OSS Lib Utilities from Texas A&M

Daniel Xiao and John Paul Fullerton mentioned three OSS library automation tools they've developed (lita-l, 7/7/08). I modified the LibCat one so that it works with Orbis. Haven't tried the others yet.

Terri featured in NYT

Per Jon Schwartz in the Nov. 29 Health section of the New York Times, researching health issues online is nothing new, but increasingly patients like my step-sister Terri share their experiences and knowledge through online peer-to-peer networks. "These expanded capabilities allow people to share information easily, upending the top-down path of information between doctors and patients. Today, said Clay Shirky, an expert in the evolving online world, patients are 'full-fledged actors in the system'."

Online Courses at UMass Lowel

• Log in to ISIS to view, change, course selections, grades, transcripts, etc. You may look up your ISIS User ID. Also, see the instructions on logging into ISIS Student Self-Service at Click on the link for “First Time ISIS Users”

• Retrieve online course username and password. Wait 1-2 business days after registration before completing this step. Click on the "Get Your Online Course Username & Password" link to do this.

• Learn how to access UML Webmail . Wait 3-5 days after submitting your registration to complete step. The University will automatically assign you a student.uml.edu email account upon registration and this is the address where all official University communication will be sent. Enter email address in the User Account field and self-chosen password in the Password field.

• Get textbook via online bookstore. Additionally, the on-campus bookstores carry limited supply of books for online courses.

• Log into online course. Click on the "Online Student Login". You will need the username and password that you created in earlier step.

• Access Unix account MSDNAA Online Software System after 9/11

• Review UNIX and Information Technology Certificate requirements. The former lists "90.267 C Programming" as a requirement, the latter as an elective. See also Certificate program for Web Design.

• Apply for Yale tuition reimbursement

Earlier post:

• Online computer-related courses, e.g., Intro to Unix, Spring 2008: Jan 28 to May 22, or start with the stable search page. First-time students need to submit registration form along with $30.

• And here's a link to the ViM manual and description of the 30-minute tutorial./li>

2009 Library Conferences

The 2009 ALA Midwinter conference is in Denver, Jan. 23-28. Bundled registration (for this and the Annual meeting) is $300 for division members, if paid by Sept. 30.

"Hamlet" and Wilder's "The Matchmaker" coming this summer

The Elm City Shakespeare Company is staging "Hamlet" and "The Matchmaker" at Edgerton Park this year. (Both productions were excellent ... cf. shakespeare.mit.edu for full text of Hamlet.)

Traverse City driving trip

View Larger Map

Or consider NorthWest Airlines BDL to TVC $400 each (per Travelocity 11/8/08)

RDF Book Mashup

"The RDF Book Mashup demonstrates how Web 2.0 data sources like Amazon, Google
or Yahoo can be integrated into the Semantic Web. ... information about books, their authors, reviews, and online bookstores ... can be used by RDF tools and you can link to it from your own Semantic Web data."

What Motivates OSS developers (per Clay Shirky)

Video clip of Clay Shirky's presentation at Supernova 2007, comparing the Ise shrine to the Perl user community. The shrine is re-built every 20 years from forest that supplied wood for original building. UNESCO would have none of it, since the original was not preserved. "Perl is a shinto shrine," in the sense that it perseveres over time through the love of its community, not through signed contract and financial promise (or in the case of the shrine, a solid physical presence). He says, "Standing from today, looking towards the future, you will make more accurate predictions about software, and, in this web-driven world, about services, if you ask yourself not 'what’s the business model?' but rather 'do the people who like it take care of each other?' That turns out to be the better predictor of longevity."

Vizualize books with Amaznode

Amaznode visualizes the relationships between and among books in the Amazon database. For example, I searched "Shogun" and retrieved a networked cluster of cover images related to that search. Would be interesting to mash up with YuFind ...

TechEssence (blog)

Don't know how I missed this before. "Roy Tennant started TechEssence to address the need for simple, easy to understand information about information technology ... " Other contributors include: Dorothea Salo, Eric Lease Morgan, Jenn Riley (the "Inquiring Librarian"), Lori Bowen Ayre, Marshall Breeding, Meredith Farkas, and Thomas Dowling.

Eosuchian Wordle

This is a word-art-style tag-cloud based on my delicious account



To build your own, visit wordle.net

בית הספרים הלאומי והאוניברסיטאי

Notes on "Tradition, Text, & Technology" AJL session in Cleveland 6/25/08

Prof. Carl Posy reviewed history of JNUL, and current efforts to separate national library collections from those of the Hebrew University. Effort supported by Rothschild's Yad ha-Nadiv.

Followed up by Prof. Elhanan Adler on "Creation of Full text Archive of Historical Jewish Press." JNUL announced Historic Newspapers project, 2004, issues largely digitized from microfilm copies. Biggest challenge was subject indexing, though helped by unpublished Yad Ben Zvi index. Aleph Software company has provided technical support at cost. OCR is a challenge because of similarity of certain Hebrew characters and Rashi script. Segmentation is used to identify pictures, headlines, body of text, separate articles, etc. Data to be indexed eventually in Google News.

Not quite related to JNUL, but followed by Yossi Galron on "Lexicon of Modern Hebrew Literature ", now in its fourth year of operation. Specifically focused this talk on Almagor's "Shakespeare from Right to Left", newly integrated into the Lexicon.

"The Library in the New Age" (Darnton)

Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library, has a piece in the June 12th issue of the New York Review of Books called "The Library in the New Age".

He writes: "Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?"

He reminds us, though, that, going back to the invention of writing ca. 4,000 BC, through innovations like the alphabet, the codex, movable type, and now the Internet, there's been the persistent illusion that knowledge can be captured in inert objects. The printed word, in particular, tends to exaggerate the authority of authors and publishers, and the accuracy of their knowledge claims.

Just as Wikipedia invites readers to question its own reliability, however, the new information paradigm is an opportunity "to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood," Darnton argues, "as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. "

Librarian threatens to blow up Soka Gakkai building

Reported in Mainichi News and LIS-News: "'Soka Gakkai members kept on trying to get me to vote for their favored election candidates,' he was quoted as telling investigators. 'I wanted to get back at them.'"

"Libraries Unleashed" supplement in Guardian

The Guardian newspaper published a supplement called "Libraries Unleashed". See post on CMS web log.

ALA 2008 Anaheim

ALA 2008 annual conference is in Anaheim, June 26-July 2.

Billington at Yale

As reported in the Yale Daily News and LIS News, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, gave a talk last week on "Freedom as Strategy: the Importance of an Ideal". I was there. He stressed the importance of education in sustaining a free society, and that we're not doing too well in that area. More controversially, he suggested that some kind of religious faith is necessary to prevent knowledge-based liberty from degrading into cynicism and libertinism.

It was also interesting to see how the World Digital Library has become a priority at the highest levels of the Library of Congress.

AJL 2008 Cleveland

The 2008 annual conference will be June 22-25, 2008, at the Marriott Cleveland East. Here's the official home page. There's also this blog with some additional information on it.

The keynote speaker Sunday evening will be Dr. Ellen Frankel, editor-in-chief and CEO of the Jewish Publication Society. Her appearance at the AJL convention will coincide with JPS's 120th anniversary.

Yale Rep: "A Woman of No Importance"

"In 1895, the year that saw the debut of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the playwright lost everything when he was convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years in prison. A Woman of No Importance had premiered two years earlier and anticipated the forces that would strike him down. Of British society, he said, “To be in it is merely a bore. To be out of it is simply a tragedy.”"

The Yale Rep production is directed by James Bundy and runs March 21 to April 12, 2008

Ultra-Low-Cost Laptops

I saw a few of these $400 flash-powered Linux-running Asus 3epc's at C4L 2008.

Compare with Via NanoBook, Palm Foleo, Intel ClassmatePC, Lemot Fulong, and OLPC (One Laptop per Child).

Top Free Software

The Feb. 8 issue of PC Magazine recommends 157 free software tools.

Charms of Wikipedia

"Wikipedia is just an incredible thing," writes Nicholson Baker in the March 20, 2008 issue of the NYRB. Ostensibly a review of John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, Baker's piece goes a long way toward explaining why Wikipedia's become the world's dominant reference work. One factor: it has an excellent foundation in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and other public domain reference works on top of which it's built. Another factor: editors have great fun improving articles, "whacking trolls," and performing other duties. For researchers, Wikipedia is a place to find information; for editors, it's more like an online game.

There's a related article in the March 5th issue of Information Today called "What to do with Wikipedia", by William Badke, associate librarian at Trinity Wester University. Rather than decry the use of Wikipedia by students, as many librarians and teachers are wont to do, Badke suggests an alternative: "If the key element in information literacy is the ability to evaluate information, what better place to start than with Wikipedia? We can help students to distinguish the trite from the brilliant and encourage them to check their Wikipedia information against other sources."

And B.G. Sloan cites "The Battle for Wikipedia's Soul"from the March 6th Economist, on the battle raging between the "inclusionist" and the "deletionist" editorial schools of thought.

Live from Code4Lib

Yesterday I attended that Evergreen pre-conference led by Dan Scott of Laurentian University. By show of hands, it seemed two-thirds of the attendees (myself included) were unable to get prerequisites installed before coming. I should have installed VMware or Parallels and then Ubuntu or Debian Linux at home, but there just wasn't enough time. In any event, the installation of the Evergreen software still seems too complicated to expect widespread adaptation in the near term. Once up and running, though, Evergreen seems very impressive and holds a lot of promise.

Terry Reese led a preconference later in the day on LibraryFind (cf. demo at Oregon State), which is "an open source metasearch application developed by librarians for libraries, built with Ruby on Rails", and including an OpenURL resolver, 2-click workflow, ability to locally index collections, web-based admin, 3-tiered caching system (to improve speed of searches), and customizable user interface. Terry warned that Ruby is increasingly unsupportive of XML and espouses a philosophy of "make things work first; optimize later." In terms of Installation, it shouldn't matter what version of Linux you use. Actually, Jeremy Frumkin has installed it on a Mac (cf. article on installing on OS X).

The regular program begins this morning with a keynote address from Brewster Kahle.