The game's afoot with the BHCTI Catalog

Closing in at last on the proposed BHCTI Library Catalog through American Biblical Higher Education's ABHE Solutions, though I've yet to have a clickable link for the stinker; The first iteration will feature individual links to all the items in both of our affliated GoogleBook libraries, BHCTILibrary 'Proper,' and BHCTILibraryToo, as well as Logos Bible Software's stand-alone website of full text ebooks at Books.Logos.com, and in addition all the content of ebook vendor Questia (and not only the 5,000 or so free full text items).

Those who recall our long relationship at BHCTI with Questia will remember that though the company sells individual accounts, Carroll has set these up for our students through student fees. The catalog will still require an individual login for any Questia content outside their 5,000 freebies; but Carroll students will know their accounts, or can ask...

A part of our 20,000 or so print collection (approximately 4,000 MARC records) will also be included. I hope in time to coordinate those catalog records with my available print items.

All in all, having author, title, and subject access to 75% or so of our items across vendors and platforms is a serious improvement, and (with apologies to Samurai Jack) 'an historic victory most worthy of our logs.' Or blogs. We should have the bugbots dispensed with before the month is out, so keep watching this space (and my wiki)...

Print also progresses

One benefit of being out to hear Dr. Hargraves at our Summer Colloquy has been the opportunity (in the interstices) to unpack boxes of books to arrange on the inviting shelfspace provided in the new Carroll Digs. So the number of items whose physical location I can vouch for gained slightly, up 66 from 135 to 202 as of June. The revised list is at a special page here on my wiki for the curious....

Slow build

Development of my wiki (focused mostly on Library Instruction and expanding web site listings) and the reigns of teaching BHCTI 5000 (Gateway) for BHCTI has not stopped me entirely on my quest to place 10K or so full-view ebooks I'd discovered into Google Book libraries where they can be found easily and sorted by Library of Congress letter ranges, BHCTI areas of concentration, and suchlike 'bookshelves;' but it has sure slowed me down. We hit 1,600 'reviewed' items in the second collection, BHCTILibraryToo ('Too' for short) today; that makes our combined take about 4,100 items in both current collections (the other is located at the first BHCTILibrary, the BHCTILibrary proper, so to speak; therefore, 'Proper' for short). If Google retains its current ceilings of 2.5K titles per collection, I've got about 1.4K left to add to 'Too' before I create a third Googlebook library; I'm going to try speeding that process up with weekly adds there, and updates here. It's been my hope for a while now; and like Bilbo hoping for his eggs and toast in the Hobbit, 'not for the last time.' Stay tuned...

Sidelight on Bhctilibrary Wiki

This wiki is a sandbox-worthy version of how to search our NexLearn resources, and to (I hope) disambiguate our bibliographic instruction. Go there to learn how to search OCLC FirstSearch, Seminary Library, Questia, Oxford Reference Online, Grove Music Online, our '07 list of Online Resources; plus directives back to BHCTILibrary "Proper" and BHCTILibraryToo, as well as this page. Once the kinks are all worked out, some version of it will be added to NexLearn, but feel free to visit and edit meanwhile...