Refworks has some okish documentation about how to deal with its callback import procedure, but I thought I’d put down how I’m doing it for our vufind install (mirlyn2-beta.lib.umich.edu) in case other folks are interested.
The basic procedure is:
Send your user to a specific refworks URL along with a callback URL that [...]
After a medium-sized discussion on #code4lib, we’ve collectively decided that…well, ok, no one really cares all that much, but a few people weighed in.
The new format is: A list of arrays. If it’s got two elements, it’s a control field; if it’s got four, it’s a data field.
SO….it’s like this now.
{ "type" : "marc-hash", "version" [...]
Why do I ever, ever think that MARC might not rely on order? I don’t know.
In any case, control fields will now be just an array of duples:
control: [ ['001', 'value of the 001'], ['006', 'value of the 006'] ['006', 'another 006'] }
In my first shot at MARC-in-JSON, which I appropriately (and prematurely) named MARC-JSON, I made a point of losing round-tripability (to and from MARC) in order to end up with a nice, easy-to-work-with data structure based mostly on hashes. “Who really cares what order the subfields come in?” I asked myself.
Well, of course, it turns [...]
[Only, of course, if you're using Solr. Otherwise, that'd be dumb.]
We’ve been working on Mirlyn2-Beta, our installation of VuFind for some time now (don’t let the fancy-pants name scare you off), and the further we get into it, the more obvious it is that I want to move as much data normalization into Solr itself [...]
OK. I’m done with it, and this time I mean it.
I’ve updated and improved the lc normalization code, documented the algorithm, and put it all into Google Code. In the next couple weeks, I’ll be turning it into a Solr text filter so we can do some decent sorting on call-number search results.
The good folks at ticTocs heard the call for open data, and they responded…exactly as I asked them to. Which makes me think I should have asked for a pony, too, but I’m still very, very happy!
Anyone can now download a simple tab-delimited text file describing all the journal table of contents RSS files they’ve [...]
For those who haven’t heard, ticTOCs is a service that provides web-based access to a database of Journal RSS/Atom Table of Contents feeds. Awesome.
In their blog at News from TicTocs, a post titled I want to be completely honest with you about ticTOCs notes that:
As for the API - yes, we’ve been asked this several times, [...]
[I've noticed that a sure way to get people to look at stuff (as measured by, say, digg) is to include a number. So I did. Five. ]
Over at Bibliographic Wilderness, Jonathan Rothkind has a great followup to an ongoing discussion on the Blacklight list called How to build shared open source in which he [...]
I had a great — great! I tell you — 30 second conversation with Ken Varnum (of RSS4Lib fame) that went something like this (much paraphrasing, obviously):
B: You’re gonna have to fix that interface. The standard header won’t work. K: Well, no, we’re going leave it as it is. B: It’s not gonna work. K: We’ve decided to [...]