The Joy of METS

See notes at CMS Web Log

The Case against Social OPACs

Jim Michalko had some interesting observations on the June 3rd OCLC user studies symposium. I posted a response on the CMS Web Log

Microformats Explained

John Allsopp has a nice article on microformats at the mixonline site. If you want to include microformats in your own web pages, you can embed elements in classes with values taken from the hCard standard, .e.g,. p class="country-name" USA /p (I'm leaving off the angle brackets here since they trigger HTML formatting and obscure the code).

To see your microformats or those embedded by others, download the Operator plugin in Firefox or Oomph in IE, restart browser, and you'll see them appearing on your screen, ready to be clicked and imported into various map applications, address books, calendars, whatever.

Here's a hCard fragment for geographic center of New Haven:

N 41° 31'
W 72° 92'

Cf. geo-cheatsheet for example syntax and Wolfram Alpha (for coordinates)

Here's a non-functional hCalendar fragment for the upcoming NELINET course (based on another cheatsheet):

Intro to METS to be held on July 7 from 9:30am until to 3:30pm EST in Southborough, MA

Google Public Data

This is cool (from Information Today via ILS News): "go to Google.com and type in 'unemployment rate' or 'population' followed by a U.S. state or county; you will see the most recent estimates and then get an interactive chart that lets you add and remove data for different geographical areas. Users can customize the graphs and share them with others."

Return of LSCH in RDF SKOS

See post in CMS blog.

"Wolfram Alpha" Computational Knowledge Engine

Stephen Wolfram presented his "computational knowledge engine" at Harvard's Berkman Center. You can find the video on YouTube. Over at the code4lib discussion list, some are debating if it threatens research libraries or even Google. Hard to tell until it gets switched on later this month.

This topic was just slashdotted (5/5/09)

The Research Library in the Age of Google

SRA cited a nice article by Anthony Grafton, "Apocalypse in the Stacks?" in the journal Daedalus . I posted a few excerpts to the CMS blog.

World Digital Library goes Live

The World Digital Library (WDL) was formally released yesterday. Yale University is a founding partner and Dan Chudnov (formerly at Yale; now at LC) helped develop it. You can find brief descriptions in the Chronicle of Higher Education and New York Times and more details on the site itself. It was also discussed on Slashdot. According to the Mission Statement, the WDL "makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world." Interactive maps and timelines (along with more traditional textual metadata) provide user-friendly access to the collection. (Speaking of timelines, I keep hoping we'll find a way to deploy this very cool SIMILE widget at Yale.) According to the Yale Bulletin, Yale has contributed 22 pencil drawings of the 1839 Amistad captives, an 1810 map of North America by William Clark, an Arabic calligraphy primer, and Magellan's journal from his 1522 circumnavigation of the globe. More items will be added over time.

OCLC announces new Cloud-based ILS

I posted some thoughts about the new OCLC ILS here.

Yale Budget Woes

Deputy Provost Charles Long, quoted in the Yale Daily News: "Every month, [Chief Investment Officer] David Swensen has to write a check for $100 million to the University. Imagine you're Swensen. What're you going to sell?"

Library 2.0 Symposium: Highlights

I wrote up some of my notes in the CMS blog.

MS Word as Blog Editor

This is just a test to see if I can post directly from the MS Office (2007) blogging template. If you can see this message, then it worked!

Library 2.0 Symposium (Yale Law School)

I'm looking forward to the Yale Law School's Library 2.0 Symposium this weekend. According to the home page, "This symposium will lay out a vision for the future of the library and digital collections; the ethical implications of Library 2.0, including data retention and patron privacy; intellectual property rights in user-generated and traditional digital library content; and the challenges of digitizing library collections."

This Week at Yale: Clifford Lynch and Aaron Swartz

Clifford Lynch and Aaron Swartz visited Yale this week. I had an opportunity to speak with both of them, and I've posted my notes to the CMS blog (where I seem to be posting everything these days).

Brewster Kahle interviewed in the Economist

See article link in CMS blog.