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Month: September 2010

2010-09-29 / Bill Dueber

Size/speed of various MARC serializations using ruby-marc

Ross Singer recently updated ruby-marc to include a #to_hash method that creates a data structure that is (a) round-trippable without any data loss, and (b) amenable to serializing to JSON. He’s calling it marc-in-json (even though the serialization is up to the programmer, it’s expected most of us will use JSON), and I think it’s the way to go in terms of JSON-able MARC data. I wanted to take a quick look at the space/speed tradeoffs of using various means to serialize MARC records in the marc-in-json format compared to using binary MARC-21. Why bother? Binary MARC-21 is “broken” in…

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2010-09-16 / Bill Dueber

VuFind Midwest gathering

A couple weeks ago, representatives from UMich (that’d be me), Purdue, Notre Dame, UChicago, and our hosts at Western Michigan got together in lovely Kalamazoo to talk about our VuFind implementations. Eric Lease Morgan already wrote up his notes about the meeting, and I encourage you to go there for more info, but I’ll add my two cents here. So, in light of that meeting, here’s what I’m thinking about VuFind of late: None of us are running VuFuind 1.0 as released with full catalog data. Eric has a special purpose portal running the current code over an aggregated special…

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2010-09-13 / Bill Dueber

Simple Ruby gem for dealing with ISBN/ISSN/LCCN

I needed some code to deal with ISBN10->ISBN13 conversion, so I put in a few other functions and wrapped it all up in a gem called library_stdnums. It’s only 100 lines of code or so and some specs, but I put it out there in case others want to use it or add to it. Pull requests at the github repo are welcome. Functionality is all as module functions, as follows: ISBN char = StdNum::ISBN.checkdigit(ten-or-thirteen-digit-isbn) boolean = StdNum::ISBN.valid?(ten-or-thirteen-digit-isbn) thirteenDigitISBN = StdNum::ISBN.convert_to_13(ten-or-thirteen-digit-isbn) tenDigitISBN = StdNum::ISBN.convert_to_10(ten-or-thirteen-digit-isbn) ISSN char = StdNum::ISSN.checkdigit(issn) boolean = StdNum::ISSN.valid?(issn) LCCN normalizedLCCN = StdNum::LCCN.normalize(lccn) Again, there’s nothing special here…

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