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

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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.