Category: Digital Libraries

  • O’Reilly Radar > Google Deprecates Their SOAP Search API

    This was reported on the O’Reilly blog.  Apparently, Google is deprecating their SOAP API.  If you ask me — this is a terrible decision.  Look up the current sets of books on Google Hacks, etc. and what you find is an entire ecosystem designed around these API.  This is why developers have traditionally liked Google — its why I’ve traditionally liked…

  • Lost in Airport hell

    I spend the weekend in DC as a panelist for an NEH grant.  It was a very interesting experience.  Having never been on an NEH grant panel before, I was somewhat amazed by the tremendous number of high quality research project currently being undertaken in the humanities.  If this is a representative sample of the…

  • LibraryFind updates

    Jeremy apparently did a podcast at CNI (http://connect.educause.edu/blog/mpasiewicz/an_interview_with_jeremy_frumkin?time=1166414496) where he discussed some of the work being done on LibraryFind.  One thing that’s he’s particularly happy about is what he’s calling the “look ahead” feature in LibraryFind.  Essentially, LibraryFind is both an OpenURL server and client allowing it to “look ahead” and resolve all citations before…

  • Google Sitemaps

    I’d run across these a few weeks ago and thought they were pretty nifty. Essentially, I was looking for something that would allow Oregon State University’s CONTENTdm collections to be harvested by Google. Since CONTENTdm has an OAI interface, and Google’s Scholar supports OAI harvesting, I thought there must be an easy way to get…

  • Adding user comments and tagging to CONTENTdm

    At OSU, we’ve played with this on and off and finally decided to just take this live.  For those that use CONTENTdm, I’ve created a small document that discusses how this works and what it looks like.  As I said, simple implementation at this point, but if use takes off, I’ll look to add things…

  • Dspace Community-list; adding most popular collections entries hack

    As I’ve started to get more involved in the Dspace work here at OSU, one thing that has struck me is the interface really could use a once over.  No place could this be more obvious than the community-list page.  While I doubt that this page was every meant to be the default access mechanism…

  • Dspace hack #2 — Did you mean?

    Its funny how things work out.  As some folks know, we are currently in the process at OSU of re-writing our hybrid metasearch tool from PHP to ruby, and now that much of the heavy lifting has been accomplished (a simple caching engine, wsdl api, oai harvesting, ferret integration, etc.), its been time to start…

  • ruby-oai and processing metadata elements

    Since modifying the ruby-oai module to work with libxml — I’ve found extracting the data from “metadata” to be much easier.  And the nice part — using libxml, I was able to do an initial metadata harvest from 4 collections in under 10 seconds.  Here’s the code from the harvesting component — see below. –TR…

  • More reasons to avoid REXML (like the plague)

    I’ve been having a great time playing with ruby — but one of the things that I find myself constantly running up against is the “ruby way”.  The place where I notice this most is when dealing with XML.  One of the things I’ve noticed in working with XML in ruby is that the ruby…

  • Native RSS Support in CONTENTdm (kindof) 🙂

    Updated: Fixed a couple of typos below Updated two: Thanks to Josh Kline for pointing out that the PubDate wasn’t RFC 822 complient. This has been updated. About a year ago, I created an RSS generator for CONTENTdm.  At the time, CONTENTdm really didn’t have an API that could be worked with, so in building…