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".