The Case against Social OPACs

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

Microformats Explained

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

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

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

N 41° 31'
W 72° 92'

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

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

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