Харьковского национального университета радиоэлектроники

Kharkiv is an interesting city in that it is largely a university city. Local librarians informed me there are more than 30 universities (both public and private) in Kharkiv. The streets are full of young people and I saw more foreigners in Kharkiv than in any other city which I have visited in Ukraine including the capital Kyiv. There are students from the former soviet republics as well as from various countries including but not limited to Turkey, India, Pakistan, China, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ethiopia and others.
At the Kharkiv National University of Radio-electronics “Харьковского национального университета радиоэлектроники” I presented on creating library websites as well as planning and managing digitization projects. This photograph was taken during our coffee break.

During my stay I also had a chance to visit the library of the Karazin National University of Ukraine. I was impressed that unlike many libraries which I have visited in Ukraine, their online catalog is integrated with a circulation module and their user cards have machine readable barcodes, meaning that all patron records are in electronic form not paper.

Tamara Borisovna (Тамара Борисовна) the Library Director of Kharkiv National University of Radio-electronics was a warm and gracious hostess! I enjoyed our time together and look forward to meeting again at the Sudak conference in June.

Digitization in the News

BIG NEWS IN DIGITIZATION....

Microsoft announced today that it would shut down its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic programs, which have digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. For more information read the Chronical of Higher Education article, Microsoft Shuts Book Digitizing Project.

OCLC and Google will exchange data, link digitized books to WorldCat. On May 19th, they signed an agreement to exchange data which will facilitate the discovery of library collections through Google searches. Under terms of the agreement, OCLC member libraries participating in the Google Book Search program, which will make the full text of more than one million books searchable, may share their WorldCat-derived MARC records with Google to better facilitate discovery of library collections through Google. Google will link from Google Book Search to WorldCat.org, which will drive traffic to library OPACs and other library resources. Google will share data and links to digitized books with OCLC, which will make it possible for OCLC to represent the digitized collections of OCLC member libraries in WorldCat. More information can be found in the press release.

Харьков / Харків

Monday I will travel to Kharkiv (Харьков in Russian and Харків in Ukrainian), an industrial city in the east. Kharkiv, a former capital city, is the second largest city in Ukraine and is one of the main industrial, cultural and educational centers of Ukraine. Its industry specializes mostly in arms production and machinery. A well known landmark in Kharkiv is Freedom Square.

I will be presenting at the Kharkiv National University of Radioelectronics to an audience of regional librarians from a number of institutions and library school students from Kharkiv State Academy of Culture (known for having one of the better library school departments in Ukraine).

The first presentation менеджер веб-контенту та електронних зібрань Бруклінської публічної бібліотеки (м. Нью-Йорк) is an introduction to the work I had done while Manager of Web Content and Digital Collections at Brooklyn Public Library. The second presentation, Using Blogger to Create Library Blogs: Технологія ведення блогів, is an introduction to an online tool called Blogger owned by Google. Please note there is a Ukrainian version of this site (simply select the language). The third presentation Creating Library Websites Створення тауправління веб-сайтами бібліотек. And the fourth presentation is on Planning and Managing Digitizationprojects Планування та управління проектами з оцифровки.

Information Literacy

Laura Kaspari Hohmann gave a presentation on Information Literacy to the English Speaking Librarians Club Wednesday, May 14th. It was especially fun to view the video entitled Library Mystery Tour. Created by Williams College Libraries, Library Mystery Tour is a game which serves to familiarize users with library services and to reinforce the idea that librarians are available to assist. Laura is an Information Specialist from the US State Department.

Ukrainian Catholic University

Last week I visited Catholic University's library in the beautiful western Ukrainian city of Lviv near the border with Poland. During my visit we discussed best practices of creating library websites as well as planning and managing digitization projects.

They are looking towards a redesign of their website and have begun making steps towards digitization of rare church related materials. Their current website does not yet properly reflect the library’s resources because for the last year and a half this small staff has been working on implementing a new OPAC system (MarkSQL). In addition, they have started to digitize selected periodicals and rare books (prints from 17th c. and older). So far their activities have been limited to scanning and they have not yet decided what to do with the images produced. We discussed what it would take to make these items searchable and web accessible vs. simply burning these images as PDFs to a CD. Their collections are quite diverse ranging from theology and church history in Ukraine (including very interesting materials related to the underground activities during Soviet times) to Ukrainian studies publications (political and historical). They also have specialized reading rooms such as one for Byzantine studies.

Thank you to library director Taras Tymo (former Fulbright Fellow) and assistant director Andrew Koslar for interesting discussion as well as gracious hospitality! (Taras is pictured at his desk and Andrew is pictured at the circulation desk).