Many of the folks who read this blog (hi, both of you! Mom, say hello to Dad!) are aware, at least tangentially, of the HathiTrust. Currently hosted by us at the University of Michigan, the most public interface to its data is a VuFind installation you can access at catalog.hathitrust.org (or, for you smart-phone types, [...]
Monthly Archives: September 2009
Dead-easy (but extreme) AJAX logging in our VuFind install
September 25, 2009 – 11:02 am
One of the advantages of having complete control over the OPAC is that I change things pretty easily. The downside of that is that we need to know what to change.
Many of you that work in libraries may have noticed that data are not necessarily the primary tool in decision-making. Or, say, even a part [...]
The sad truths about journal bundle prices
September 23, 2009 – 10:42 am
[Notes taken during a talk today, Ted Bergstrom: "Some Economics of Saying Nix To Big Deals and the Terrible Fix". My own thoughts are interspersed throughout; please don't automatically ascribe everything to Dr. Bergstrom.
Check out his stuff at Ted Bergstrom's home page.]
Journals are a weird market — libraries buy as agents of professors, using someone [...]
More Ruby MARC Benchmarks: Adding in MARC-XML
September 18, 2009 – 11:08 am
It turns out that UVA’s reluctance to use the raw MARC data on the search results screen is driven more by processing time than parsing time. Even if they were to start with a fully-parsed MARC object, they’re doing enough screwing around with that data that the bottleneck on their end appears to be all [...]
Benchmarking MARC record parsing in Ruby
September 17, 2009 – 3:19 pm
[Note: since I started writing this, I found out Bess & Co. store MARC-XML. That makes a difference, since XML in Ruby can be really, really slow]
[UPADTE It turns out they don't use MARC-XML. They use MARC-Binary just like the rest of us. Oops. ]
[UP-UPDATE Well, no, they do use MARC-XML. I'm not afraid to [...]