Month: February 2008

  • Color me excited

    I’ll write more about Code4Lib, but one of my favorite parts of Code4Lib was seeing David Walker’s session providing a first look at OCLC’s grid services.  Very promising.  If OCLC can deliver a robust api for both member and non-member libraries and provide the infrastructure to make this happen — then maybe it will allow…

  • Summit libraries share (and share some more) records with the Open Library

    On Tuesday, I’d mentioned that I’d been spending my evening working on approximately 6 GBs of data and mentioned that I’d explain later.  Well, it’s later, so I probably should explain.  Some background…Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive (among other things), was the opening Keynote speakers at Code4Lib.  We’d had some trouble thinking…

  • Code4Lib 2008 begins

    And so it begins.  Well, actually begins yesterday.  Yesterday Jeremy, Tami Herlocker and I gave a LibraryFind preconference.  Kindof an installfest that didn’t turn out that way thanks to Parallels on my laptop.  That’s ok — lots of good questions afterwards and now we have a very good install document — but still a little…

  • Some MarcEdit changes: Z39.50 updating

    This is one of those things that I wanted to get done a long time ago, but finally have found the time.  I’m working on updating MarcEdit to allow users to pull records directly into the MarcEditor from the Z39.50 client and then post them directly to a Z39.50 service that supports record updates.  At…

  • Rails SVN question

    For a rails project, when I want to update the vendor/rails it appears that the easiest way to update this in svn is to delete the directory, refresh the gems and then re-add the directory to the svn.  Does this sound right?  Seems like it should be easier.  This has been the process that we…

  • My dog and I want a recount

    Apparently, Dr. Adnan Qureshi, a stroke expert at the University of Minnesota performed a study recently that found cat owners to be less likely to die of cardiovascular disease than dog owners.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune ran this story (http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/15858742.html [appearently, this page was only available for a little while — seems to be carried here…

  • Reading between the lines

    Like a number of people, I found the following piece (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i24/24a01101.htm) from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the Open Library fairly interesting — in part, because of the topics that the author chose to highlight.  I tend to categorizes pieces such as this as fluff, in that one rarely gets any content of substance…

  • MarcEdit 5.1 update

    Couple of updates — Finished adding functionality to support different DPI settings.  This corrects the oai harvester, the marc tools and some marceditor layout functionality. Batch File processor — fixed a small error in which the program would save marcxml=>marc conversions as xml files (rather than mrc files) Save/Save As — when harvesting (and other…

  • MarcEdit 5.1 Update

    Couple of quick updates to the program.  Added a new variable to the global vars passed when doing xslt transfers (currently, these variables are, destfile, sourcefile and pdate.  You access these as global parameters in your xslt file.  Two other changes.  Added the Compile Individual Selected Record(s) back into the 5.x branch and lastly, updated…

  • Bitter Cold

    I’ve been spending some time in Regina, Ca. this weekend and I can’t think of any time that I’ve been in such bitter cold.  When my plane landed on Saturday, a little afternoon, it was the high of the day around -29 F (but felt like -49 F with the wind).  By nightfall, it was…