Education Task Force. Author of numerous Web design and digital imaging books, including Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites and CSS Cookbook , Christopher has also written for New Architect Magazine, A List Apart, Digital Web and Web Reference.



8 March 2011

Christopher Schmitt
Author and Web Design Specialist

HTML5 and CSS3    #orhtml5
Co-sponsored by OCLC Research and the OCLC Developer Network

In this webinar, author and Web design specialist Christopher Schmitt revealed what attendees need to re-learn about markup, to understand how to incorporate new HTML5 elements and to embrace the new creative freedoms of new Web typography and CSS3. These two new Web development technologies are revolutionizing the Web development and design worlds. HTML5 is the latest version of the HTML standard, offering easy ways to add semantic markup and application-like features such as video without proprietary plug-ins, drag-and-drop, offline data storage, and more. CSS3 extends earlier Cascading Style Sheet standards for managing layout, colors, etc., with new features designed to optimize HTML5 Web content.

Christopher Schmitt is the founder of Heat Vision, a small new media publishing and design firm, and an award-winning Web designer who has been working with the Web since 1993. As a sought-after speaker and trainer, Christopher regularly demonstrates the use and benefits of practical standards-based designs. He is co-lead of the Adobe Task Force for the Web Standards Project (WaSP) in addition to being a contributing member of its Education Task Force. Author of numerous Web design and digital imaging books, including Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites and CSS Cookbook , Christopher has also written for New Architect Magazine, A List Apart, Digital Web and Web Reference.

18 November 2010

Stephen Abrams
Patricia Cruse
John Kunze
Perry Willett

University of California Curation Center,
California Digital Library

Merritt: A Micro-Services-based Curation Repository   #ormerritt

Merritt is a new, cost-effective curation repository service developed by the University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library (CDL) that empowers users to manage, archive and share valuable digital content. Based on the pipeline metaphor, Merritt promotes an aggressive decomposition of function into a granular set of independent but highly interoperable micro-services. Since these services are small and self-contained, they are collectively easier to develop, maintain, and enhance. Although the scope of any given service is narrow, complex global behavior is nevertheless an emergent property of their strategic combination. Micro-services are purposefully designed and implemented as policy neutral and protocol and platform independent components, so they can easily be used to assemble curation environments that are not constrained to conform to an infrastructural monoculture of prepackaged repository solutions.

In this webinar, Stephen Abrams, Patricia Cruse, John Kunze and Perry Willett from UC3 provide background on the micro-services concept and the growing community of practice that is cohering around the idea, and a technical description and demonstration of the Merritt repository and its services. The repository supports flexible, low-barrier submission via human interfaces and machine APIs; persistent identifier minting, binding, and resolution; a semantically-enabled metadata catalog; and distributed storage sub-domains to facilitate wide-scale replication. Merritt is being used by UC3 to manage the diverse digital collections of the ten campus University of California system and a number of external content partners. It provides contributors and curators with direct control over their content and access to it; facilitates content sharing and reuse; and helps meet the requirements for data sustainability increasingly being required by grant funding agencies. Merritt will soon be made available under an open source license.



14 October 2010

Sarah L. Shreeves,
IDEALS and Scholarly Commons Coordinator
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

BibApp

In this webinar, Sarah L. Shreeves, IDEALS and Scholarly Commons Coordinator from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gives an overview of BibApp, an open source software that matches researchers on your campus with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations and to find experts in research areas. Sarah explains explains how BibApp works, reviews the challenges of work in this area, and highlights the next steps for the BibApp development team.

15 July 2010

Karen Coombs,
Product Manager
OCLC Developer Network

OCLC Web Services

Have you wondered just what a Web services is, and what it would mean to use one? Are you thinking of investing effort into building new systems that rely on Web services, or enhancing an existing service with API-provided data? OCLC offers a variety of Web services which can be used to extend library interfaces and improve user experiences. In this webinar, OCLC developer network product manager Karen Coombs will provide an overview of the Web services offered by OCLC and demonstrate real world applications of these Web services in libraries. Come learn about services such as the WorldCat Search API, xISBN, WorldCat Registry and Identities.

1 July 2010

Ralph LeVan,
Senior Research Scientist
OCLC Research

Linked Data Part 2

In this follow up to his well-received Linked Data webinar on 27 May, OCLC Senior Research Scientist Ralph LeVan dives deeper beneath the surface to describe the open source technologies he uses to expose records in text databases as Linked Data. He also talks about Java, Servlet Filters, XSLT, and SRU, plus explains how anyone can use his framework to make their database content available as Linked Data.

27 May 2010

Ralph LeVan,
Senior Research Scientist
OCLC Research

Linked Data

Linked Data is a hot topic. It provides a mechanism to expose library data in a way that is understandable to non-librarians, thereby facilitating community development of services that go beyond traditional library resources and creatively exploit library data in valuable new ways. In this webinar, OCLC senior research scientist Ralph LeVan explains what Linked Data is about and how OCLC produces it, using examples from VIAF (The Virtual International Authority File). He also talks about topics such as Real World Objects, Generic Documents, Content Negotiation and RDF.

29 April 2010

Bruce Washburn,
Consulting Software Engineer
OCLC Research

Mobile Development

The landscape is changing rapidly for Mobile application development. While some libraries, archives and museums were early adopters or have recently launched mobile ventures, others are still weighing their options. In this webinar, OCLC Research consulting software engineer Bruce Washburn provides a brief update on current conditions, discusses choices to be made between "native" and Web mobile application development paths, looks at some recent efforts, and considers the impact our mobile apps might have now and in the near term.

This is the first instructional track webinar in the TAI CHI series.

8 December 2009

Sheila Brennan,
Omeka End User Outreach Coordinator
Center for History and New Media

Dave Lester,
Omeka Developer Outreach Coordinator and Developer,
Center for History and New Media

Omeka

Omeka is a free and open source collections-based, Web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators and cultural enthusiasts. Its "five-minute setup" makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Designed with non-IT specialists in mind, Omeka allows users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural Web sites to foster user interaction and participation. It also makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Omeka's robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite its stability and sustainability.

Until now, scholars and cultural heritage professionals looking to publish collections-based research and online exhibitions required either extensive technical skills or considerable funding for outside vendors. By making standards-based, serious online publishing easy, Omeka puts the power and reach of the Web in the hands of academics and cultural professionals themselves.

In this webinar, Sheila Brennan, Omeka End User Outreach Coordinator and Senior Digital History Associate at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), provides an overview of Omeka. Dave Lester, Omeka Developer Outreach Coordinator and Developer at CHNM provides more technical aspects of the Omeka software.

This is the second product demo track webinar in the TAI CHI series.

*Please note: due to an error in the recording process the slides in the webinar recording do not progress entirely. To view the slides in their entirety please view this .pdf of the Omeka Webinar Slides separately.

26 August 2009

Jane Nichols,
Subject Librarian,
Oregon State University

Kim Griggs,
Programmer,
Oregon State University

Library à la Carte

Library à la Carte is software developed at Oregon State University that lets you build customized Web pages by choosing exactly what you want from a menu of choices. in this webinar, Jane Nichols, Oregon State University subject librarian, demonstrated how to create course Web pages, assignment tip sheets and subject guides in minutes without writing a single line of HTML. This content management system makes it easy to integrate Web 2.0 features, chat and RSS feeds, etc. with traditional library content, such as catalogs and article databases, into Web pages. Kim Griggs, Oregon State University programmer, discussed installing and customizing Library à la Carte and future developments.

This was the first product demo track webinar in the TAI CHI series.