"Future of Cataloging" (Marcum)

Interesting speech by Deanna Marcum, addressing EBSCO Leadership Seminar on "The Future of Cataloging". Marcum is Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress. Points out that LC spends $40 million per year on cataloging, and wonders whether the efforts will continue to be worth while in the age of full-text online via Google search engine.

See also Barbara Tillet's 2004 lecture on "Cataloging for the Future" and Dale Flecker's January 2005 presentation on " OPACs and Our Changing Environment".

FAST

FAST Wiki. Yale ITS hosts SAC FAST disussion list

Ted Rall on the instability of digital information

FranklinCovey planning pages

Check online catalog for refil pages and "Seven Habits" gift ideas.

2005 New Haven Jazz Festival

2005 New Haven Jazz Festival. Ramsey Lewis Trio is August 20. Listen to sound clips here.

NETSL (Conference)

NETSL held its spring conference in Worcester, Mass, April 8, 2005. One of the main speakers was Grant Campbell, who discussed the Semantic Web in the context of cataloging. Along the way, he showed a frequently-cited schematic from Tim Berners-Lee, illustrating the architecture of the Semantic Web. It is worth noting that Berners-Lee considers Unicode and URIs to be the foundation of this architecture. Unfortunately, Campbell's presentation not yet mounted on the Web, at least I've had no luck finding it, but here's a link to his bibliography.

Map thefts at Yale

[2005-08-29]
Article published 8/29/05 "Our Nation of Thieves", by Rachel Shteir, author of Striptease: The Untold History of the Girle SHow, in the LA Times. She claims "we are in the middle of an epidemic of stealing," citing the various financial scandals, and online music file swapping as evidence. And she says shoplifting is increasingly called "theft addiction", which I've never heard. Interesting positions, but not entirely persuasive.

Home page of E. Forbes Smiley III, map collector and dealer caught red-handed on June 8th with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rare maps stuffed in his jacket and briefcase. Boston Globe article by Jenna Russell includes interesting details. For example, one of the items Smiley appears to have stolen from Yale is a $50,000 map of New England from 1614 drawn by Captain John Smith of Jamestown. The article also contains Smiley's mug shots, and ends with a quotation from his competitor W. Graham Arader III: "It's time these things [i.e., the antique maps] were cataloged like diamonds." Tony Campbell maintains an index of articles on the map thefts, and there's a page dedicated exclusively to Smiley-related events, wherein Campbell opines, "Rare books librarians, this is your call. Map specialists would certainly be ready to assist. But if you do no more than wring your hands over the present disaster you could reasonably be held responsible for the next [theft]" (emphasis his). Report from Yale Detective posted by Everett Wilkie August 18 2005.

DSpace and FEDORA

DSpace developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Labs, open source application, serves as a comprehensive digital archive. Compare with FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture) from University of Virginia.

MODS MARC and Metadata Interoperability (ALA)

Moved to Yale blog 8/30/05.

Botany of Desire (Michael Pollan)

Michael Pollen's Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, 4 chapters:

1. Desire: Sweetness / Plant: The Apple
2. Desire: Beauty / Plant: The Tulip
3. Desire: Intoxication / Plant: Marijuana
4. Desire: Cotrol / Plant: The Potato

Computing (MySQL, etc.)

[2005-06-12]
Reminder: Dynamic Drive site has script for opening links in new window.

Categories: New_Horizons, PHP, MySQL, PERL, Databases

bin.yale.edu
"provides users with access to a variety of scripting and programming tools [e.g., MySQL]. The goal is to allow users to experiment with development tools that are not available on other institutional servers." But there's a caveat: "can be overkill for small data sets that do not change frequently. If you are unfamilair with SQL, but are comfortable with a scripting language such as PERL, it may be easier to store your data in a tab-delimited file" (from http://bin.yale.edu/mysqlover.html).

Categories: MySQL


There's a list of PERL Modules installed on bin.yale.edu (with several broken links). There's a PERL FAQ page, and a URL for downloading latest release. How to access MySQLthrough BIN account. Note MySQL Reference Manual for version 3.23.41 available on Yale site.

Server specifications
bin.yale.edu is a SPARCstation 20, running SunOS 5.8, with Apache 1.3.14
httpd server installed. Documentation on the Apache server is at
http://httpd.apache.org/

How to access bin.yale.edu:
Connect to the server bin.yale.edu using your NetID and password. You can
use any of a number of methods to log in and to transfer files. All of
these methods protect your password.

Logging In
You can log in to bin.yale.edu using either Kerberized telnet or Secure
Shell (SSH). Clients for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux are available at
http://www.yale.edu/software/network/secure/

Transferring files:
You can transfer files either using SAMBA or Secure Shell File Transfer
(SFTP) under Windows, and Secure Copy (scp) or Secure Shell File Transfer
(SFTP) under Unix, and Kerberized FTP (KFTP) for the Macintosh. More
information on secure file transfer can be found at
http://www.yale.edu/webmaster/secure-ftp.html

Once you have connected:
Upon connecting you'll find yourself in your home directory:/export/home/NetID

Within this home directory is a subdirectory,
public_html, which is the directory from which web pages, including web
pages generated by scripts, will be served. Within the public_html
subdirectory is in turn a directory called cgi-bin, into which scripts
should be placed.

The corresponding URLs:
/export/home/NetID/public_html = http://bin.yale.edu/~NetID/
/export/home/NetID/public_html/cgi-bin = http://bin.yale.edu/~NetID/cgi-bin/

Because we've configured the Apache server to run with suEXEC enabled,
you can protect your cgi-bin directory so that only you can read and
write to it.

Also, there are no shared group affiliations. Your NetID is also your
group ID. Your scripts belong to you individually, not your www.yale.edu
group. If you stop having access to bin.yale.edu, be sure to hand over
your files to someone else who can maintain them.

Note: Change of server software from Netscape to Apache:

Any Netscape-server specific behavior in scripts or pages you have ported
from www.yale.edu must be modified to work under the Apache server.
The most obvious change is in the syntax for .htaccess files.
If you currently have .htaccess files on elsinore, which uses a
Netscape server, you'll need to modify the syntax of those files.

http://apache-server.com/tutorials/ATusing-htaccess.html contains a tutorial on using .htaccess files under Apache.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/directives.html contains a list of directives that can go into .htaccess files.

Perl has moved: Perl on elsinore was in a non-standard location. On bin.yale.edu it's been installed in

/usr/local/bin/perl

which is a more normal place for it to be. If you're porting scripts from www.yale.edu, you'll need to change the header in your scripts to reflect this change.

MySQL
To access MySQL, type the following at the command line:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -p

You will then be prompted for your MySQL password. When you have entered your MySQL password, a prompt will appear:

mysql>

At the prompt, type use netid (substitute your netid) to access your database.

PHP
According to BIN Tools: "You will have to put #!/usr/local/bin/php at the top of your php pages contrary to the 'common' way of doing php where it is parsed directly by the server."

suEXEC environment:
All your scripts will execute as you, not the web server. You no longer
need to have your files world-readable to have the web server look at
them, nor will you need to have them world-writable to have the web
server edit them. However, you do need to be sure that you (the owner)
have execute permission for the script, or it will not run.

If you have any questions about the new server, please reply to us at
webmast@pantheon.yale.edu, or call us at (203)-432-6598.


[2004-11-25]
Start with DreamWeaver Exchange tutorials.Webmonkey also has tutorial on PHP with MySQL. Another is available at freewebmasterhelp.com, where one is encouraged first to read specific tutorial on PHP. But dev.mysql.com might be the best.

[2004-11-21]

Blogger article "How to create expandable post summaries" including critical piece:

[span class="fullpost"] [/span]

where the expanded post text is insterted inside the span tags.


[2004-11-24]

Set up mailing list for SAC-FAST, but still waiting for confirmation from fellow subcommittee members that the invitations were distributed. The Administrative page allows modification of settings for members or list. Users are directed to the information page. These Web pages are customizable using HTML.


[2004 10 16]
HTML Cheat Sheet

Julie Linden, discussing good web design, recommends two web sites: Electronic Library Initiatives and Web, Workstation and Digital Consulting Services

For blog technical assistance, htmldog.com might be worth a look. Includes handy tags reference sheet.

July 8, 2004
The website SiteExperts.com seems like it might be useful. Also take a look at dive-into-xml.html and CSS Online which is actually a part of SiteExperts.com, I believe. Also check out SourceForge.net: Software Map for additional java script snippets. Here's a bit of java script that forces selected link to open in new window, which I've used on both Blogger and my static html homepage.
[2005-03-09]
Yale-hosted Tiki Wiki , a PHP/MySQL -backed opensource Wiki solution used by Yale ITS Technology & Planning to drive departmental webpage, superceded by uPortal, based at Princeton.

Consider Dream Weaver 2 for Learning Plan.

[2005-04-14]
MediaTech Solutions on Whalley Avenue offer classes in XML, DreamWeaver, ColdFusion, MySQL, and other web and database tools of interest to the Library. Less convenient, but better known, is New Horizons in Trumbull, which has lots of stuff on database-driven website development, but almost all of it presupposes a Windows OS environment. Here's their Course Catalog. It does have a DreamWeaver level 2 class, which might be worth taking. Would need to read course outline and make sure it's new territory. Also consider taking Programming with XML in the Microsoft .NET Framework, though it appears I don't have proper prerequisites. HOTT offers specific class on php programming, but rather expensive ($1895), and takes 4 days.

Yiddish language class

Beginning Yiddish language class offered at Slifka Center, taught by Yedida Kanfer, Mondays at 7pm @ Friedman Library

quetzalcuatl | LibDB - Asset Management

quetzalcuatl | LibDB - Asset Management

Reading Lists

What various smart and famous people are currently reading, as gathered by the New York Observer. For example, Harold Bloom has "been rereading all of Henry James and all of Faulkner and all of Whitman in preparation for a book ... "

Testing Bloggar editor

Does this message post directly to my blogspot blog?

SML to celebrate 75th anniversary

David McCullough will deliver a lecture entitled, "The Heart of the University" on October 21st. There's supposed to be additional information about the anniversary celebration on the Library's RSS News Feed, but I don't see anything here (or in the News archives).

Categories: SML

LITA Top Technology Trends 2005

Moved to Yale blog 8/30/05