Month: January 2007

  • MarcEdit 5.0 update

    What folks may not realize, is that MarcEdit 5.0 includes a command-line program.  I added a few more command-line switches to give users access to the XML transformations through the command-line.  At this point, the following arguments are available: Arguments:        -s:     Path to file to be processed.                        If calling the join utility, source must be…

  • Inside Higher Ed :: A Stand Against Wikipedia

     Classic…Middlebury College’s history dept. is banning the use of Wikipedia as a source for papers.  Not that noteworthy given the academic community’s general dislike for the resource.  What I don’t understand is why the department banned it.  So its not authorative[1] — who cares.  Part of the job of faculty is to teach students to:…

  • Kyle’s just nuts

    I’ve been starting to look this upcoming summer and trying to decide which century and double century rides I’ll be participating in this summer.  There a a few that I always ride in, like the Monster Cookie at the start of the year which is just a metric century and a good stretch of the…

  • Digital World Norway Outlaws iTunes

    Interesting…I’m not a big fan of governments legislating services — particular a service like this in part because there are available options to work around Apple’s Fairplay DRM and allow play of downloaded items on other players.  So I’m not sure what to think about this.  On the one hand — it would be great if the whole DRM concept could…

  • Groklaw – Patent Office Orders Re-Examination of Blackboard Patent

     Uh, oh.  Looks like the folks at Blackboard should have just let well enough alone.  Given a short period of time, a pluthera of prior art was able to quickly be located — enough to cause a re-examination of the patent.  See the link: Link to Groklaw – Patent Office Orders Re-Examination of Blackboard Patent…

  • Marcedit update

    Two bugs in MarcEdit — one simple, one more involved.  The simple one has been fixed and uploaded.  The easy one to fix — In the deduplication tool, there are occasions when the program will throw an error if access code in the message pump accesses the GUI elements before they are ready.  More difficult…

  • Nicholas Carr — Wikipedia as a black hole

    I like to track Nicholas Carr’s blog, Rough Type, partly because it deals with a number of media issues — particularly with Wikipedia.  So it was interesting to get his take on Wikipedia’s decision this last weekend to make all its external links, no-follow links.  Here’s the post: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/01/is_wikipedia_a.php   –TR

  • Fun at the space needle

    III had their ALA get together at the Space Needle.  It’s a very cool place and they had my usual favorites — the chocolate fountain with chocolate covered strawberries.  Actually, the strawberries were covered in white and dark chocolate — with the strawberries looking like they are wearing tuxedos (I loved it).  And they had…

  • Translating ETDs from Dspace OAI to MARC

    Ok — here’s the info.  File: MidWinter 2007 ALCTS PresentationSo what’s included?  Zip file contains our custom XSLT that’s used in MarcEdit, the Macro that I use to clean data, and the ppt slides.  The XSLT file is a custom version of the default OAIDC translation found in MarcEdit.  Its customized to deal with the…

  • Translating ETDs from Dspace OAI to MARC

    I’m giving a short 15 minute presentation at ALA (How Catalogers and System Developers Work Creatively with Metadata: 1:30-3:30 pm at the Convention center) on the process OSU uses to moving ETD data going into Dspace directly into MARC/OCLC and our catalog.  Its a pretty simple process.  If you want to see how we do…