Robot Librarian Posts

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’] }

[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 as possible. Arguments about how much business logic to move into the database layer, in the form of foreign-key requirements, cascading inserts and deletes, stored procedures, etc. are as old as the features themselves. Solid arguments for and against are made on all sides,…

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 assembled, for use however anyone wants. The data include issns and eissns (where available), the title of the journal, and of course the URL of the RSS/Atom/Whatever feed. The feeds themselves are all over the map — it’s whatever the publisher decides to provide,…

[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 tackles some of the differences between open-sourcing your code (a legal and distribution issue) and actually making it so someone else can usefully contribute to your code. The project I’m spending most of my time on right now, VUFind, is a great piece of…

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 make it all consistent. B: OK, you can keep saying that, but I’m really, really smart and I say users are going to be confused. K: We’ve done user testing. They weren’t confused. And here’s our plan to see if they…

No matter where I’ve gone today and for the past few days, I keep running into people (on both sides) who are sure that if Their Guy Doesn’t Win, it’s going to be because of dirty tactics. I’m not an expert in this stuff. Not by a long shot. But I thought it would be fun to work out, for my own benefit, types of election fraud and what to really worry about. Note that how you might interpret all of this really depends on what you consider the greater evil: a vote  cast that shouldn’t have been, or a…

We in the library world have a problem. We spend a zillion-with-a-Z dollars subscribing to online databases, purchases which presume our ability to make sure only authorized people can look at them. The alternative is to be in breach of contract law, which I’ve been assured is something we’d like to avoid. The problem I see is this: The limitations of our proxy server software restrict how we can write contracts with our vendors. The standard approach is to define two types of access: By IP address. The person is sitting in front of the right computer (or has hooked…

Move over, Axis of Evil! Our 43rd president, George W. Bush (and you gotta know that his dad hangs on to that ‘H.’ with two white-knuckled hands) is now in search of “the surest way to defeat the enemies of hatred.” Of course, we’re the best of friends with hatred here at Robot Librarian, so we should be safe.

Because you can never have too many open encyclopedia-type-thingies, Google has launched Google Doctype, a “Google-sponsored open encyclopedia and reference library for developers of web applications. By web developers, for web developers.” It’s set up to use an open license (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License) and, unlike other similar resources, is explicitly set up to include code for testing and browser-compatibility tables generated by running that code against different browsers. Simple, direct… what’s not to like?