Technology for the Information Commons in a Special Library
Nancy Allmang and Rosa Liu, NIST, Information Services Division

What is the information commons?
Physical place for gathering and sharing new technologies
Virtual “place” for accessing digital
Their goal was to seamlessly merge the two
Library as Place – places for collaboration, knowledge management centers?
Real places as well as virtual spaces
Enabling technologies:
IM reference – using external software (AIM, Yahoo, MSN)
Wireless loaner laptops (145 checkouts in a year, small core of ardent fans, wireless security issues)
Wired carrels
Beaming stations – send results of searches to PDAs, blackberries via IR
Self-service PDF scanning station – users use this to scan journal articles instead of photocopying them. Also has OCR software.
The wireless security is key, see the current issue of Computers in Libraries
Now use WiFi Protected Access (WPA)
TKIP – dynamically generated
IM Reference
Ask a librarian link from a web page with instructions
Use Trillian (the free version)

Virtual Commons
Three pieces
Virtual library, virtual museum, integrated knowledge editorial net??
Pieces
Federated searching
Links to open access journals – selected by library advisory board
Links to feed aggregators and feeds
Links to video, audio search
Links to speechbot – searches radio broadcasts
PDA resources page
NIKE
Depository of articles, book chapters, etc. written by NIST staff
Will be searchable by the public
Compliant?

Evaluation
Counters
Feedback forms
Surveys

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