Category: Digital Libraries

  • MARC21XML=>Static OAI XSLT Stylesheet

    So I noticed David Bigwood mention on his blog (http://catalogablog.blogspot.com/2006/07/static-oai.html) that he wished that there existed an XSLT stylesheet that moved data from MARC21XML to Static OAI.  Well, ask and you shall receive.  While I doubt that David will be able to make use of this (it sounds like he’s finished with his project), maybe…

  • Coding block?

    I’ve heard of writers block, but coders block?  Who knows.  All I know is that I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately.  After pushing out the first version of our metasearch tool, our group sat back and looked at retooling the program in Ruby.  Partly to make it easier to do R&D prototyping…

  • Red Hat Patent lawsuit and its far reaching consequences

    I seen that Red Hat has recently found themselves ensnared in a patent lawsuit stemming from their purchase of JBoss.  The lawsuit is centered around the Hibernate 3 technologies — or technologies that deal with object-oriented access to a relational database.  The story can be found here: http://www.infoq.com/news/RedHat-Sued-Due-to-Hibernate-3-O My assumption, looking over this lawsuit, is that there will likely be much prior art to pull from to hopefully invalidate this particular claim.  However, in a worse case scenero (i.e., the patent is upheld), frameworks made popular by languages like Ruby and Python would be…

  • Project Gutenburg update

    Andrew Houghton let me know that this project did start creating MARC records for their data sets at some point.  Here’s the link I got: http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/catalog.marc.zip  I haven’t looked at the records yet — but I’ll look at them shortly.  I’ll still post the XSLT in case anyone is interested in just looking at it…

  • Spell Checking with Aspell and PHP

    One of the things that I like about PHP is the many built in functions found in the language. Within our metasearch tool, one of the things that I wanted to start looking at adding was spell checking. Since Aspell works as a good open source dictionary and is available as a php extension (pspell)…

  • Libraries, digital libraries and the printed word

    On Sunday, before coming back to Oregon, I ended up spending some time at Monticello relaxing in the garden doing some reflecting on my trip and I started to think about the printed book and where it fits into the digital library of the future.  Its actually funny, because a number of articles recently have…

  • Federated Search limitations

    Today we got to see first hand the fragility associated with the current state of federated search technology. As a beta site for Innovative, we have been testing their 2006 general release software prior to general distribution and an update last night caused ports to fail, resources to be limited and screwed up the keyword…

  • Extra, extra…LibraryFind kicks MetaFind’s, um, bottom

    Actually, that’s probably a bit overstating it and its still fairly early, but with MetaFind over the past year, our average search stats on a good day was about 70 searches.  Since Friday (include the weekend) with no publicity and a soft launch — we’ve had 798 cached results and ~1200 searches.  I’m hoping that…

  • MetaSearch Updates

    Ah — well, it looks like we are getting close to a formal public release….Friday actually.  There are a few things that I’d still like to work better (III’s Z39.50 server for example) — but we are ready to make it available to our patrons and start taking our lumps.  Some of the new things…

  • Emulating III’s Advance Keyword Searching using Z39.50

    Its funny how things work.  I was talking today with David Walker about III and their Z39.50 implementation.  The problem that David had noticed and had asked me about was whether I had noticed that the items being returned via the Z39.50 keyword search were different than a query done via the Opac.  Up until…