code4lib 2008

The 2008 code4lib conference will place Feb. 25-28 at Embassy Suites in downtown Portland, Oregon.

See discussion at conference home page and Google Groups and on code4lib IRC (cf. FAQs)

Some proposals of particular interest: Andrew Nagy on VuFind; Jon Phipps on the NSDL Metadata Registry; Winona Salesky and Michael Park on "XForms for Metadata creation," Terry Reese and Emily Lynema on DLF ILS Discovery Interface Task Force API, Aaron Swartz on the Open Library Project, Rob Styles on RDF extraction of MARC data, Gabriel Farrell on Solr-powered Helios, Casey Durfee on MARCThing


Registration is $125. Hotel rooms are $150 per night, and include full breakfast and "free happy-hour." There's a wiki page with suggested Portland restaurants/hang-outs.

Here's the basic conference schedule:

Monday, February 25 - Preconference Day
Tuesday, February 26 - Conference full day
Wednesday, February 27 - Conference full day
Thursday, February 28 - Conference half day

Also, regarding Panizzi supybot, download Last.fm

VuFind 0.7

Chris Barr (Design & Interface Specialist at Villanova University library) writes: "With this release [i.e., 0.7] we included an experimental browse feature that we would love to hear some feedback on from this list, as the topic of browse has come up here in the past.Try the browse demo here: http://www.vufind.org/demo/Browse/Home . This is still a work in progress. Some things in the browse are still buggy (Subject Area & Tags don't work yet). Hopefully you can overlook this and discuss, beyond the technical part, theoretically how you see a browse functioning and if this is going in the right direction or not... What can we do differently, beyond squashing the bugs, to make the browse useful for an average user?"

Yale Puts Course Content Online

The Dec. 11th Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Yale has begun providing open access to video, audio, and textual materials for selected courses.

”Lectures can be downloaded and run in streaming video or in audio only. There are searchable transcripts of each lecture, as well as course syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets, and other materials." (per University spokesman Tom Conroy.)

So far, 7 courses have been posted to the Open Yale Courses web site. I checked Shelley Kagan's lectures on the philosophy of death and Christine Hayes' Introduction to the Old Testament, and the production values are excellent.

Bibliographic Control Working Group Report

Release of the LC Report has been mentioned on the CMS Web Log, and was the topic of discussion at our last Catalog Librarians meeting. Here are my notes for Section 4.

OPAC 2.0 on Alice's Blog (Dec. 15)

See original page and CMS referral.

"The Three Worlds of IT"

In "Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology," (Harvard Business Review, November 2006, p. 141-149) Andrew McAfee argues that "managers who distance themselves from IT abdicate a critical responsibility." They should "stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage." He goes on to distinguish three categories of IT that need to be understood and harnessed by managers. My notes are posted on the CMS Weblog.

Map of Israel

Plugged in from Google Maps. Click on virtual pushpins to view labels.



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OSS for the Masses

This article in CNet was slashdotted today. Why should you care about open source?" the author asks rhetorically, "You should care because the vast majority of common applications, even complex commercial stuff like Adobe Photoshop, Windows Media Player and Microsoft Office, have free, open-source alternatives."

"Productivity Toolbox"

Posted on LISNews 11/14/07: Productivity Toolbox: 37+ Tools ..., including the book Getting Things Done, "the most famous resource about completing your tasks and checking things off of your to-do list. Written by the now-famous David Allen, it is a must read if you haven’t already," Lifehacker.com, Simple GTD (free software based on Allen's work), Mee Timer (compares business versus personal web browsing at the office), clockingit.com, "a free web application that will keep track of your tasks and the time you spend on them. It’s really well designed, and fully featured, considering it is available for free," joesgoals, Motivation Hacks, toggl, etc.

Things to Do in Rochester and Buffalo

On the way to Kitchner, Ontario, Rochester, a 6-hour drive from New Haven,


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has the George Eastman House; and Buffalo, the Albright Knox Gallery

Movable Type Goes Open Source

Slashdot story: Movable Type Goes Open Source. But is it too late to catch up with Wordpress?

Cf. dlovins.wordpress.com

Fun with LoC Authority files

Back on February 12, Jessamyn West mentioned on librarian.net that a complete set of LoC authority records had been made available for download by Simon Spero. Tim Spalding also announced it on his thingology blog. Now (per Nathan Rinne on AutoCat 11/13) Bernhard Eversberg has used it to create a user-friendly BrowseLCSH application.

Michigan and Yale Take Heat on Commercial Digitization

In response to accusations that the UM Library has sold itself out to Google, Dean of Libraries Paul Courant told the Library Journal (Nov. 11 LJNewswire), "As part of our arrangement with Google [for 7 million volumes scanned in 6 years], they give us copies of all the digital files, and we can keep them forever," he wrote. "Our only financial outlay is for storage and the cost of providing library services to our users. Anyone who searches U-M's library catalog Mirlyn can access the scanned files via our MBooks interface. That's right, anyone." A related LJ article appeared on Nov. 12: "University of Michigan Library Head, in New Blog, Defends Google Deal."

A related article appeared in the Nov. 9 Yale Daily News, regarding the contract signed between Yale and Microsoft. The reporter points out Yale's endowment now exceeds $22 billion, and the 2008 library budget is $89.6 million. And assuming a $3.5 million price tag, covering the full processing of 100,000 volumes would cost only one-half of one percent of the University's $615 million capital expense budget. (Though estimate I've heard was more like $7.5 million).

Some Upcoming NELINET Events

These three look promising:

Nov. 16, 8:30 AM-3:30 PM, the 2007 Bibliographic Services Conference: "Subject Access - Out of Control?"

Dec. 10, 9:30 AM-3:30 PM a workshop by Ed Sperr on "Widgets, Mashups and Web Services", a kind of companion to the "Exploding Your OPAC" class of October 25.

Dec. 12, 10-11 AM, a webinar on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).

FAST Database Available on Web

Steven just informed me that the FAST Authorities Database is available as a public Web site. I wonder if it will be integrated at some point with the NSDL Metadata Registry.

Joseph Lucia's Thought Experiment

Via ngc4lib, a a lucid suggestion from Joseph Lucia about building open source library applications.

Here's an excerpt:

What if, in the U.S., 50 ARL libraries, 20 large public libraries, 20 medium-sized academic libraries, and 20 Oberlin group libraries anted up one full-time technology position for collaborative open source development. That's 110 developers working on library applications with robust, quickly-implemented current Web technology -- not legacy stuff. There is not a company in the industry that I know of which has put that much technical effort into product development.

BiblioCommons founder Beth Jefferson Interviewed

On Jon Udell's "Interviews with Innovators" at IT Conversations. Podcast features Beth Jefferson, founder of BiblioCommons, a company that "aims to transform public libraries' online catalogs into environments for social discovery of resources that are cataloged not only by librarians, but also by patrons."

Beth was a speaker at 2007 code4lib .

Digitization and its Discontents

There's a nice article by Anthony Grafton in the November 6, 2007 New Yorker on the mass digitization of library holding.

Here are some of his conclusions:

"The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases ... The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating".

Noting the great wealth of resources now available on line, he suggests that "these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you."

Is Waterboarding Torture?

Current.com journalist Caj Larsen hired professional interrogators to waterboard him in front of a TV camera. He was interviewed 11/5/07 on NPRs Talk of the Nation. Also, he explains why he did it in a Huffington Post column.

E-Books Coming of Age?

Bernie Sloan on web4lib 10/26/07 points to this article by Chicago Tribune "Internet critic" Steve Johnson, and notes the "suprisingly positive" experience had by this otherwise e-book-skeptical English major.

Sloan shares this telling excerpt:

"I just read 'Pride and Prejudice' on my BlackBerry. And, reader, I liked it. Against all my own prejudices, all my own pride in the history and tradition of the printed word, I liked it...The experience taught me that a book is not what I had thought it to be. It is not, in any important sense, typeface, paper stock or cover art. A book is, foremost, the arrangement of words in sequence, and they are, to borrow a buzz-phrase from the digital folk, platform agnostic."

Exploding Your OPAC (NELINET)

I attended a NELINET workshop with Ed Sperr on October 25 entitled "Exploding Your OPAC ." I posted my notes to the CMS blog in case others our curious.

The Open Library (John Hostage memo)

John Hostage mentioned via Autocat a presentation by Aaron Swartz of the Open Library Project, held at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The project's goal seems to be a wiki-like "Web page for every book," including descriptive metadata and hyperlinks to full-text copies, library holdings, online booksellers, etc.., where available. It is also to include print- and scan-on-demand services and social tagging. Hostage said the audience included the likes of Tim Spalding (Library Thing) and David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous). "Someone even mentioned FRBRoo, the object-oriented model of FRBR that is being developed."

NYTSL 2007

The NYTSL Fall 2007 program on Libraries and Free and Open Source Software Movements, will be presented by Edward Corrado of the College of New Jersey.

Ed co-authored a winning IMLS grant toward developing an open source OPAC and is a member of the Code4Lib Journal editorial board.

Mass Digitization and Open Access

According to a September 13, 2007 news release, the Yale Library is partnering with Microsoft to scan 100,000 of its public domain books:

Yale is committed to providing the widest possible access to its collection ... The full text of the digitized books will be indexed. Full text searching enables researchers to locate relevant material that they could never find through traditional indexes or library catalogs (e.g. a single paragraph in a work on an unrelated topic).

Mass digitization will certainly improve access to Yale's collections. The problem is that while the majority of Web searchers rely on Google (54% versus 13% for Microsoft's Live Search) , Microsoft requires that the new digital copies be indexed exclusively in Live Search. Google users will simply not be able to find the full texts presented or indexed there (though they may find catalog records courtesy of openworldcat.org). One wonders, therefore, whether this arrangement undermines Yale's commitment, mentioned above, "to provide the widest possible access to its collection."

Compare this to the approach taken by UConn, which is partnering with the Boston Library Consortium and Brewster Kahle's Open Content Alliance. According to the October 4th LJ Academic Newswire, Vice-Provost Brinley Franklin said, "The library staff at UConn was unanimous in its endorsement of unrestricted access to materials we digitize ... We are ready to turn down funding from companies that restrict searching digital collections through their proprietary search engine." An October 22 New York Times article (slashdotted on Oct. 23) reports that the Boston Public Library, MIT, Brown, the Smithsonian, and others, have similarly opted out of the Google/Microsoft model.

People's Choice Music

Komar and Melamid along with Dave Soldier conducted a study in 1995 or 1996 that determined:

"The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition.

The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and 'elevator' music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music."

Soldier and lyricist Nina Mankin actually went on to compose two pieces of music based on the survey results. I've listened to them and, ironically, the "Most Wanted Music" is so ingratiating that it's too painful to hear more than once, while the "Most Unwanted Music" is wonderfully stimulating and quite funny.

Josephus online

The Works of Flavius Josephus: "The Works of Flavius Josephus Translated by William Whiston"

BookMooch

Via Blake at LISNews (10/19): BookMooch: "exchange books and trade them, like a book swap or book barter"

World Digital Library

"The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials."

Open Content Aliance (OCA) Attracts New Members

From LJ Academic Newswire, Brewster Kahle convinced the Boston Library Consortium to commit $500,000 over two years to scan public domain texts for the open access repository. Unlike the digital conversion programs of Google and Microsoft, these texts would be search engine-agnostic. UConn is involved as well, and hired a digital projects librarian to help manage its contribution. Matt W., in his reference to the news release, shared this excerpt, "The library staff at UConn was unanimous in its endorsement of unrestricted access to materials we digitize ... We are ready to turn down funding from companies that restrict searching digital collections through their proprietary search engine." Rather different from the Yale approach.

ALA Preconference on Metadata

ALA | Metadata for Digital Library Development: "January 9-10, 2008 Philadelphia, PA"

Knights Templar in the News

Pete posted this item in LISNews about re-discovered archival document that is now being published in limited facsimile edition. According to the cited BBC article, the "Chinon parchment", a contemporaneous Latin account of the investigation and trial of the Templars, was rediscovered five years ago, after having been lost for centuries due to incorrect cataloging. The document shows that the Templars tried to justify their seemingly blasphemous initiation rites (such as spitting on the cross) as necessary practice in case they should be captured by Muslims (and presumably need to feign conversion?). The Knights Templar, portrayed in the popular imagination as guardians of the Holy Grail, were suppressed by the Pope in 1312, and the last Grandmaster, Jacques de Molay, burned at the stake by order of King Philip IV on March 13, 1314.

Open Source ILS Market Penetration

In the October 15th issue of LISNews, Bob Molyneux reviews the extent of open source ILS market penetration in U.S. libraries and elsewhere. In particular, he looks at the adoption of Koha and Evergreen, based on data gathered from Marshal Breeding's lib-web-cats (library websites and catalogs) database. A growing number of public libraries have adopted open source ILSs. So far 4 academic U.S. libraries are using Koha (e.g., Galen College of Nursing); none is using Evergreen. In Canada, Laurentian University is in the process of migrating to Evergreen.

Also posted to CMS weblog.

The Israel Lobby

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 484 pp., $26)

Despite accusations to the contrary, there is nothing anti-semitic about this book. The authors are simply performing an exercise in "political realism". "Although we believe that America should support Israel's existence [i.e., for moral and historical reasons]," the authors write, "Israel's security is ultimately not of critical strategic importance to the United States ... By contrast, if oil exports from the Persian Gulf oil were insignificantly reduced, the effects on America's well-being would be profound." (p. 338). Tough words, but not racist.

The final chapter offers some policy advice: the United States should abandon its current efforts at regional transformation in the Middle East and return to a strategy of "offshore balancing" since "the United States does not need to control this vitally important region; it merely needs to ensure that no other country does" (p. 339). Israel, a regional economic and military superpower, can largely fend for itself. If (however improbably in their view) her existence should ever be threatened by enemies, the U.S. would at that point have a moral obligation to intervene. Otherwise, they maintain, Israel should be treated like any other state, based on U.S. national interest, and not subject to the "special relationship".

For Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Republic, however, this book represents "the most sustained attack, the most mainstream attack, against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin." Backed up by the recorded words of Richard Clarke and Lawrence Wright, he effectively challenges the book's analysis of Bin Ladin's motives (i.e. that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians was close to Bin Ladin's heart) and representation of Israel's position on Iraq (i.e., that Iran wasn't the greater threat in Israel's view). Goldberg fails to offer a counter-explanation, however, for why the Israel policy debate has been so strangely stifled in the U.S.. He also unhelpfully smears journalist Robert Fiske as a "rabid anti-Zionist who has lately made common cause with the September 11 conspiracy movement".

Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, also roughs up the authors a bit in his piece for the New York Times Book Review. Gelb points out some significant problems with the book (e.g., cherry-picking of quotations, absence of original research, reflexive blame on Israel for failed peace negotiations) , but, in their response the following week, Walt and Mearsheimer point out a fatal flow in Gelb's critique, one that reflects the distorted way in which he read their book: "Gelb refers repeatedly to a "Jewish lobby", despite the fact that we never employ the term in our book. Indeed we explicitly rejected this label as inaccurate and misleading, both because the lobby includes non-Jews like the Christian Zionists and because many Jewish Americans do not support the hard line policies favored by its most powerful elements." Another error was Gelb's inference that they turned their wrath on the Israel lobby out of exasperation and disbelief over the invasion of Iraq. But the Atlantic Monthly commission of the original article began in October 2002, still nearly 6 months before the war began.

Meanwhile, Ray McGovern of Consortium News has an article on Alternet (10/10/07) regarding Israel's June 7, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty. McGovern attributes the 40-year cover-up to--you guessed it--intimidation by the Israel lobby. The recent declassification of government documents along with aggressive reporting by John Crewdson make it increasingly hard to deny that the Israelis intentionally destroyed a "friendly" U.S. spy ship, and that the two governments conspired afterward to keep it secret from the U.S. public.

A Brief History of Slashdot

Last week, in honor of its 10th annniversay, Part I recounted Slashdot's origin in 1997 when it was called Chips & Dips (CnD) using flat text files and Perl. Part II, CmdrTaco picks up thread in 1998 with conversion to SQL database.

How to Eliminate Unwanted Catalogs

Brett cites Catalog Choice website on LISNews, designed to help people "reduce the number of repeat and unsolicited catalog mailings [they receive in the mail] ... Consumers can indicate which catalogs they no longer wish to receive, and businesses can receive a list of consumers no longer wanting to receive their catalogs." It's endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

tikiwi "hello world"

dev.tw.o : Tikiwiki Development : Hello World

Standing up for Open source

Standing up for Open source, Lee David Jaffe, Greg Careaga

Arizona (etc.)

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Fac-Back-OPAC

The "Faceted Back-up OPAC" or Fac-Back-OPAC is an advanced catalog interface based on Lucene Solr, marc4j, and Django. Dan Scott (Laurentian University) archived the software on Google Code. There seems to be step-by-step install documentation as well.

Dan Scott mentioned how Solr dominated the code4lib 2007 conference, including all-day preconference led by Erik Hatcher and MyResource portal demo by Andrew Nagy. The Fac-Back-OPAC was derived from Casey Durfee's "Open Source Endeca in 250 Lines or Less".

1. MARC records (bibs and holdings) are extracted nightly from traditional OPAC.

2. then run through marc4j scripts (controled by Jython programming language) converting them to UTF-8 MARCXML.

3. then indexed through Solr (see tutorial) configured with bibliographic schema, run inside Jetty application server. Fields are extracted from MARCXML records as XML strings and sent to Solr instance via HTTP POST method.

4. The Django Web application framework then comes into play. It "implements the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern written in Python".

Maxie's 95th

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Richard Akerman on Library Futures

John Dupuis (Confessions of a Science Librarian blogster) interviews Richard Akerman, Technology Architect at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), author of the Science Library Pad, and SciFoo Camp 2007 invitee.

Dupuis: "Can academic/research libraries change fast enough to stay relevant? Similarly, can libraries rush to transform themselves into the wrong things, and just a different path to irrelevance?"

Akerman: "I think there was a big, big intermediation role that libraries just have to let go of. It isn't coming back. And there's also a big, big technology investment, in catalogues and ILS systems that worked in ways that librarians understoood, that were basically library operations, turned into computer programs and databases."

LCSH Browser

LCSH Browser: "contains a sample of 100.000 Library of Congress Subject Headings, set up for browsing by the authority headings themselves but also by phrases and even words contained in the headings. "

"Can New Haven Become a Sustainable City?"

F&ES blog posting re program on sustainability in New Haven, October 4, 2007, 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Peabody Museum, 3rd floor.

ALA 2008 Philly

See conference home page and Philly map (Google)


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Genki Online

Genki Online

SCOPA Grants Program

Here's the home page for the SCOPA Grants Program

Siris Cross Catalog Searching

Jeffrey cited the interface of the Lucene/Solr-powered Siris Cross Catalog Searching.

SIRIS stands for Smithsonian Institution Research Information System.

Solr "is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat. See the complete feature list for more details, then check out the tutorial." There are several sessions on Lucene/Solr offered at the Apache Convention, Monday-Friday, Nov. 12-16, 2007, in Atlanta.

MyLibrary

Eric Lease Morgan reminds ngc4lib readers about MyLibrary, a set of object-oriented perl modules that (per README page) lets you generate dynamic web pages from collection data, create personalized pages, perform inventories, support manual data-entry, import MARC and OAI-accessible data, index content and support 'search this site' function, syndicate content to portal, and write reports in form of browsable (subject, title, format, etc.) lists. There's a demo library catalog with 300,000 records, to which I signed in as Eosuchian. According to the about page, "The content of the MyLibrary database was indexed with Kinosearch and made accessible via an SRU interface. Search results sport cover art from Amazon.com. If reviews exist, then they can be read. Users can to view the full MARC records in tagged, MARCXML, and MODS formats. Users can create accounts for themselves and have items (virtually) delivered to them."

Drupal

See John Blyberg's blog, slides [pdf] from LITA 2007 program, article in Library Crunch ("Blyberg's Beautiful Drupal"), and LITA blog on Building Public Libraries with Drupal.

Librarians Seek Open-Access Copyright DB

Library Journal: Librarians seek to free copyright catalog

Yale Weblogs

Templates
Roller uses Velocity template language. See Velocity website and Reference Guide. In Roller the words "page" and "template" are used interchangably.

Invitations
Trying to invite registered Yale Weblog members to CMS Blog.

Interpreting error message via RollerWiki UserGuide_2.x:

"Set the users Permissions by selecting Admin, Author, or Limited. Click on Send Invitation. If roller is not configured to talk to the mail server, you may get the following messages:

User successfully invited.
ERROR: Notification email(s) not sent, due to Roller configuration or mail server problem.

As long as the first message is present, the invite is successful. The next time the user logs into the blog site, they will see the following: on the Main Menu page:

You are invited to join weblog [weblog name will appear here] – accept  |  decline

Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us

BG Sloan via ngc4lib, 9/15 Library Journal has article: Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us

Big E

The Big E, Sept. 14-30, "New England's Autumn Tradition, is the largest fair in the northeast, hosting more than one million people each September at its 175-acre site." Located in West Springfield, Mass. (cf. exact address on Google Maps)

LISNews - Drupal Beta Site

Blake announces testing of an LISNews Drupal Site. He writes, "let me know what you think. Sometime within the next month or so I'll be porting LISNews over to Drupal."

Sakaibrary

Sakaibrary is an eighteen-month project at Indiana University and University of Michigan, supported by Mellon Foundation, to develop OSS tools that integrate licensed digital content within Sakai. Cited by Ross Singer on NGC4LIB.

University Libraries Explore OSS Options

Via Birdie at LISNews, an article from E-Commerce Times on increasing use of OSS in university libraries.

OSS learning management system (LMS) Moodle now used in 56 percent of universities and "an increasing number of content management and portal systems are also open source, and many university libraries are involved in setting up open source repositories." Koha and Evergreen are mentioned as popular OSS library systems in the US and Australia. The Oxford University Library chose Moodle as its LMS and is implementing a CMS called MySource Matrix, derived from Squiz.

OSSWatch manager Randy Metcalfe wisely points out, though, that "open source is not the key feature; the key feature is value for money."

Yehuda Amichai conference at Yale

Nanette's conference "Poetics and Politics in Yehuda Amichai's World" is described in an August 23rd news release.

According to Benjamin Harshav, the keynote speaker: “Amichai is the most universal Israeli poet, expressing the human condition… In an age of ideology, he celebrated the individual’s private moments and existential situation; in an age of war, he celebrated love and love-making.”

Earlham Professor Charlie Peck wins Ultimate Geek Award

From Earlham Public Relations: Peck demonstrated his technical prowess at the SuperComputing '06 conference in Tampa, Fla. His prize was a $40,000 computer cluster which he donated to the college.

Babel : Arabic

Lesson 1

New Haven Citizens’ Action Network BOA Accountability Project

On flyer left outside our door, aldermanic candidate Cleaven Johnson (Div '98) asks rhetorically: "Did you know Alfreda Edwards voted to raise your taxes?" By way of proof, he offers the New Haven Citizens’ Action Network BOA Accountability Project ...


19th ward alderman candidates for Sept. 11 election:

1. LaMont Moye. MBA from Albertus Magnus. New Haven public school substitute teacher. Proposes: Increased parent involvement in schools, etc.; More summer jobs/afeter school programs; mandatory programs & uniform sentence, NO GOOD TIME, for prison inmates; Community Review Board jurisdiction over redev and zoning in our neighborhoods; better legislation and reduced spending by city government. In 1999 organized First Christian Softball Association in New Haven, in 2006 founded Parent Project 99 (PP99) non-profit group operated by parents in New Haven. Pet project: tracking device in school vans for children with special needs.

2. Cleaven Johnson. MDIV '98. Seems responsible for New Haven Citizens' Action Network flyer: BOA accountability project; provides links on evaluation board of alderman, with emphasis on increase versus decrease in taxes. Main point: "Did you know Alfreda Edwards voted to raise your taxes?" President/CEO of "Last Kingdom Productions"

3. Alfreda Edwards. The incumbant. Doesn't seem to be campaigning much if at all.

Apple Boot Camp

Windows XP (2001) not eligible for Apple Boot Camp. Needs to be SP2 (2004). Per Setup Guide [pdf]: "You must use a single full-install Windows installation disc (Service Pack 2 is required for Windows XP installations). Do not use an upgrade version of Windows and do not install an earlier version of Windows XP and attempt to update it later to SP2. Use only 32-bit versions of Windows."

Chernyakhov, Ukraine

Chernyakhov, Ukraine: Is this paternal grandparents' hometown?

Courses in Modern Hebrew

From Yale College Programs of Study:

"HEBR 103a, Advanced Modern Hebrew: Israeli Society. TTh 4.00-5.15 Shiri Goren I ; Not Cr/D/F L5 (27) Permission of instructor required Meets during reading period An examination of major controversies in Israeli society. Readings include newspaper editorials and academic articles as well as documentary and history-related material. Advanced grammatical structures are introduced and practiced. Conducted in Hebrew. Prerequisite: HEBR 102 or equivalent."

"HEBR 104b, Introduction to Modern Israeli Literature. MW 1.00-2.15 Ayala Dvoretzky I ; Not Cr/D/F L5 (0) Permission of instructor required. Reading, discussion, and analysis of fiction, poetry, films, drama, and magazine articles representative of contemporary cultural, social, and political issues in Israeli life. Conducted in Hebrew. Prerequisite: HEBR 102 or equivalent."

OPAC 2.0 betas

The Yale library has loaded 4,000 records into a test instance of Encore. The law school is nearly finished with Encore for Morris. Vanderbilt is hosting a test instance of Primo

LibX (Firefox extension)

LibX is an open source tool created by Annette Bailey and Godmar Back that creates hyperlinks between text on web pages and items held in one's library. It received the 2007 LITA/Brett Butler Entrepreneurship Award. Create new ones through the edition builder interface. See below or tikiwiki page for more detail.

Step Schmitt developed one for Morris that seems to query Orbis as well.

It works with Voyager (and other ILSs), and features toolbar, drop-down context menu (usu. right mouse click), drop-and-drag searches. For example, if ISBN is selected, context menu offers option to search directly using that unique identifier. The following identifiers are currently recognized: CrossRef DOIs, ISBNs, and ISSNs, and PubMed IDs.

It uses OpenURL resolvers (in Yale's case, SFX) to retrieve local holdings and subscriptions, and will provide full-text where available. Within Google Scholar, for example, one can quickly look up references (even from within PDFs) and retrieve paid-for copies of full text.

Graphical cues (e.g., university logo) appear next to text strings in Web pages if LibX determines that the library owns related content. For example, a book record on amazon.com might link back to the same edition held at Yale. (See screencasts in Demo 3 for examples). Click on cue to activate link and view fulfillment options

Jesse Ruderman has created an autolinking script which allows LibX automatically to link ISBNs, ISSNs, DOIs, and other identifiers to one's catalog or OpenURL resolver.

LibX provides support for proxy server access. It also supports COinS, which turn tags hidden by web site authors or publishers into actionable OpenURLs links. And it also supports OCLC's xISBN, which allows one to find a similar book in one's library even if the exact edition is not held or currently unavailable.

Inheritance and loss? A brief survey of Google Books

Via Bernie Sloan on web4lib, Paul DuGuid discusses flaws in the Google Books Project in First Monday, 12(8). August 2007.

"The Google Books Project is no doubt an important, in many ways invaluable, project. It is also, on the brief evidence given here, a highly problematic one. Relying on the power of its search tools, Google has ignored elemental metadata, such as volume numbers. The quality of its scanning (and so we may presume its searching) is at times completely inadequate. The editions offered (by search or by sale) are, at best, regrettable."

JSR 168 and JSR 286

Introducing Java Portlet Specifications: JSR 168 and JSR 286

Brewster Kahle Interviewed in LJ

Via BG Sloan on LITA list, Open Content Alliance's Brewster Kahle interviewed in 8/15/07 issue of Library Journal about the future of libraries as public domain gets digitized as well as prospects for the Open Content Alliance.

Some snippets courtesy of Matt W. ...


You've been critical of Google's library partnerships. What is Google
doing right and/or wrong?

Two problems: one is perpetual restrictions on the public domain.
Another is that these negotiations are all going on in secret. It
shouldn't take a subpoena to get information from a librarian. But in
this new world order, both perpetual restrictions and gag orders are
being put in place on libraries by a corporate enterprise. The idea
of making all books accessible online in new and different ways is
all good news. But if you do this in a way that the materials that
have been housed in libraries for centuries are made available only
through one corporate interface, that is an Orwellian future.



-------------

Google's pitch to libraries can be awfully attractive, and it is so
ubiquitous. How does the OCA compete for library partners?

Revolutions aren't started by majorities. They come from leaders who
see things that need to be done. Boston Public Library, for example,
has been courted by Google, but it has said it is going to remain
open. The Library of Congress also announced it is going to work with
the Open Content Alliance. That's what it takes. It takes guts on the
part of our leadership to keep librarians first-class members of this
information world, not just in a service role of feeding the machine
and then checking out at the end of the day because everything's
going to be handled by some great search engine in the sky. No. It
should be handled by us. We have the tools to build this open world
right now. We can invest in ourselves, in the traditions that we come
from. This is a choice.

Art Museum Social Tagging Project ("steve")

Per Jennifer Trant on LITA list, "steve tagger" is OSS tool for supporting social tagging in online art collections. Works with real words (word net) and discipline-specific thesauri (AAT and ULAN). Encouraged to try out with non-museum collections as well.

Andrew Keen v Emily Bell: "Is the Internet Killing our Culture?"

Via B.G. Sloan on web4lib, a debate in the Guardian on the Is the Internet Killing our Culture?

Hawk Inn (Vermont)

Hawk Inn, Plymouth, Vermont, with heated indoor/outdoor pools, tennis courts, a marina for boating/kayaking, etc., a spa and restaurant.

VuFind

Linked to Roy Tennant libraryjournal.com piece. Installation looks fairly simple.

See also Andrew Nagy's oss4lib 2007 presentation on MyResearch Portal (VuFind installation at Villanova University)

According to the about page, it's a "library resource portal" running on Solr Energy, supporting search and browse across all library resources. These include:

• Catalog Records
• Locally Cached Journals
• Digital Library Items
• Institutional Repository
• Institutional Bibliography
• Other Library Collections and Resources

Eric Lease Morgan on OSS for Libraries

Would love to attend his August 29th workshop on OSS in Libraries. Too bad it's so far away (Tilburg University, the Netherlands).

In his message to NGC4Lib ... Morgan writes,

"At the end of this month I will have the privilege of a presenting a
day-long, hands-on workshop on open source software and XML at the
Ticer "digital library" school, and I have made much of my
presentation available online in the hopes of getting some feedback
from you, sets of my peers. Please see:

About Ticer - http://tinyurl.com/yso2ey
OSS and XML - http://boole.uvt.nl/

"The OSS and XML workshop covers things such as:

* reading and writing MARC records
* indexing and searching MARC records
* harvesting and serving metadata via OAI-PMH
* moving from MARC to XML
* designing and implementing XML vocabularies
* transforming XML into other document types
* indexing and searching XML
* "mashing" content together

"From the workshop's summary:

"The combined use of open source software and XML are the current
means for getting the most out of your computing infrastructure.
Their underlying philosophies are akin to the principles of
librarianship. They enable. They empower. They are flexible.
They are "free". The way to get from here to there is through a
bit of re-training and re-engineering of the way libraries do
their work, not what they do but how they do it. Let's not
confuse the tools of our profession with the purpose of the
profession. If you think libraries and librarianship are about
books, MARC, and specific controlled vocabularies, then your
future is limited. On the other hand, if you think libraries are
about the collection, organization, preservation, and
dissemination of data, information, and knowledge, then the
future is quite bright.

"Finally, be forewarned, the link to the workshop is temporary since
the hosting machine will be wiped clean as soon as a the day after
the workshop."

Facebook Apps for Librarians

From iLibrarian, Top Ten Facebook Apps for Librarians: Books iRead (various LibraryThing type functions), LibGuides Librarian (supports posting of research guides of Profile page), and Librarian (involves creation user-influenced links for finding common resources, and allows users to automatically ask questions of librarians.), MyFlickr, SlideShare, UIUC catalog, delicious, jstor, My Wikipedia, and LOLcats.

European Library Portal

Via Gerry McKiernan on Web4Lib: The European Library "provides the services of a physical library and the opportunity to benefit from a virtual environment in 20 languages. This website allows to search through the resources of 30 of the 47 national libraries involved in The European Library. Resources can be both digital or bibliographical (books, posters, maps, sound recordings, videos, etc.)."

Includes browsable (but not keyword searchable) section on European Digital Library Treasures. Metadata is available in drop-down text boxes, but images are generally not of high enough resolution to read what's on them, and some of the metadata is poor, e.g., the subject of a Vatican Arba Turim ms. is given as "politics".

Feedity RSS Generator

Via birdie at LISNews: Feedity is an RSS Generator for Web Pages without Syndication. Per Michael Balmer: "Feedity aims to make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse content from any website."

500 jokes

From Dilbert blog via LISNews, hundreds of favorite (mostly filthy) jokes submitted by readers.

Tim Spalding at the Library of Congress (webcast)

Via LISNews, the Library of Congress hosted Tim Spalding of LibraryThing as part of it's "Digital Future and You" series.

Ghost Towns in Second Life

Via Rosenzweig on alaworld list, a wired.com article on dim prospects for Second Life, noting, e.g., that over 85% of created avatars have been abandoned.

"Uncontrolled Vocabulary"

This looks intriguing ... By way of LISNews and Chronicles of Bean, a weekly podcast entitled Uncontrolled Vocabulary, where librarians discuss current events in their profession and listeners can participate by text-messaging their comments through Talk Shoe.

OpenBiblio (free ILS software)

OSS ILS OpenBiblio used by the Yale Film Study Center. Written in PHP, includes OPAC, circ, cataloging, and staff admin modules.

Free information for the taking

C|NET article Via Blake at LISNews, on the "wealth of free resources out there--on-line databases, audio books, museum passes. You just need to know where to look."
Includes annotated links to resources like JStor , The Historical New York Times Project, Ebrary, etc.,

read more | digg story.

Google Librarian Central

Via birdie at LISNews, a collaborative blog called Google Librarian Central Recent posting: Creating your Custom Search Engine just got easier

What Some Successful CEOs are Reading (hint: not management books)

From the New York Times 7/21/07 business section, via LISNews: C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success. E.g., Steve Jobs loves William Blake; venture capitalist Michael Moritz likes to read and re-read T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and admires Andy Grove's Swimming Across.

Springshare Library Widgets

Includes LibMarks for social bookmarking & tagging and Libguides collaborative publishing platform. No mention of costs on website.

eXtensible Catalog (XC) Survey Results

The U. of Rochester Library has released the results of survey designed to gauge public "interest in the XC system and readiness to implement it."

According to the 10-page report, the Mellon-funded XC will be open source and freely-available to all interested libraries. Phase One of the project (2006-2007) has reviewed potential partners, complementary source code, and other environmental variables.

On page five is a table listing the most commonly desired OPAC enhancements (as selected from a large list, reproducced in the appendix). The top ranked feature is "Optional grouping of related works in search results". One feature listed here, not mentioned in our PIC document, is "Personal showcase pages for institutional/faculty-created content".

Debate Over Dewey

Via LISNews, article from Wall St. Journal on public libraries rejection of Dewey classification in favor of broad, bookstore-style, genres categories. In one case, at least, results are encouraging: "Since the doors opened last month, visitors have checked out about 900 items a day, far more than the 100 to 150 that typically circulate daily in nearby branches." But the ether has been churning on Autocat, and it seems extrapolation to large libraries would be misleading.

If Libraries had shareholders

Peter Brantley on O'Reilly Radar via BG Sloan on Web4Lib: If Libraries had shareholders Cites Web interface for querying ARL statistics

NEUG Annual Meeting

The Northeast ExLibris User Group is meeting at the Yale Divinity School.

Schedule of Events:


8:30-9:00 Breakfast

9:00-9:15 Welcome Address Niebuhr Hall (N123) NEUG Officers

9:15-10:00 ExLibris Update - Company updates, Future of RUGs at ExLibris Niebuhr Hall (N123) Susan Stearns, VP Customer Services (ExLibris)

10:15-11:15 First Sessions

• Voyager Product Update Voyager 6.5 release, ILL 6.5 release, Voyager 7.0, Analyzer Niebuhr Hall (N123)

• Jenny Forbes, Customer Liaison (ExLibris)

11:30-12:30 Second Sessions

• Querying Voyager with MS Access CANCELLED

• SFX at Yale University Library A look at the staff administrative module of SFX and local practice at YUL Niebuhr Hall (N123) Nisa Bakkalbasi (Yale)

12:30-2:00 Lunch

1:00-2:00 Primo and Verde Product Updates Niebuhr Hall (N123) Susan Pastore, VP Sales (ExLibris)

2:00-3:00 Third Sessions

• Enhancing Your OPAC without Losing Your Mind Enhance your Voyager OPAC using: book covers from different sources, Google Books, and other customizations. Source code for all the enhancements will be provided as well as a few tips and tricks regarding general issues with the OPAC. J. Edwards Dining Hall (N126) Julia E. Allen (FLO- WIT)

• Panel: A Look at the Aleph ILS and a Discussion on the Future of the ExLibris ILS An overview of managing the Aleph ILS followed by a group discussion on the future of Aleph and Voyager at ExLibris Niebuhr Hall (N123) Jan Jourdain (Amherst College), Tania Fersenheim (Brandeis University)

3:15-4:00 SIGs

• DIGITool Discussion of the different ExLibris products, including various Voyager modules Library Seminar Room (L104) Rodney G. Obien (WPI)

• Acquisitions J. Edwards Dining Hall (N126) Lora Brueck (WPI)

• Cataloging Niebuhr Hall (N123) Catherine Touhy (Emmanuel)

• Systems Library Seminar Room (L104) TBA

• Circulation Common Room (N226) TBA

4:00-4:30 Business Meeting Niebuhr Hall (N123)

VuFind

Per announcement on ngc4lib list, Andrew Nagy of Villanova University has posted the source code to his VuFind software on SourceForge. Initially designed to work with Voyager, it will eventually be compatible with other systems, including Evergreen and Koha, once necessary drivers are developed. Nagy reports achieving very fast speeds using Apache Solr. Demo and download can be found at VuFind web site.

Since demo included only 10,000 records, Casey Durfee recommends testing against larger set, e.g., LC MARC records provided through archive.org as he had done with the Seattle Public Library HELIOS catalog. Durfee adds, "Solr faceting performance scales pretty linearly with the number of records, so things that work fine on even 500,000 records can be unusably slow on 5 million +."

"Future of Librarians" interview archive

From degreetutor.com via LISNews, an archive of interviews withprominent librarians, information scientists, etc., on the Future of Librarians

Open Library (Aaron Swartz)

From LISNews : Aaron Swartz--co-author of RSS, former member of W3C's RDF Core Working Group-- now, in partnership with Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive, announces founding of the Open Library. This new global resource will be "a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money- seeking companies behind closed doors, it's more important than ever to be open."

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Librarians

The Occupational Outlook Handbook on the "Nature of the Work": "The traditional concept of a library is being redefined from a place to access paper records or books to one that also houses the most advanced media, including CD-ROM, the Internet, virtual libraries, and remote access to a wide range of resources. Consequently, librarians, or information professionals, increasingly are combining traditional duties with tasks involving quickly changing technology ... "

Wireless Networking

[2007-08-17]

Attempt to link wirelessly new Mac Powerbook to Linksys WRT54GS router (hardware version 6; firmware v1.50.6) so far unsuccessful. Even though I enter correct password when prompted, the Mac says there is a "problem joining the selected network". New 1.52.2 firmware available as of 7/2/2007. Tried to install, but formatted as .bin file, which I don't seem able to open or execute. Someone named Larry_Kahan on Linksys forum thread, says "Do not expand the .bin file. Just start the update routine and point the router at the downloaded .bin file." and provides specific steps.

One suggestion offered on linksys forum is to insert $ before one of the alternate WEP key (i.e., as alternative to entering password?).

Apple Discussions has a similar thread.

Personal install disk designed for Windows O.S. only. Able to patch to router with physical cable. Also, O.S. X recognizes suzukinet signal, but not correct password. Trying to diagnose problem at local unit address, i.e., http://192.168.1.1.

If all else fails, install Bootcamp, and access the router via Windows XP.


[2005-12-13]
Motorola Surfboard FAQs

Online rebate form

www.rebatestatus.com - Results

Comcast New Haven service packages

New Haven Service Center:
630 Chapel Street
M - T 8:00-5:00; F - 8:00-6:00 PM;
SAT - 8:00 - 12:00

[2005-12-03]
Per Zoom Tech Support: Windows 2000 and XP Users: You must install the software before installing the PC Card. Software not yet tested with Windows XP logo, according to installer/OS. And then: "Unable to initiate HotSync operation because the port is in use by another application".

Unable to get Model 4312 Zoom Bluetooth PC Card Adapter to talk with Tungsten E2. Purchased card through Amazon for $54.99 on Dec. 23, Order #: 103-0127648-1186243 .

Telephone: (561) 997-9686
Fax: (561) 997-2163
E-mail: Personal Assistance
(8:30 AM - 11:00 PM ET, Monday-Friday)
(9:00 AM - 5:00 PM ET, Saturday)

[2004-01-04]
Walking through WEP steps with Linksys tech support.
At first, new setting worked with intermittent disconnects, but after disabling IEEE 802.1x authentication, it seemed to be all right. Earlier, I had been trying to set up the WPA (Wireless Protected Access) to my Linksys WRT54G wireless router. I found what appears to be a set of instructions for this procedure on the 10 most frequently asked questions on the Linksys Support Page. I'm also waiting on the phone for a tech support person, since I'm finding the instruction a bit vague.

Planet Feed Reader

Planet Feed Reader, a Python-based aggregator, underlies Planet Cataloging.

U. of Rochester Ethnographic Study

ACRL announces forthcoming title: “Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester” (Thanks, Matthew)

Planet Cataloging

Planet Cataloging: “an automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata"

Evergreen Milestone

Brett at LISNews notes: "A big milestone [has been reached] in adopting Evergreen outside of PINES", following an announcement in the Evergreen open-ils blog. Release 1.20 can be downloaded here. An "Anonymous Patron" adds that "the adoption of Evergreen by the British Columbia libraries [bclibrary.ca] is also a huge catalyst for moving the project along to the next level." The only working implementation so far, though, seems to be the Georgia Pines catalog.

Equinox can help with server hosting local implementations.

The Space

At The Space Tuesday, July 10, in Hamden: David’s Circumspection Trio (featuring David Chevan on processed acoustic bass, Jesse Chevan on drums, and Jeff Gitelman on Stratocaster guitar). "Original Music that is Loud, Proud, and Jewish for the progressive lounge lizard." 295 Treadwell St, Hamden, Connecticut, (203) 288-6400.

Testing AAC 128 vs. 256 kbps sound quality

In test of 128 vs 256 kbps AAC files (i.e., what iTunes 7 calls "high quality" vs. "higher quality"),none of the ten subjects was able to tell the difference. Slashdotted on 5/31/07, where there seems to be a consensus that on good speakers the 128 sounds "tinny" and the high frequencies are distorted.

David Swanson on the Case for Impeachment

Here is a timely article from the The Smirking Chimp given the coincidence of Bush commuting Libby Scooter's sentence on the same week as Independence Day. As Swanson reminds us, Bill of Rights author George Mason had argued at the 1787 Constitutional Convention that the President might using his pardoning power to "pardon crimes which were advised by himself" or, in advance of an indictment or conviction, "to stop inquiry and prevent detection." For this reason, the House of Representatives would need to possess the power of impeachment as a check and balance on the President.

James Madison added that "if the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty."

So this seems like a pretty clear case:

Libby Scooter was found guilty of obstructing justice. His motive was to protect his boss Cheney, who, along with Bush, had authorized the disclosure of Valerie Plame's secret CIA identity. Plame's cover was blown, in turn, in order for Cheney and Bush to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, after he exposed the bogus intelligence they used to justify war with Iraq.

Bush's interference in the legal system at this point represents a profound conflict of interest and abuse of power. If there were ever a time for impeachment, therefore, it would appear to be now.

Paprika

Notes on Rotten Tomatoes.

Washington Post on the "Modern Librarian"

Washington Post "Style" section of June 24th has an article by Monica Hesse entitled: "The Modern Librarian: A Role Worth Checking out." Here's the lead paragraph:

Men in tuxes and women in gowns smartly walk the red carpet at the Washington Convention Center, to the "woo-hoo!" of adoring fans. A cameraman records the procession, photographers angle for close-ups. One carpet-walker, a woman in blue sequins, strikes a come-hither pose, and a security guard taps a female spectator on the shoulder.

"Are they famous?" he asks.

"No," she replies. "They're librarians."

I-751

Removing Conditions On Permanent Residence. Form I-751 [pdf] and a copy of I-551, along with documents such as mortgage receipts, to be submitted within 90 days of second anniversary of I-551. So, some time between Nov. 6 2007 and Feb. 6, 2008.

Diane Hillmann talks with Talis about metadata and standards

Talking with Talis: Diane Hillmann talks with Talis about metadata and standards

del.icio.us A-to-Z by Functions : All 150 hacks categorized

del.icio.us A-to-Z by Functions : All 150 hacks categorized (eConsultant)

ALA 2007 Washington D.C.

The ALA 2007 wiki has a nice "Unofficial Events" page. LIS-News gathering not listed there though.

Here's the agenda for the Subject Analysis Committee (but most of the meeting times conflict with CCDA). Some items of potential interest:

• 2.2.1 Vote to approve the revised charge of the SAC Subcommittee on the Future of Subject Headings.

• 2.9.1 Discuss Encore product http://www.iii.com/encore ; http://youtube.com/watch?v=Qj_tMDbCs9M

Improving the SFX menu

Xerxes article (podcast, actually) on Cal State redesign of SFX menu. As it appears 'out of the box' is confusing. One way to test Web page usability is to squint at it. Notice how certain things pop out and other elements recede. Designer should make sure that the most important items are the ones that jump out. In this case, why are "Ebsco Host" and "Innovative InnOPAC" highlighted in red? Students typically don't know what these mean. Better to highlight and hyperlink the words "full text". Moreover, bands of variant shades of gray in background should be removed. Font face should be Verdana. Citation info should be offset at top to give it more prominence. Get rid of "full text available" boxes which probably not well understood and take up a lot of space. Section headings are redundant, since often only one item per section, and in any case self-explanatory. Template files (.zip 14k) are provided.

De Lange Conference on Emerging Libraries

Kenny cites a Conference held March 5-7, 2007, at Rice University. Speakers include Brewster Kahle, John Seeley Brown (former head of Xerox PARC), Paul Ginsparg (arXiv), Michael Keller (Highwire Press founder), Donald Kennedy (ed-in-chief, Science)̲, Deanna Marcum, Harold Varmus (nobel recipient, re genetic basis of cancer), William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering), and other major leaders in technology and library science.

Summary:

The traditional concept of a library has been rendered obsolescent by the unprecedented confluence of the Internet, changes in scholarly publication models, increasing alliances between the humanities and the sciences, and the rise of large-scale digital library projects. The old ways of organizing and preserving knowledge to transmit our cultural and intellectual heritage have converged with the most advanced technologies of science and engineering and research methodologies. Such rapid and overwhelming changes to a millennia-old tradition pose significant challenges not only to university research libraries, but to every citizen. If the traditional library is undergoing a profound metamorphosis, it is not clear what new model will take its place. More information has been produced in the last several years than in the entire previous history of humanity, and most of this has been in digital format. Libraries are not storage places any more; they are less and less a place. The critical issues now include: How can that information be efficiently accessed and used? How do we extract knowledge from such an abundance of often poorly organized information? How might these enormous digital resources affect our concept of identity, our privacy, and the way we conduct business in the new century? Insight from many disciplines and perspectives is requisite to begin to understand this phenomenon to identify ways to help chart a future course.

AJL 2007

AJL to hold its 42nd annual convention at Hilton Scottsdale Resort & Villas, June 17 - 20, 2007. David Hirsch [email] is programming chair for RAS. Here's the preliminary program [pdf] and registration form [pdf]. See also my committee site.

Library Futures Conference (The Speculist)

The Speculist: Conference Day 1

Workstation Ergonomics

HealthyComputing - Keyboard Setup and Usage

DLF and Wikipedia

Via LIS-News: TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home » Wikipedia intrigues Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation

Against perpetual copyright - Lessig Wiki

From LISNews: Against perpetual copyright - Lessig Wiki

O'Reilly Radar

O'Reilly Radar
seems like excellent source for late-breaking IT news. Someone just posted here an announcement about a new feature of Google maps: Streetside View based ImmersiveMedia technology, where you can get a human-scale view of walking down the street as featured in a Google map̮

OPAC 2.0 discussion at Yale

I'm hoping to get a wider discussion going about functional requirements for Yale's "next generation OPAC". This discussion paper in Sakai might be a start. The requirements table in particular could lend itself to communal effort [but note that the deeplinks in classesV2 don't quite make it through all the way].

Google Gadgets, Cold Fusion, and Adam Brin

Mike Cunningham writes about "Getting Stuff into the OPAC", specifically by using ColdFusion, javascript, the MARC 970 field, and DOM. He credits Adam Brin at Bryn Mawr, i.e., the devloper of the "Search Triad" Google gadget, with providing some useful tips. Here's the Google Gadgets API.

Philly 2007 July

Here's a Google map with vectors and pushpins inserted

Everything is Miscellaneous

See my brief review at LibraryThing.

Steve Ettlinger Deconstructs the Twinki

Cited by LIS News, Steve Ettlinger interviewed by Moira Gunn at IT Conversations. Ettlinger is author of Twinkie, Deconstructed.

Google Notebook

The Wine Thief

The Wine Thief has second location now at 181 Crown St.

Craigs List posting

Supentown air conditioner

Karen Coyle on Library in Digital Universe

Diane Hillman recommends Karen Coyle 3/12/07 interview with Scott Mace of Open Source Conversations. See Coyle's blog posting on this.

Me listening to podcast on April 1 .... Libraries as early implementers of standards and semantic markup. LC, for example, started distributing standardized catalog cards in 1901.

Major advantages ... libraries accustomed to working as collective. Also (and this comes up later in conversation), because expertise always has context, and libraries have defined constituencies, easier for libraries to set boundaries on authoritative information. Wikipedia, trying to be all things to all people, lacks such context.

Disadvantage, not used to working with entities outside the library world.

Google Book project a mixed blessing. Open Content Alliance in part designed to remedy lack of transparency (i.e., difficulty sharing Google's digital files among different libraries).

Importance of OpenURL technology, dynamic linking of global Web content with local library holdings.

NISO migrating from heavy to less-formal light-weight standards development. In current environment, things move to quickly to build elaborate standards.

Laptops

My Dell Inspiron 5100 keeps overheating and shutting itself down, especially when I copy CDs to the hard drive. Need to force air through the vents, or buy one of these Laptop Desks or Notebook Cooler, or, if that doesn't work, buy a new laptop. A Thinkpad maybe? Or a MacBook?

Libraries as educational, technological hubs

Via Blake at LISNews.org, from Inside Higher Education, Libraries at the Cutting Edge, e.g., "A quick look at two familiar Web sites will demonstrate that academic libraries now play a vital role in how students and faculty find and gather information via the Web as well as in the stacks. Both Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland offer a full range of online library services, from catalogs (formerly known as “card catalogs") to research help to DRUM — the Digital Repository at Maryland, which provides a permanent online address for computer files and eliminates the need to attach them to e-mail messages. The Julia Rogers Library at Goucher College subscribes to services that provide students with access to over 22,000 online titles, while Baltimore City Community College’s library gives students technology support and online access to research materials."

Public Library Geeks and Web 2.0

Blake at LISnews.org cites from Wired. Excerpt: "Learning 2.0, developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe." Library staff encouraged to take on 23 Library 2.0 assignments.

"Essential" Knowledge Management sites

31 Essential Knowledge Management Sites as identified by Lucas McDonnel on the unCommon Knowledge blog. Cited in March 28 AL Direct.

Recommended freeware

List of 100 recommended freeware/shareware tools from the Free Geek. Cited in March 28 AL Direct.

Digital Preservation funding cut at LC

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) has a mandate to “capture, collect, preserve, and provide access to important ‘born-digital’ material and web-based information”. However the Congress has rescinded $47 million in the latest budget, which means another $37 million of matching funds will be lost, for a total of $84 million. James Billington is asking Congress to reconsider. Cited in March 28 AL Direct.

Open Content aggregator (Index Data)

Also from March 28 AL Direct: Index Data is offering free aggregator of open content (e.g. ebooks, open access digital repositories, encyclopedia articles, and human-reviewed Internet resources), using OSS Zebra and Metaproxy and SRU and Z39.50. Note the demo of their MasterKey tool which works off the open content and standards.

Steven Bell on RSS Aggregators

March 28 AL Direct cites PALINET Technology Conversations podcast featuring Steven Bell, Director of the Gutman Library at Philadelphia University (though he seems to have recently been appointed AUL at Temple University). Bell advocates use of open-source RSS-toHTML converter that produces java script, and then plugs in as newsfeed to Blackboard courseware. Also talks about routing blog postings via RSS to library news channel. Bell has written a tutorial on RSS and news aggregators. Maintains that few Americans know what RSS is, and that, once faculty are shown effectiveness in courseware, usually want it.

Koha is Chosen by the Guggenheim Museum — LibLime

Via LIS-News ... Koha is Chosen by the Guggenheim Museum — LibLime

"How Google Books is Changing Academic History" (Guldi)

, blog post by Jo Guldi, cited by Blake in LIS-News 3/23/07.

LIS-News technical details

From the "Journal of Blake", featured in 3/23/07 LISNews

MyLibrary 3.0

Chuck mentioned release of Eric Lease Morgan's MyLibrary 3.0 which includes a perl script that converts resources to RDF

Clusty Cloud Creator

Clusty Cloud Creator

LJ Movers & Shakers

Library Journal published its annual "Movers & Shakers" list on 3/15/2007. Includes "mad scientist" Casey Bisson, citing his innovative WP-OPAC, "Uber-resolver" Ross Singer, and NCSU's Emily Lynema, among many others.

Asakawa Conference at Yale

On the occasion of the centennial of Asakawa Kan'ichi's appointment to the Yale faculty, the Council on East Asian Studies sponsored Japan and the World: Domestic Politics and How the World Looks to Japan [pdf] on March 9-10, 2007. Jun Saito, Naomi's husband, read a paper on "Japan's New Nationalism" (co-authored with Frances Rosenbluth and Annalisa Zinn) dicussing recent trends in text book revisionism, state visits to Yasakuni war shrine, growing popular support for revising article IX of the Japanese Constitution ("the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation ..." ), and other indicators of Japan's "cool nationalism".

S. Yabuki delivered a paper entitled: "K. Askawa's View on History: Science Prefers the White Light of Truth". He begins by recounting the "legend of the Asakawa Cherry Tree" as reported by Dartmouth 1899 classmate G. G. Clark: "K would memorize two pages of the English-English dictionary daily, then literally 'devour' the pages, a practice in those days not uncommon. When the last pages were gone and only the covers were left they were buried by K at the foot of a cherry tree on the school campus. The tree was known as the Asakawa Cherry Tree." In the first section of the paper, Yabuki maintains that Asakawa's research on the village of Iriki "debunked the concept of serf and serfdom in medieval Japan". [What does the term 'medieval' even mean in a country like Japan? Doesn't it come from the European experience of losing Greco-Roman civilization and then recovering it with the Reformation and Renaissance?]. In the second section, Yabuki explores Asakawa's role in negotiations following the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The upshot of these negotiations was the Portsmouth Peace Treaty, (for his contributions to which Theodore Roosevelt would received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906). Asakawa was teaching (nearby?) at Dartmouth at the time, and was able to observed the entire conference at the Wentworth Hotel.
Yale was involved in the negotiations even though Asakawa hadn't yet joined the faculty (though he'd already been a graduate student there). Barnaba Tokutaro Sakai, sent to the U.S. on a public relations mission, had written a letter to his friend Anson Phelps Stokes , Secretrary of Yale University ,on Oct. 3, 1904, asking "What is the feeling or sentiment among the learned scholars in New Haven as to what terms of peace Japan should make, etc.?" Stokes in turn consulted Yale's international law professor Theodore Woolsey and oriental history professor Frederic W. Williams (son of Commodore Perry's interpreter Samuel Wells Williams), and provided a set of recommendations. Asakawa had already published his book the Russia-Japan Conflict and a highly-regarded pieced in the May 1904 issue of the Yale Review, and was therefore well-known and respected at Yale, and a major influence on their recommendations.

Naoyuki Agawa spoke on "Asakawa Kan'ichi's American Journey: Its Time and Place in the History of Japan-U.S. Relations". Some highlights: Asakawa was born into a samurai family that had been loyal to the Shogun. For this reason, he was among the disenfranchised after the civil war of 1868-69 and the Meiji restoration. The winners of that struggle were disproportionately Satsuma, Choshu, and other samurai provinces that lost to Tokugawas in Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. Those on losing side this time around had special incentive to travel to U.S.

Asakawa came to U.S. in 1895, same year as China ceded Taiwan following Sino-Japanese war, and 3 years before Spain handed Philippines to U.S. following Spanish-American War. "As a result of these respective territorial acquisitions," Naoyuki notes, "Japan and the United States suddenly found themselves physically facing each other across a relatively narrow strait, a reality that transformed the nature of the bilateral relationship."

In 1905 Asakawa married Mirriam. This was the same year as Japan's victory in Russo-Japanese war, and two years before he returned to Yale as an instructor. In 1921 Asakawa wrote letter to Japan's Deputy Foreign Minister Masanao Haniwara and U.K. ambassasor Gonsuke Hayashi, that widespread anti-Japanese feeling in West was largely due to a vast Jewish conspiracy. He cited the Protocols, which he acknowledged were fake, but still somehow illuminating.

In November 1941 he drafted a concilliatory letter for FDR to send to Hirohito; it arrived too late to do any good.

Asakawa died in 1947, 2 years after WWII ended and 4 years before Japan regained independence.