Planet Code4Lib
November 20, 2008
On the one hand, there’s a rich abundance of electronic resources, on the other hand, it requires some effort to maintain and organize them.
An integrated platform may be a solution, but at least to some degree we’ll always be dealing with multiple interfaces and decentralized data.
From a user’s point of view, it may be desirable to integrate the various interfaces like links to web platforms, search engines, lookup tools, etc., with his or her own browser environment. Maybe this is actually a good place to combine everything, because this is where other useful tools and interfaces provided by third parties are to be found, see
If a browser search engine does not deliver results as desired, access to a more specific search interface is probably the best solution. By using vLib resource feeds, it is possible to organize these links in a feed reader or as bookmarks.
Combining resources tends to blur the precision of a search, but on the other hand covers a wider range of content. Hence it may be useful to organize resources (with search interfaces) in sets, such as
or use a deep link to point users to the interface which may best serve their purpose, examples: a list of resources, vs. a specific search triggered right away.
Documentation about deep linking may be found here.
by eia at November 20, 2008 03:16 PM
The prototype site for Europeana, the European digital library funded by the EC, is set to launch today, November 20, 2008.
The initial collection of 2 million items comes from museums, libraries, archives, and audio-visual collections, and includes paintings, maps, videos and newspapers. The interface is in French, English, and German, with more languages planned. Highlights include the Magna Carta from Britain, the Vermeer painting “Girl With a Pearl Earring” from the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy'" and newsreel footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Content is free of copyright restrictions.
New York Times and EU Business articles provide more details. The goal is to add 10 million items into the digital library by 2010, at a price of 350 million to 400 million euros.
by Leslie Johnston (noreply@blogger.com) at November 20, 2008 07:26 AM
WorldWideScience.org, the global science gateway, has gotten a lot of press recently. Last month, China joined the WorldWideScience Alliance, the organization that is primarily sponsored by ICSTI, and that manages the gateway, and China contributed access to some of their science content to the application. This was a huge deal. Brian Hitson, OSTI’s Associate Director for Administration & Information Services, and I co-authored an article on OSTI’s blog explaining just why this was significant. (Note: OSTI is the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information. ICSTI is the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information.) Adding to the attention was this blog article by Hope Leman in AltSearchEngines which opened my eyes further as to why the global expansion of WorldWideScience.org is a really big deal.
(more…)
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by Sol at November 20, 2008 04:53 AM
Hello, my name is Roy and I have aided and abetted spammers. Here is my story. I meant well, I really did. I have a site that has a group blog -- s...
November 20, 2008 04:45 AM
A new bibliographic record distribution policy from OCLC threatens to split the library community from the increasingly large and valuable data sharing resources and applications on the Web, if it doesn’t simply fracture the library community internally. In this post, I’ll try to explain the basic issues. I hope to follow this with specific critiques of OCLC’s policy, and suggestions of useful responses. (If you’d just like a concise overview of the controversy, this Inside Higher Ed article is a good place to start.)
Librarians often lament that people all too often bypass the well-written, informative resources collected by libraries in favor of material on the open Web. One reason for this practice is that Web content is widely harvested, indexed, and annotated by a variety of entities. Some are well-known, large-scale services like Google, Technorati, or Delicious. Some are smaller services that specialize in a particular niche. Each of these services reuses openly accessible data to make Web content easy to find, search, and annotate. Information about what’s in libraries (”metadata”, in library parlance) has also been compiled with great detail and effort, but it tends to be locked up behind individual libraries’ online public access catalogs (OPACs) that tend to be less usable, and less visible, than services like Google.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If you follow this blog, for instance, you’re aware of the DLF ILS Discovery Interfaces recommendation, which is meant to free library metadata from the constraints of the OPAC and make it available to a wide variety of discovery applications. And a growing number of Web services like Open Library, LibraryThing, WorldCat.org, and Google Book Search aggregate metadata from a variety of libraries and other knowledge sources. They open up interesting new ways for people to find, use, and annotate books and other knowledge sources. Bringing library resources into the light through services like these helps readers find the best information, and helps libraries fulfill their missions.
These services, as well as libraries themselves, rely on aggregating the metadata they need from a wide variety of sources. Creating catalog records for books is a laborious and painstaking process, one that would be too labor intensive for most libraries acting on their own. So librarians long ago agreed to partition the work, exchange their records, and enhance them jointly, though the use of shared cataloging and union catalogs that combined the different libraries’ records. Union catalogs were first devised well before the Web, when libraries mainly traded information just among themselves. Union catalog participants typically contribute their own catalog records, and pay a subscription fee for the right to retrieve and reuse records from the union catalog. One current union catalog, OCLC’s WorldCat, has absorbed other union catalogs over time and is currently much larger than any other of its kind. The WorldCat.org website gives free public access to some, but not all, of the information in the subscription-based WorldCat.
In effect, libraries are paying their staff to create catalog records, giving them to OCLC, and then paying to get them back. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re paying a reasonable price for a useful service, such as OCLC provides with its WorldCat service. But such arrangements can turn exploitative or obstructionist over time. We in libraries are all too aware of this when we see the invoices for the journals we subscribe to, where the articles are written and refereed for free by our faculty. The subscription fee in some cases can cost as much as a new car just for one year of a single journal. And the scholars who wrote the articles typically sign away their rights to get them published, and then can be surprised to discover that they are restricted from redistributing or reusing what they themselves wrote.
An alternative advocated by many library professionals (myself included) is open access, where intellectual content can be freely shared and reused. We have lots of arguments about how open access can lower costs, increase visibility, and promote the global spread of knowledge. The arguments are not just about economics and philanthropy, but about improving scholarship. For instance, when data is freely shared, it can be fruitfully be reused, repurposed, remixed, and reanalyzed in new scholarship and teaching. Yet, even while libraries have promoted open access, open access has not been the principal ways in which we have shared and distributed our own cataloging.
At Palinet’s future of cataloging forum I attended earlier this year, I heard folks in various parts of libraries start to speak up about opening up access to our own cataloging data. My own talk at that forum argued for opening access to catalog data, and recommended doing so via Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses. There were also OCLC staff at the same forum, and while they did not promise anything specific, I got the sense that they were planning on opening up access to their WorldCat records.
The new policy does clarify how individual researchers and libraries can reuse and repurpose WorldCat records in some useful ways. Unfortunately, it also explicitly asserts OCLC control over these records, in a way that threatens to dampen much of the sharing and independent collective action that can make our library metadata much more visible and useful. In a followup post, I’ll summarize the problems I see in the policy, and then suggest some things that we might do to help free our library metadata for the benefit of our users.
by John Mark Ockerbloom at November 20, 2008 03:11 AM
The Research Information Network, a national research and policy unit in the UK which looks at the information needs and practices of researchers, has produced what it calls a Guidance Booklet. The title is Ensuring a bright future for research libraries: a guide for vice-chancellors and senior institutional managers. The audience is senior university administrators.
Digital technologies and online information resources have brought fundamental changes in how research is done, and also in what researchers expect from library and information services. The services that librarians and information professionals provide have also changed fundamentally over the past decade. They can now do much more to provide leadership that brings improvements in research performance and effectiveness. New resources, services and technologies continue to create new opportunities, new challenges and new expectations. Librarians and information services need the resources and the continuing top-level support within their institutions to ensure that they can fulfil their potential and meet these challenges. ...
... Most higher education institutions (HEIs) have clear research strategies. The challenge now is to set out a clear direction for the relationship between these strategies and the development of your institution’s library and information services, ensuring that the two fit well together. There is also a need for much better communication and engagement between library and information professionals, researchers, and managers at all levels in HEIs.[Ensuring a bright future for research libraries PDF]
It introduces a framework within which to consider library services, and sketches some detail under these headings:
- Linking library content and collections to research strategies
- Cataloguing, navigation, discovery, delivery and access: Researchers’ needs
- Sharing skills and expertise
- Communicating and evaluating research outputs
- Curation, preservation and disposal
- Sustainable resources
Given the audience, I wondered about the level of detail under some of these. I was interested to see the Communicating and evaluating research outputs strand:
Effective communication of research results is an integral part of the research process. Library and information professionals are key sources of advice and expertise about the rapid changes taking place in disseminating, publishing and sharing research results, and also in assessing their impact. Institutions should ensure that they develop and implement, through consultation both with researchers and with library and information staff, strategies that optimise the dissemination and impact of the research their staff undertake. [Ensuring a bright future for research libraries PDF]
This is an area where we have introduced a new program of work: research information management. Indeed it was good to see that there was a variety of contact points with the RLG work agenda.
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November 20, 2008 03:03 AM
Today’s Speech from the Throne (PDF) included one line about copyright:
“Our Government will proceed with legislation to modernize Canada’s copyright laws and ensure stronger protection for intellectual property.“
One year ago, the same government included a similar line in their Speech from the Throne and the result was Bill-61 (which thankfully died on the order paper when this fall’s election was called). Despite the blowback they received this past spring and summer about that bill, I doubt the next incarnation will be much better.
Hopefully the new Industry Minister is a bit more clueful than the last and takes feedback from Canadians more seriously.
by thebookpile at November 20, 2008 02:27 AM
November 19, 2008
Okay, a more technical programming related post.
Ruby supports closures in a really convenient way, built into the syntax. The things Ruby calls “blocks” (although you can also create a closure with ‘lambda’ keyword, and a couple other ways).
I just found a really nifty elegant use of closures to solve a problem I was having in Umlaut with configuration dependencies.
Umlaut has a whole bunch of configuration parameters. First the configuration parameters are set up with Umlaut defaults. Then certain local files are executed to allow local installations to redefine the config parameters however they want.
The trick is that some config parameters depend on others. For instance, there’s config for the name of your app, and then there’s config for the advertised name of an OpenSearch search, which uses the configged name of your app. (I’m (ab)using the AppConfig plug-in to handle my config. Just know that AppConfig::Base.key = value basically sets the key/value in a great config hash in the sky.)
AppConfig::Base.app_name = 'Find It'
AppConfig::Base.opensearch_short_name = "Find Journals with #{AppConfig::Base.app_name}"
Okay, this is all well and good, until we consider that whole local config over-riding global config stuff. Because maybe in your local config, you set app_name locally. But you shouldn’t need to reset opensearch_short_name locally too, if you’re still happy with it being Find Journals with [app_name]. You might not even know opensearch_short_name exists. The problem was that the global default for opensearch_short_name was set back when app_name was something else, based on the previous value of the app name.
The solution? Closures! Instead of setting opensearch_short_name to a string, set it to something that can take a closure defining it, and then re-run the closure after all the local config is set, re-executing the code that defined it, this time based on the new value.
We do this with a magic DependentConfig object, which takes a closure, and then, using ruby’s really dynamic language features, essentially pretends to be whatever the result of executing that closure are. Ruby makes it easy to act as a ‘proxy’ object, so DependentConfig can look just like whatever the results of that closure are, to any other code. But DependentConfig still has the closure there too (until I tell it to forget it, because we don’t need it anymore, and I’m happy to have it garbage collected in case it’s taking up a lot of memory or something. Not sure the penalty of a closure)–and since it still has the closure there, you can tell it to re-execute it and re-update it’s value at any time. I keep a list of all DependentConfig’s that have been created in a class-variable (again, until I tell it to forget them all), so I can easily say “update all of those guys”, which I do after loading in local config.
So the code sample above turns into:
AppConfig::Base.app_name = 'Find It'
AppConfig::Base.opensearch_short_name = DependentConfig.new {"Find Journals with #{AppConfig::Base.app_name}"}
Nice how convenient it is in ruby to make a closure that’s an argument to a method, just put some code in {braces}, yeah? And it’s passed as an argumetn to the DependentConfig initializer.
Then, after I’ve loaded all local config, and want to recalculate any config that depends on values that may have changed, I just call:
DependentConfig.permanently_reset_all
I’m rather too pleased with myself for this elegant solution. If anyone can think of any pitfalls here, do let me know. You can look at the code for the DependentConfig proxy class in my svn. (It’s not in trunk yet, it’s part of my branch moving Umlaut to rails2, which should be back in trunk soonish.) Only 50 fairly sparse and elegant (and, I think, relatively easy to understand, tell me if I’m wrong) lines of code, not counting the initial introductory comments, and including lots of whitespace lines and copious internal comments (I’m a verbose documenter).
update: duck typing bites back, trouble in river city
I’m afraid that when I pass a DependentConfig object that is proxying a string to Rails render, because the string identifies the name of a template to render, it makes render all confused, I think it thinks I’m passing it an already instantiated template object of some kind, instead of a string identifying a template. Bah! When duck typing and flexible arguments bites back.
The fix is simply calling:
render :partial => variable.to_s
instead of just:
render :partial => variable
When variable is a DependentConfig masquerading as a String. But I’m no longer so pleased in the complete transparency of my DependentConfig proxy. Oh well. Still worth it, I think.
More update: Oops, I just discovered that the ruby standard library already has a class to help you create this kind of a proxy/delegator object. http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/delegate/rdoc/index.html I bet once I restructure my class to use that, all of my problems with imperfectly impersonating the result object will go away. Use the wheel that’s already been tested by others, not try to reinvent my own! That’ll make my class like 10 lines instead. Will update here when I have that done.
Posted in General
by jrochkind at November 19, 2008 10:10 PM
I generally liked CommentPress, but when the Institute for the Future of the Book website went down recently, it started throwing errors in the dashboard. So I decided to re-do the Open Source Software For Libraries website using Derek Powazek’s DePo Masthead.
I think it’s a beautifully readable theme, and I only had to make a few modifications. I’ve ostensibly lost CommentPress’ paragraph-level commenting features, but I discovered those may have been broken all along (that was what started me thinking about replacing the theme). I still have lots of work to do on the site, like inserting the footnotes, illustrations, and the final chapter (Ryan Eby’s guide to open source software for the server-side of your library).
by Casey at November 19, 2008 09:03 PM
Sometimes serendity is so terrific. I started a conversation with Amanda Etches-Johnson at Internet Librarian about the need for a Drupal in libraries conference or unconference. Then we dragged John Blyberg and into the mix. The result was the following:
Darien Library will be hosting a “Drupal4Lib Camp” on Friday, February 27, 2009 from 9 am to 4 pm.
The camp will be an opportunity for libraries who are working with Drupal, or interested in implementing Drupal, to get together, share experiences, solve problems, and collaborate. This unconference will be a combination of a series of 10 min lightning talks given by Drupal veterans in the morning followed by break-out sessions in the afternoon.
Audio and video from Drupal4Lib Camp sessions will also be streamed lived online.
There is no registration fee. However, participation is limited to 70. Please register for the Drupal4Lib Camp at http://drupalib.interoperating.info/node/167
Tags:
Drupal,
libraries,
unconference
by Karen at November 19, 2008 08:48 PM
RSS and Scholarly Journal Tables of Contents: the ticTOCs Project, and Good Practice Guidelines for Publishers by Lisa Rogers provides some advise based on experience.
Publishers are using various versions of feeds such as RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, RSS 0.91 and Atom. RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 are very simple XML formats, and typically only contain the fields for title, description and link. However, RSS 1.0 can easily be extended by the use of modules so as to not only deliver the content, but also provide structured metadata. One such module for extended RSS 1.0 is the Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) module. A variety of publishers such as Nature Publishing Group (6), Inderscience (7) and SAGE (8) are already using PRISM along with Dublin Core Metadata to provide rich metadata in their RSS feeds.
by noreply@blogger.com (David) at November 19, 2008 08:03 PM
I’ve been away at a conference so I am a little slow about getting my college football top 10 after the November 15 games. No changes this week as no one in the top 10 lost this past week.
1. Texas Tech (10-0)
2. Alabama (11-0)
3. Utah (11-0)
4. Boise State (10-0)
5. Ball State (10-0)
6. Texas (10-1)
7. Oklahoma (9-1)
8. Florida (9-1)
9. Southern Cal (9-1)
10. BYU (10-1)
by ecorrado at November 19, 2008 06:59 PM
We run a lot of Python code and have been following the Python 3.0 development with interest. 3.0 is the new incompatible version of Python. The new version is still in testing with a final version expected in December 2008. It comes with a script (2to3) that can transform much of 2.x Python into 3.0 Python. I have run the script on small pieces of code, and for those it does all you could expect it to, which is a pretty good translation.
Since one of the things we use Python for is processing large amounts of XML code(e.g. 120 million 3K chunks) , we worry about I/O speeds and XML processing speed (we use cElementTree that comes with Python for our XML support).
So I ran a small test. I took 10,000 XML records (79 megabytes). Read them in and parsed them using cElementTree's fromstring method.
The 2.5.1 code takes 3.8 seconds on my PC running 64-bit Vista.
In 3.0, opening the file with open('filename', encoding='utf-8') and passing the (Unicode) strings to cElementTree: 17.1 seconds (4.5 times as long as 2.5.1).
Opening the file as a binary file, and converting the input to a 3.0 string (strings are now Unicode) cut the run time from 17.1 seconds to 5.0.
Avoiding the conversion into a string by passing a bytearray to cElementTree cut the time down to 4.4 seconds.
We were disappointed in the speed of doing things in a standard manner, especially the time it took to read in UTF-8 data and return Unicode. Our 2.x programs are constantly worrying about whether a string is in Unicode or not and it would be great to just work in Unicode. But while we could probably live with slightly slower code to get that, when you have a program that runs all night, you don't want to see it take four times as long to run.
Maybe the final release will be faster.
Michael Watkins seems to have had quite a different experience. My timings on cElementTree in 3.0 show it parsing XML just slightly slower than in 2.5.1.
--Th
by Thom at November 19, 2008 05:51 PM
From the Borowitz Report:
In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.
“Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.” More…
Story via, picture from jmtimages.
by Casey at November 19, 2008 05:21 PM
Well, not the entire university, I guess, but a number of online publications use it. The newspaper is featured above, their CIO has a blog, and they’ve started a pilot with WPMU to offer blogging to everybody in the University.
by Casey at November 19, 2008 03:52 PM
Google has launched a hosted collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE Magazine.
Apparently only a small percentage of these images have been published; the remainder come from their photo archive. Google is digitizing them: 20 percent of the collection is online, and hey are working toward he goal of having all 10 million photos online.
There are some great Civil War, WWI, WWII and Vietnam war images, portraits of Queen Victoria and Czar Nicholas, civil rights-era documentation, and early images of Disneyland. There are photographs by Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Carl Mydans, and Larry Burrows, among others.
by Leslie Johnston (noreply@blogger.com) at November 19, 2008 03:28 PM
The guidelines for CrossRef publishers ("DOI Name Information and Guidelines" - PDF, 210K) has this to say in "Sect. 6.3 The response page" regarding the response page for a DOI:
"A minimal response page must contain a full bibliographic citation displayed to the user. A response page without bibliographic information should never be presented to a user."
which would seem to be all fine and dandy. But if that user is a machine (or an agent acting for a user) they'll likely be out of luck as the metadata in the bibliographic citation is generally targeted at human users.
So here's a quick and dirty implementation of what a machine readable page could look like using RDFa. (The demo uses Jeni Tennison's wonderful rdfQuery plugin which I blogged about earlier.)
Clicking the DOI link below will bring up in a sub-window a bibliographic citation which might be found in a typical DOI repsonse page. If you now click the "Read Me" link you should see an alert message which presents the bibliographic metadata as a complete RDF document (in a simple N3 – or Notation3 – format). This document is assembled on the fly by rdfQuery using the RDFa markup embedded in the page.
doi:10.1038/nature05634 (Click for demo)
See the "View Source" link to list the actual XHTML markup and the RDFa properties which have been added. And note also that some of the properties are partially "hidden" to the human reader, e.g. a publication date is given in year form only whereas the machine record has the date in full, and some of the properties are fully "hidden": print and electronic ISSNs, issue number, ending page, etc.
(Continues below.)
November 19, 2008 01:29 PM
I’m pointing out a change that Frédéric Demians made recently to the Git usage page on the Koha development wiki.
In order to avoid mangling non-ASCII characters in commit messages for patches submitted via git-send-email, Frédéric suggests forcing the Content-Type header in patches prepared by git-format-patch to specify UTF-8. This can be configured like this:
git config --global format.headers "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"utf-8\""
by Galen Charlton at November 19, 2008 12:41 PM
Kevin Hawkins gave a talk earlier this month at the 2008 Annual TEI Members Meeting: FRBR Group 1 Entities and the TEI Guidelines (50 KB PDF). Slides for the talk are also available (288 KB PDF).
When speaking about literature or about text encoding, we sometimes use terms like work, text, and document quite loosely—so loosely, in fact, that you could hold an entire graduate-level seminar or publish a whole book to discuss the meanings of these three words. While lexical ambiguity is a common feature of human language, loose usage may point to a deeper ontological ambiguity—or simply a lack of clarity—over what is being discussed. The various members of a bibliographic family are confused not only by novice text encoders but also, I believe, by the many contributors to the TEI guidelines. Clarifying this confusion over what is the object of encoding may help us to get around some of our persistent problems in applying TEI markup and lead to texts that are more machine-readable than at present.
While there are many ontologies of bibliographic families, for this analysis I will apply the FRBR model to TEI text encoding.
TEI is the Text Encoding Initiative, and if you don’t know it, this section of their guidelines will give you an idea of how they’re marking up novels, poetry, plays, essays, nonfiction, etc.
Also, back in August, Hawkins gave a talk at Modern Information Technologies and Written Heritage: From Ancient Texts to Electronic Libraries in Russia.
by William Denton (wtd@pobox.com) at November 19, 2008 12:41 PM
Today marks the entry of Amazon's Cloudfront Beta. This new service brings cloud computing to the masses see - http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront
by rmcdonal at November 19, 2008 12:33 PM
Darien Library will be hosting a Drupal4Lib Camp on Friday, February 27, 2009 from 9 am to 4 pm. It just so happens this is the day after code4lib2009 ends in nearby Providence, RI -- so you can theoretically hop on over after code4lib proper ends.
The camp will be an opportunity for libraries who are working with Drupal, or interested in implementing Drupal, to get together, share experiences, solve problems, and collaborate. This unconference will be a combination of a series of 10 min lightning talks given by Drupal veterans in the morning followed by break-out sessions in the afternoon.
Audio and video from Drupal4Lib Camp sessions will also be streamed lived online. There is no registration fee. However, participation is limited to 70. Please register for the Drupal4Lib Camp.
read more
by edsu at November 19, 2008 02:09 AM
Perhaps it is the Google Book Settlement that has started me thinking about this. Or maybe it's other things that are happening in my world at the ...
November 19, 2008 01:45 AM
Les Carr Shows How to Grow a Repository
This recent post includes some great examples of how a repository can add extra value to researchers who want to expose/promote their research.
Scraped from Repository Man
by mleggott at November 19, 2008 01:15 AM
I was told this was the “hard” direction — coming back to the U.S. from Australia. It hasn’t been too rough — though I wake up feeling as if I’ve been nailed to the bed — which makes me wonder if I ever really switched over. We jostled our way across so many time zones I think my body plumb gave up trying to adjust.
(Do astronauts get jet lag?)
No srsly, not to be missed!
The big thing I want to share is that this Friday, November 21, there will be yet another one-hour online ALA Connections Salon. This one is hot as a pistol: it’s “Political Connections,” featuring the charming and well-spoken Emily Sheketoff, associate executive director of ALA’s Washington Office, and Vic Klatt, ALA’s political consultant and former staff director of the House Education and Labor Committee.
It’s online, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. EST Friday, Nov. 21, 2008. Come one, come all!
From the blurb:
“Online Programming for All Libraries (OPAL) Coordinator Tom Peters will begin the hour with an interview with Sheketoff and Klatt. Both professionals will talk about President-Elect Obama’s Administration, the new Congress and what these changes in Washington portend for libraries during a period—a year, a term and beyond—marked by extraordinary challenges.
“Following the interview, participants will be free to ask questions and engage with Sheketoff, Klatt and with one another to discuss the promise and perils of a moment when, as President-Elect Obama said in his victory speech, “there’s so much more to do.”
If you’re a first-time user of OPAL, here’s a webpage containing basic information and tips.
But for now, I’m up very early tomorrow for a meeting in Warner Robins (4 hours north), so I’m taking it very easy and old-ladyish tonight, doing a little work blogging and uploading hundreds of photos to both my personal and work accounts while soup simmers on the stove.
by K.G. Schneider at November 19, 2008 12:52 AM
Residents of Mumbai (Bombay) were wondering who was responsible for removing an abandoned 737 in their Chembur neighborhood. Then, as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared, it vanished. The Times of India says the plane arrived by truck, but the driver took a wrong turn and couldn’t maneuver the 75 foot long hulk out.
Wingless planes and beached whales aren’t so dissimilar. The Oregon Highway Department knows how to take care of the latter (though, it turns out that whales are known to spontaneously self destruct).
by Casey at November 19, 2008 12:11 AM
November 18, 2008
On the plane to talk at the Minnesota Library Association conference, I dug into my paper copy of Information Today, and flipped to Steven Cohen's regular column, "Library Stuff Revisited."
Steven's topic this time was ReloadEvery, a Firefox plug-in that allows you to automatically reload a browser page at given intervals. He recounts how he uses ReloadEvery on different services, including keeping up multiple company press release pages all day, refreshing them automatically at fifteen-second intervals. Most remarkable was Steven's scheme to grab first-place reservation on Southwest:
"I could have set up the page to reload every second, but I was nervous and didn't want one tab to freeze on me. So I set up five tabs with the same page and had them each reload every four seconds at different intervals."
It's all very clever, but refreshing every second—who said that was okay? As a web developer of a site that gets hurt by more modest refreshaholics, I think Steven and the people who made ReloadEvery need to confront the "All You Can Eat Rule": Just because it says "All You Can Eat" doesn't mean you can shovel smoked salmon into your handbag for later, or lie on the drink counter with your mouth under the orange-juice spigot!
by Tim (noreply@blogger.com) at November 18, 2008 11:49 PM
A Primer in Risk: Taking a critical look at common support scenarios for open source software
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6611591.html
This is based on an essay that already appeared in my blog. One of my main objectives was putting the word out that paid vendor support does exist for open-source, contrary to some proprietary vendor FUD that open source is neccesarily less well supported than proprietary. It is not.
I’ve realized only since writing the article, in discussions at my own library, that some people need some encouragement against the opposite error too—being willing to try open source software only if it’s vendor-supported, or has a large and already existing support community! But somebody’s got to take the first steps, usually. Hopefully this article keeps people from going too far in that direction too.
If the article also functions as an advert for LibLime and Equinox, fine by me. Note that both organizations get their URLs mentioned in the URL section at the end, hooray. I was careful to always mention both organizations whenever I mentioned either one, not playing favorites.
Posted in General
by jrochkind at November 18, 2008 09:13 PM
I just returned from a five-city”road show” hosted by CAVAL and VALA. I spoke about open source in libraries while Lizanne Payne of WRLC spoke about mass storage. In two weeks we visited libraries in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and Melbourne.
(I think Melbourne was my favorite, but that’s because I grew up in San Francisco, which looks and feels a lot like Melbourne — two cities with Victorian gold-rush roots.)
As always, I learned a lot from these visits. First I learned from all the preparations I did for my talk — piles and piles of books about library history, going back to the mid-1900s. I tried to tie together a full century of library innovations to the open source movement today. Then, as always, I learned from the visits themselves.
There were many good things to see throughout my trip (and some delish cream scones at our next-to-last library stop), but Brisbane City Library made my socks roll up and down. I encourage you to visit the entire Flickr set (just click on the picture above).
Some innovations at this library include:
* A highly-sophisticated self-check system where patrons can watch their books disappear into the automated-sortation area
* Tools and space for gaming and media that as Bibliotheka points out has resulted in a bump in library use among males aged 18 to 35
* Color-coded Dewey shelving (”Go upstairs and find the pink shelves…”)
* A lovely glass meeting room that floats celestially above the first floor
* Comfy, attractive furniture that can be angled around the terrific city views from library windows or pulled together into impromptu study circles
* A business center staffed by city experts
It’s not that I haven’t seen bits and pieces of all these innovations in various libraries — but this library has a sustained “wow factor” that keeps going and going. Should you happen to find yourself in Brisbane, do stop in.
by Karen Schneider at November 18, 2008 08:47 PM
Rachel Singer Gordon has launched a site, The Tech Static to "assist librarians with technology-related collection development." A press release about the launch says that the site contains:
* Reviews of current computer books
* Reviews of technology-related titles targeted at librarians
* Collection development articles (weeding, “must-haves,” balancing a computer book collection)
* Prepublication alerts
* Publisher press releases
* DVD and ebook reviews
* Announcements
* … and more!
There are already a number of book reviews of technology books available.
by Roy Tennant at November 18, 2008 08:29 PM
I've been meaning to have a stab at creating something similar to a friend wheel, but using library data, for a while now. Here's a prototype which uses our "people who borrowed this, also borrowed…" data to try find strong borrowing relationships…
I picked three random Dewey numbers and hacked together a quick PerlMagick script to draw the wheel:
- 169 - Logic -> Analogy (orange)
- 822 - English & Old English literatures -> Drama (purple)
- 941 - General history of Europe -> British Isles (light blue)
The thickness and brightness of the line indicates the strength of the relationship between the two classifications. For example, for people who borrowed items from 941, we also see heavy borrowing in the 260's (Christian social theology), 270's (Christian church history), and the 320's (Political science).
The next step will be to churn through all of the thousand Dewey numbers and draw a relationship wheel for our entire book stock. I've left my work PC on to crunch through the raw data overnight, so hopefully I'll be able to post the image tomorrow.
by Dave Pattern at November 18, 2008 07:44 PM
Karen Calhoun and Roy Tennant od OCLC have recorded a podcast with Richard Wallis as part of the Talking with Talis series (disclosure: I work for Talis). The podcast discusses the recently published changes to OCLC’s record usage policy. I wrote about the legal aspects of OCLC’s change from guideline to policy before and why OCLC’s policy changes matter. It’s great that they’ve come on a podcast to talk about this stuff.
I do think it’s a shame though that this podcast didn’t form November’s Library 2.0 gang. There are several regulars on the gang who would have some great angles to pick up on in this discussion. I guess it just didn’t work out right in everyone’s diaries.
Broadly the content of the podcast covers the background to the change, the legal situation, how the policy may affect things like SaaS offerings, competitors to WorldCat, OCLC’s value-add, the non-profit status, OCLC’s role as “switch” for libraries on the web and finally some closing comments. This is an hour well-filled with insights into why the policy says what it says and why it says it how it does.
I’m going to start with Karen’s and Roy’s closing comments as they seem to be the most useful starting point to understanding the answers that precede them.
Roy - @54:09 : Yeah, well I just want to make it clear that really we are trying to make it easier for our member institutions to use their data in interesting new ways. To become more effective, more efficient. I think we’re backing that up with real services, were exposing their data to them in useful ways that can be processed by software. So I think this a good direction for us and I think the new policy is a part of that new direction.
Karen - @54:48 : Well I guess I would just like to re-iterate that we have tried to make the updated policy as open as it can possibly be. To make it possible to foster these innovative new uses for WorldCat data to make it underpin a whole process of exposing library collections in lots of places on the web, the basis for our being able to partner with many organisations, both commercial and non-commercial, to encourage that process of exposing library collections and helping libraries to stay strong. So we’ve had to balance that against some economic realities of where our funding comes from and the need to protect our ability to survive as an organisation. So it’s not perfect, it’s really far from perfect. It represents this kind of uncomfortable balancing act and our hope is that this updated policy will be merely a first step in being able to facilitate more partnerships and more sharing of data and further loosening our data sharing policies as the years go by, so I guess that’s how I’d like to close.
Roy is doing his best here. I’ve met him and talked about stuff. I like Roy and he’s smart. I suspect, from reading between the lines, that he thinks the only way to change OCLC is from the inside. The mere fact that Karen and Roy recorded a podcast on this stuff is a huge leap forward from the OCLC of a couple of years ago. But on this policy I feel he is misguided. There is a constraining factor to working with services like OCLC’s grid that means only member libraries can innovate and only in ways that happen to be facilitated by the grid services. They’re a piece of the puzzle, but only one piece. Making the entire database available for anyone to innovate on top of is another piece - and probably the most important piece if libraries are to be allowed to really innovate.
I agree with Ed Corrado’s wrapping up in his post Talis Podcast about OCLC WorldCat Record Use Policy with Karen Clahoun and Roy Tennant
I believe Roy and other OCLC employees when they say that want to make it possible for libraries to “use their data in interesting new ways to become more effective, more efficient.” Roy and the other people I know who work for OCLC really do care about libraries. I just don’t see how the policy does this. While the current people speaking on behalf of OCLC may want to approve as many WorldCat record use requests as possible, they may not always be the ones making the decisions. This is why I want as much of these rights enumerated in the policy, instead of hiding behind a request form that “OCLC reserves the right to accept or reject any proposed Use or Transfer of WorldCat Records which, in OCLC’s reasonably exercised discretion, does not conform to the Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records.”
Karen must be praised for her incredible candor in her closing remarks. The policy, she says, is far from perfect and has to be so in order to protect OCLC’s business position. You see, OCLC face the classic innovator’s dilemma. To truly innovate they must cannibalize their own revenue stream. Normally when faced with the innovator’s dilemma an established company faces the prospect of someone else innovating faster than they can. This is what OCLC fears and is trying to prevent. Keeping the data locked away gives them time to innovate by preventing anyone else from damaging their revenue stream before they’re ready. The question you have to ask is how long do libraries have left to innovate their way out of decline and is it long enough for the OCLC tanker to turn itself around?
Karen herself gives us an answer in the podcast. She refers back to OCLC’s 2005 Perceptions of Libraries Report in which they say that 84% of information seekers start with a search engine. Libraries are in danger of being marginalised in the web environment, she says. The context of the answer is a discussion about the need for OCLC to act a giant “internet switch” on the web, directing searches from the likes of Google Books to a local library.
In answer to the same question, why do libraries need a switch, Roy says:
Roy - @43:47 : I can’t imagine that search engines want a world where they go and crawl everyone’s library catalog and they end up with 5 million, you know, versions of Harry Potter. That just makes no sense whatsoever. I think from the perspective of both end users and search engines really what they are going to want is the kind of situation that we’ve been able to provide which is you know there is one place where you can go to for an item and then you get shunted down to the local library that has that item again very quickly and painlessly. I think back to the days when Gopher was around and the Veronica search engine and when people exposed their library catalogs that way it was horrifying. You would do a search in the system and you’d find a library in Australia had a book but you couldn’t do anything with that information. so I don’t think that’s the world we want to see necessarily. I wouldn’t want to see it.
Let’s just look at that opening sentence again.
Roy - @43:47 : I can’t imagine that search engines want a world where they go and crawl everyone’s library catalog…
Really? I would think that’s exactly what the search engines want. The web is a level playing field where anyone, anywhere can get the number one spot on any search engine. Not through being a big player with the budget to buy the top slot, but by being the most relevant result. Reconciling different references to the same concept is a core strength for the search engines. And that’s without even considering the disambiguation and clarification potential of web-based semantics. The switch that OCLC describe is an adequate way of addressing the problem that libraries have right now - a few dominant search engines, opacs that do not play nicely for search engines and a lot of the data in a central place at OCLC.
How does the OCLC model scale though? What about all the libraries that can’t be part of the OCLC game? OCLC wants to be the single, complete source for this data, but the barriers to entry (mostly cost) are too high for this to be possible. The barrier to publishing data on the web is very low, that’s one of the many great things about it. And seriously, Roy, are you really comparing the capabilities of Veronica with what Google, Yahoo and MSN do today? Have you seen SearchMonkey?
A few moments later, in response to a question about location information, Roy goes on to say
Roy - @45:12 : Oh boy, I’d sure like to see them try. I mean, again, I don’t think they’re even interested in that problem. Again, I don’t think they could do an effective job at it and I don’t think they would want to. You know the Google’s of the world are making deals with Amazon, you know, we’re not necessarily the folks that they really want to do business with. The fact that we’re big enough we can sit down and talk to them on behalf of our members I think is an important point. For us to think that individual libraries would have enough leverage to get that kind of attention I think is obviously ridiculous.
I’m not sure what Roy was getting at with this, but the search engines sure do seem interested both in little sites, like this blog and with location data and while the guys at OCLC are smart I’d put a whole heap of cash on Google being able to do location based search ranking a whole lot more effectively than they can. Not sure? Google has mapped all the hairdressers on the web, and will show me hairdressers local to Bournville. The are no doubt many reasons search engines aren’t doing this kind of thing and more for libraries - the quality of the data presented by the opac is one reason. The restrictive agreements data providers like OCLC put on the libraries is another. Both of these issues can be fixed. A monopoly player to centralize and restrict access to all the data is not a necessary component for libraries to be a valuable part of the web.
Following my earlier post on OCLC’s Intellectual Property claims I was looking forward to hearing what OCLC had to say on this. I know that Richard had many questions about this sent in following his request for questions. This was Karen’s response…
Karen - @17:14 : Well, I know from reading the guidelines, which is pretty much the extent of what I know, that the whole issue of the copyrighting of the database goes back to 1982. I’m really not familiar with that history and I don’t know a whole lot about Copyright Law, so I really don’t feel knowledgeable enough to talk about all the details around the copyrighting of the database. I do know that the copyright is on the compilation as a whole and that’s about the extent of what I know. I also don’t have a legal background so I just don’t feel like I’m qualified to answer that. I have been forwarding all of the questions and commentary about that to our legal department and they are working on those issues, I’m not sure what will come of that but they are working on the commentary and the questions that they got.
Richard then asks specifically about the 1982 Copyright date. That precedes the Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service that both myself and Jonathan Rochkind keep pointing out.
Karen - @18:56 : I don’t know a whole lot about it Richard. I can tell you, that having been the head of the database quality unit for so many years, OCLC makes a tremendous investment in WorldCat. It isn’t just a pile of records that we’ve gotten from the members. And I don’t mean to denigrate the value of those records in any way. As they come to OCLC and come into the database, over the years we have invested a very large effort in maintaining the quality of that database and even improving it. When I was in charge of the database quality group for example we wrote an algorithm, probably the world’s best algorithms at that time to automatically detect duplicate records and to merge them. It was an artificial intelligence approach at that time, very very state of the art, we also created a number of algorithmic methods for managing the forms of heading, doing automated authority control in WorldCat and we corrected millions of headings. Since my return I’ve become familiar with all the things that have come out of the office of research and been moved into production in worldcat that FRBRise the records in the database, that have created worldcat identities based on what we learned from ding that automated authority control back in the early 90s. so it’s really not the same database that we get that we get from members, it’s really much improved, we continue to do a huge amount of work to make the database as valuable as it is. So we have a stake, not just the members have a stake in worldcat, OCLC is a big stakeholder and a curator of the worldcat database.
As Vice President WorldCat and Metadata Services for OCLC I am saddenned that Karen should be so ill-prepared to answer questions on the intellectual property aspects of WorldCat. What is clear, though is that Karen is true to her word about her level of understanding. Copyright is a temporary monopoly, an exclusivity, granted to the creator of something original and expressive. Legislatures all over the world developed Copyright as a means of encouraging creative expression by protecting the creators ability to make a living from it for a period of time. Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service is a crucial case as it specifically addresses the compilation right that Karen refers to. Not only that but it specifically stated that the compilation was specifically not to reward the effort involved in collecting information, but to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
That is, the court does not want organizations to be able to monopolize data. They want people to be able to innovate freely.
What Karen describes is a vast amount of knowledge of the data and the domain and how to do fantastic stuff with it. Like I’ve said many, many times, OCLC has lots of smart people and they have an important part to play. I believe that part will earn them money, but there is no basis other than contract law under which they can prevent the propagation of the WorldCat data. That’s why they’re attempting to change the contract libraries operate under to include the previously voluntary guidelines.
But OCLCs business model is what needs to change, not its contract with libraries. It’s Schroedinger’s WorldCat, it is both alive and dead at the same time, and as long as they can keep the lid of the box shut nobody knows for sure which it is. The library world doesn’t need a cat in box, it needs a free cat.
There is so much more to talk about in this podcast. You have to listen to it. Also must read posts:
Annoyed Librarian: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love OCLC
To use a prison metaphor, it’s clear that librarians dropped the soap decades ago.
Karen Coyle’s Metalogue (the comments)
Jonathan Rochkind: more OCLC
The most important negative part of the policy, which it doesn’t sound like they discussed much in the interview (?) is that any use is prohibited which “substantially replicates the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat.” That means that clearly OCLC would deny permission for uses they believe to be such, but also that OCLC is asserting that with or without such an agreement, such use is prohibited, by libraries or by anyone else.
Ed Corrado: Talis Podcast about OCLC WorldCat Record Use Policy with Karen Clahoun and Roy Tennant
One of the key things that Karen and Roy repeated a few times during the podcast (and OCLC people have mentioned previously in other venues) is that the goal with this policy is to drive traffic to libraries museums and archives. They also have repeated that they hope it will make it easier for libraries, museums, and archives to use their data. It is not that I am not hearing them on this second point, but I still do not see how this “tiger’s role (territorial and instinctive)” approach accomplishes this.
Stefano Mazzocchi: Rule #1 for Surviving Paradigm Shifts: Don’t S**t Where You Eat
You could think of OCLC like a Wikipedia for library cards, but there is one huge difference: there is no freedom to fork. Basically, by using OCLC’s data you agree to protect their existence.
by Rob Styles at November 18, 2008 05:33 PM
As the Library’s digital user analyst, I’m plowing through reams of statistics to understand who is using our online resources and how. This post kicks off an ongoing series where I will put the spotlight on an interesting finding each week, and discuss its implication for the designs our department is creating.
Our first stat of the week is Visits By Network Location. Google Analytics, the statistics tool we are using to track user behavior on our web sites, has a report that identifies the network from which users are accessing our sites (including our electronic catalogs). Initially, we wanted to determine what percentage of visitors were using the catalogs onsite; that is, how many users were sitting at a catalog terminal in a physical Library location. Over the last year, that access breaks down as follows:
|
Nypl.org |
Catnyp |
LeoPac |
| Onsite |
25% |
43% |
16% |
| Offsite - Misc |
63% |
42% |
70% |
| Offsite - Institutional |
12% |
15% |
14% |
Nypl.org is the Library’s web site, Catnyp is the catalog for non-circulating research materials, and LeoPac is the catalog for circulating books and materials.While it’s no surprise that the vast majority of users are accessing NYPL.org from the “outside world”, it was surprising to us the degree to which users are accessing the catalogs from off-site. In fact, the LeoPac (circulating) catalog sees even more traffic from off-site than the main web site, which is astonishing!
One might think that LeoPac (which tells a patron where a book is located in a physical location so that they can borrow it) would be the most strongly correlated with on-site usage. How then to explain the fact that it is in fact the LEAST correlated? One reason might be that NYPL staff use non-web tools to access the catalog, so our in-house research is not reflected here. But that can’t account for the discrepancy; clearly, users have embraced the benefits of off-site browsing in order to maximize their physical interactions with the Library. We’ve already noticed that the “My Account” section of the site is among the most heavily trafficked, so there is mounting evidence of patrons scouring the shelves virtually before deciding to arrive at their local branch.
The Lesson: We need to take this behavior into account when designing search tools. Tools like saved search, “My Favorites”, reserve online and printable lists aren’t nice to have, they are necessities when patrons are doing their research at home or at work and only arriving at the library when necessary.
Bonus Stat: In addition to the internal external breakdown, we also took some time (a nice train ride back from the DLF Conference did the trick) to examine the network names and categorize them into Networks and Institutions. When a visitor accesses our web sites from outside of the Library, we can identify the name of the network from where they originated. In the vast majority of cases, this is the name of an internet service provider (like “Time Warner Cable”). These are the home and small business users that make up the bulk of the traffic.
However, a significant chunk of users are accessing from institutional networks: colleges, hospitals, government office, etc. From the chart above, we see 12-15% of our total web traffic comes from these large institutions. Of that amount, it’s no surprise that the universities are the biggest chunk (33% to 55%, depending on the catalog). But it was interesting to see that the second biggest category was New York City’s large finance community. Investment banks, insurance companies, and the like comprise up to 26% of institutional traffic (or close to 2% of ALL traffic).
Other institutions with significant traffic (roughly in descending order of popularity) include: hospitals and medical schools, foreign organizations, media companies, government agencies, high-tech companies, museums, legal firms, other libraries, and religious organizations.
The Bonus Lesson: We can do a better job of outreach and guidance to patrons from the most popular institutions. As we build our user stories to guide our designs, you can bet we’ll be trying to identify academic and financial users to get a sense of their research needs. Any thoughts on what those financial folks are looking for?
by Michael Lascarides at November 18, 2008 05:12 PM
After writing the project page for wpSMS I didn’t have much more to say in a blog post announcing it. The cool thing about writing Pages in WordPress is that I can create a taxonomy like /projects/wpsms/ to place them in. The downside is that new pages never appear in the RSS feed.
So I need both the page and a blog post to announce it. I could have simply copied the content from the wpSMS page into a blog post, but that creates confusion and splits the audience between the two pages. Instead, I’m using two bSuite features: the [include] shortcode and the post redirection support.
- Create the page.
- Start a new post.
- In the post body put the
include shortcode like this: [include post_id="123" field="post_content"].
- In the custom fields put an entry with the key: “redirect” and the full URL to to your page.
- Relax, you’re done.
The include shortcode will copy all the content from the page (so you don’t have to manage it twice), and the redirect custom field will tell bSuite to redirect anybody trying to read that post to your page.
by Casey Bisson at November 18, 2008 04:55 PM
Internet Development Specialist and Strategy Guide for the American Library Association, and prolific blogger as The Shifted Librarian, Jenny Levine’s views challenge librarians to look to the future and engage with new technology, the web, and gaming.
In this thoughtful conversation, Online Information Conference Key Speaker, Jenny explores the way libraries should be more open to experimentation, despite the concerns of spending other people’s money to deliver a better service to those people. Much can be learnt from the wider web about simplicity and planning for a changing environment.
Jenny also throws out the challenge to those attending the conference for specific questions or topics they would like her to cover in her presentation to get in touch.
Internet Development Specialist and Strategy Guide for the American Library Association, and prolific blogger as The Shifted Librarian, Jenny Levinersquo;s views challenge librarians to look to the future and engage with new technology, the web, and gaming. In this thoughtful conversation, Online Information Conference Key Speaker, Jenny explores the way libraries should be more open to experimentation, despite the concerns of spending other peoplersquo;s money to deliver a better service to those people.#160;#160; Much can be learnt from the wider web about simplicity and planning for a changing environment.#160;#160; Jenny also throws out the challenge to those attending the conference for specific questions or topics they would like her to cover in her presentation to get in touch. Technorati Tags: Onlineinformation2008,Jenny Levine,Talking with Talis,Libraries,Talis
by richard.wallis@talis.com at November 18, 2008 04:47 PM
So we have a few bookshelves in our house–one of which is in our kitchen. Only one or two of the shelves in this bookshelf actually house books, most of which are food-stained cookbooks. The rest of the 4 or 5 shelves are given over to photographs, albums, pamphlets from schools, framed pictures, compact discs, pencils, letters, screwdrivers, coins, candles, bills, artwork, crayons–basically the knickknacks and detritus of daily living. We spend a lot of time in the kitchen, so it’s convenient and handy to just stash stuff there.
The only problem is IT DRIVES ME INSANE!
The randomness, and perceived messiness of the bookshelf drives me crazy. I look at it and I see chaos, complexity and disorder. I know I have a problem, but that knowledge doesn’t seem to help. I am constantly shuffling things around, grouping things, moving things, throwing things out while more and and more things are quietly added. I’d almost prefer the bookshelf to be somewhere out of sight, but then we’d probably use something else in the kitchen.
This morning, on my way to work, I got a call from Kesa asking where two flower petals were that needed to be ironed on to Chloe’s Girl Scouts uniform. They were in the bookshelf at one point. Did I throw them away? I can’t remember it’s all a blur. I admit that I probably did. I can hear Chloe crying in the background. I feel bad…and resentful about having to keep this bookshelf organized.
Why am I writing here about this? Well mostly it wouldn’t fit within a 140 byte limit. But srsly — I guess I just feel like this bookshelf is a living emblem of my professional life as a software developer at a library. I strive to create software that is simple in its expression, that does one thing and does it well, and which is hopefully easy to maintain by more people than just me. I relish working at an institution that values the preservation of objects and knowledge.
But I threw away the flower decal …
It’s important to remember that real life is complicated, and that the messiness is something to be relished as well. The useful bookshelf, or bag of bits, chunk of json, or half-remembered perl script in someones homedir are valuable for their organic resilience. Or as Einstein famously said:
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I’m sorry Chloe.
by ed at November 18, 2008 03:58 PM
On April 16-17th there will be a Koha innovations and sharing group in Plano Texas (suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth). The 2 day workshop would have lab access and presentation space. There would be a charge to cover lunch both days and other expenses. Any leftover money would be given to the KUDOS users group as seed money. Anticipated cost $100.
by noreply@blogger.com (David) at November 18, 2008 03:09 PM
Clustering Tags in Enterprise and Web Folksonomies by Simpson, Edwin will be published and presented at the International Conference on Weblogs & Social Media, Seattle, March 31st, 2008 (HPL-2008-18 )
Tags lack organizational structure limiting their utility for navigation. We present two clustering algorithms that improve this by organizing tags automatically. We apply the algorithms to two very different datasets, visualize the results and propose future improvements.
by noreply@blogger.com (David) at November 18, 2008 03:03 PM
Google’s new mobile application for the iPhone is now available for download from the Apple App Store. This application is both impressive in its own right, and significant as a harbinger of what is to come. I was able to load it on my iPhone at about 8:30 AM EDT, about four days after Google led us to believe it would be available. Apparently, even Google has to wait for Apple’s ridiculous application approval process for iPhone applications.
The big news, of course, is voice search. I can now touch the “g” icon, lift the phone to my ear, wait for a beep, and say some search terms. The system beeps again to indicate that it is done listening and starting to search. In the search box, I can see the words for which the system thought I wanted to search. “Library information technology” worked perfectly in my limited testing, but the system mistook “flu” for “blue”. There is a little down arrow next to the search terms that can be used to pull up a list of alternate interpretations. In my experience so far, either the system is right, or it is wrong, and the alternates are also wrong. (Your experience may vary.) I’ve also found that more words seems to help the system. “States that have the flu” worked fine. The longer and more unique term, “Influenza”, also worked fine. The GPS is also used to provide location-specific information when available. “Movie showtimes” brought up movies in my zip code, without my having to specify my location.
Wow! This technology, when combined with the already impressive iPhone, is as close to magic as I’ve ever experienced.
Google is also planning to release the application for the T-Mobile G1 sometime soon.
by John Houser at November 18, 2008 02:24 PM
I have to be honest- I’m terrified to even open this link …. The full draft of RDA is not now available for review.
Why am I scared? Something that takes this long to finalize cojures up an image of an infinite switch (or if/else) block. For non-coders - I’m imagining a document that says if you see this do this - except if you see this … and so on.
Why else? Well, I’m pretty darn busy right now, so the idea of having something else to read just makes me sad.
Anyway, I’ve done my duty and shared the link with you all so you can choose whether to click it or not.
[update] fixed some typos [/update]
Technorati Tags: rda
