Terry’s Worklog

  • Proof of concept redux

    So I’ve been spending my time making a few changes to my proof of concept cataloging application using my phone.  A couple of things that I’ve learned along the way: No matter how good the OCR is, I’m not sure it ever gets to a point where you can just happily scan a catalog card…

  • MarcEdit 5.7 update posted

    The latest MarcEdit update has been baked and pushed out the door.  If you are running a current version of MarcEdit, you can expect to see the program prompt you for update (unless you’ve disabled that functionality).  Otherwise, you can find the update at: http://people.oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/downloads.html.  Originally, this update was planned to be primarily cosmetic, with…

  • MARCEngine MARCXML translation changes coming this weekend

    One of the benefits of moving the MARCXML=>MARC translation algorithm away from XSLT to an inline function is the ability to provide some sanity checking beyond the simple XML validation.  One of the issues that I see periodically when working with XML conversions is the need to code data truncation into my XSLT stylesheets.  For…

  • Hybrid storage solutions

    While I was at the PASIG conference this last weekend, a number of people talked about the death of the harddrive, at least in the sense of our personal portable devices.  The popularity of ultrabooks and small form notebooks was discussed many times, noting that personal computing will move more and more away from local…

  • Probably time to rethink our icons

    One of my boys has really been on a bit of a writing jag lately.  I’m guessing that it’s because I write a lot for my job  (and his mom writes a lot as well) and they have a lot of stories that they’d like to tell.  Well, my youngest had asked me to setup…

  • Turning your phones into Cataloging clients

    Over the past few years, I’ve owned a number of different smart phones.  I’ve had an IPhone, Android (the first in fact) and now a Windows 7 Phone.  I have admit, they are all great, especially when I compare them to my old Blackberry.  What you can do with each of these devices is quite…

  • Will publishers turn ebook readers into shiny paper weights

    I’ve been meaning to write something about this because I’ve noticed the trend myself, but it took a post from Jonathan (http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/why-a-shift-to-ebooks-imperils-libraries/) regarding challenges libraries will continue to face with the shift to e-books that reminded me to get back to it.  There was an interesting story in the Guardian the other day entitled, “The…

  • Merry Christmas–MarcEdit 5.7 Available

    Merry Christmas everyone.  I hope that everyone has a safe, and happy holidays with their family and their friends.  In what has become a bit of a holiday tradition, I’m releasing an update to MarcEdit, MarcEdit 5.7.  Yep, this shifts from version number from 5.6 to 5.7, and there are some pretty good reasons why…

  • Can libraries really be effective advocates for open data?

    This is one of those questions that I ponder ever now and again, because I wonder how effective libraries really can be as open data advocates when our current practice demonstrates that we don’t fully believe in the concept.  Well, I should qualify that — we have no problem believing that other people have a…

  • MarcEdit MARCXML XSLT changes

    I’ve been working on making a few changes to the way in which MarcEdit processes MARCXML data.  In MarcEdit, XML metadata transactions happen via XSLT.  This was done primarily to provide a great deal of flexibility in the types of XML transactions MarcEdit could preform.  It also meant that others could create their own XSLT…

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