Re: [CODE4LIB] Linux distro for librarians
For a number of years, White Box Linux [1][2] was supported by somebody from the Beauregard Parish Library in Louisiana. He was a very interesting guy who I met at ALA Annual in Chicago in 1999 or 2000. The project had a healthy run but was effectively replaced by the larger community effort of CentOS. I don't recall that it had anything particular to libraries in its design, rather I'm pointing it out just because it was developed by a library staff person (as you asked) and it struck a certain chord in the broader community at the time. I know I got a few good years of use out of it on several servers before switching to CentOS. -Dan [1] http://www.beau.org/~jmorris/linux/whitebox/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Box_Enterprise_Linux On 18 Oct 2014, at 20:08, Cornel Darden Jr. wrote: Hello, Every now and then I consider switching my main operating system. I've been using Ubuntu for years. Does anyone know of any Linux distros made by librarians or One that's most used by librarians? Thanks, Cornel Darden Jr. MSLIS Library Department Chair South Suburban College 7087052945 Our Mission is to Serve our Students and the Community through lifelong learning. Sent from my iPhone
[CODE4LIB] A Job: software developer at GW Libraries
Hi! We're hiring. https://www.gwu.jobs/postings/19740 We are looking for a software developer to join our growing IT team. Our team works on digitization, technology, and development; it comprises full-time staff responsible for digitization operations, IT services, library systems, web development, software development, and project management. We are in the thick of all the things academic library IT groups are doing: improving user experience across diverse services, mass reformatting operations, developing new software and services for our community, and working more and more with diverse data and digital collections. We want to add somebody who will help us move wisely and efficiently through our tasks and projects so we can focus together on redefining the library as a platform for information access and services. Filling this position will double our full-time developer staff. There is room in the position for a healthy range of tasks, roles, starting skill level, and experience (come in at rank L2, L3, or L4) and we can offer an appropriate salary to match. There are good benefits with this Librarian-classed position, including the potential for six months of paid research leave and substantial tuition discounts for employees their family members. And we mean it - right now three members of our team alone (including me) are working on graduate degrees using tuition discounts available to GW employees. Nearly every software project we work on is free and open source; most of our work is managed in github: https://github.com/gwu-libraries We publish our software under an MIT-style license that accords with an explicit free/open source software release policy approved by senior GW administration. We are optimizing our dev workflows around how github works, using tickets, milestones, branches, pull requests, and travis builds. We do this to align ourselves with the broader free software community and because it helps us deliver our work better to the GW community. If this sounds good to you, and if you meet the minimum/basic qualifications, please consider applying. We've got a lot going on and we could use your help. Please get in touch with me if you have any questions. Thanks for reading, -Dan
[CODE4LIB] wiki / spam
A look at recent changes reveals a lot of suspicious looking accounts and some suspicious activity. http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Special:RecentChanges I understand Ryan's urge to disable email confs for sign ups, but perhaps avoiding defacement is a higher priority, especially right around a conference event? -Dan
Re: [CODE4LIB] wiki / spam
Thanks for filling in these details, Ryan. If you're satisfied, so am I. :) -Dan On Feb 10, 2013, at 12:41 PM, Wick, Ryan ryan.w...@oregonstate.edu wrote: Hey Dan, I don't think the email confirmation was slowing any spammers down, frankly. It just caused more problems for legit people. There were already dozens of new spam accounts coming in every day, it's just easier to see them now since they're now included in the log. The most effective thing so far was putting the page title blacklist in place, which blocked over 90% of the spam pages. I'm ok with the spam accounts being there if they're not actually creating spam pages. And the ones that get created are rarely linked to from any of our pages, and I try and get them cleaned out every day or so. I've got a watch set up on the Main Page as well so I get an email whenever it is edited. I'm satisfied with how things are currently working. Ryan -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Daniel Chudnov Sent: Sunday, February 10, 2013 4:13 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] wiki / spam A look at recent changes reveals a lot of suspicious looking accounts and some suspicious activity. http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Special:RecentChanges I understand Ryan's urge to disable email confs for sign ups, but perhaps avoiding defacement is a higher priority, especially right around a conference event? -Dan
Re: [CODE4LIB] Senior Software Developer at GWU
You might have seen this come through here overnight: http://jobs.code4lib.org/job/4888/ That's us, we're hiring at GW Libraries. You may wonder: what makes this position different from others like it? Wonder no longer... Five reasons to work at GW Libraries as a software developer 1. Competitive salary (commensurate with experience) with an annual opportunity for merit increases, and a benefits package including a tuition discount for employees and their family members. We encourage use of the tuition discount and offer scheduling flexibility. I'm finishing my second full class now and am registered for a third class next term. 2. Foggy Bottom in DC offers all the perks of a bustling downtown location - great restaurants, cultural venues, landmarks, and an international vibe. I run into the Obamas all the time. Well, I bike past their house regularly... and sometimes am delayed by motorcades. Still. 3. Formal approval from university administration to release software with a free software license. Almost everything we do is on github: https://github.com/gwu-libraries 4. This position is a member of our Library Council (an HR designation akin to a tenure-like system). As such you would be eligible for additional benefits such as a paid sabbatical. 5. We need you and are ready for you. Our team is growing, taking on more work, and still establishing best practices, so it's a great time to join us as an experienced developer. Thanks for reading. Please consider applying! https://www.gwu.jobs/postings/12663 (go here to apply) -Dan p.s. we have several other jobs open now; seven total, to be precise: http://library.gwu.edu/about/organization/jobs/librarian
Re: [CODE4LIB] marc in json
On 12/1/2011 3:24 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: newline-delimited is certainly one simple solution, even though the aggregate file is not valid JSON. Does it matter? Not sure if there are any simple solutions that still give you valid JSON, but if there aren't, I'd rather sacrifice valid JSON (that it's unclear if there's any important use case for anyway), than sacrifice simplicity. That's the same question - does it matter? - that I had reading this thread. If you have a ton of records to pack into a file, are the advantages of sending a json mime type over http and viewing it in a browser with jsonovich or whatever worth it when it's a really big file anyway? Seems that having 3-4 parsers that share the exact same idea of how to read/write individual records is the main story, and a great step forward. +1 to y'all for getting this done. -1 to me for never following through with my half-done pymarc implementation at c4lc '09 or whenever it was. -Dan
Re: [CODE4LIB] Code4lib Seattle Keynote Speakers.
Er, sorry, bio's updated now: http://onebiglibrary.net/bio Hoping to make it worth your time and attention. -dc On Oct 4, 2011, at 12:22 PM, Anjanette Young wrote: Congratulations and thank you to Dan Chudnov and Bethany Nowviskie for agreeing to be the keynote speakers at #code4lib 2012. Dan. Daniel Chudnov is a librarian and programmer in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress. Previously, he worked as a software developer at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics, and contributed to several free software projects for libraries while working at the MIT Libraries and the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at the Yale University School of Medicine. He is a frequent speaker and author on technology and the importance of free software in libraries, and he writes a monthly column for Computers in Libraries magazine. He started the oss4lib weblog and listserv in 1999 to promote the use of free software in our community. Bethany. Bethany helps shape UVA’s support for digital scholarship by running a Library department that includes the Scholars’ Lab and a crack RD team devoted to scholarly interfaces. The SLab combines the services and resources of UVA Library’s former GeoStat and Etext Centers with end-user assistance from ITC’s Research Computing Support group. She is Associate Director of the Scholarly Information Institute (SCI), a Mellon funded think tank. Additionally, she is current Vice President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), a member of the MLA's Committee on Information Technology, and is Senior Advisor to NINES, for which she designed the Collex tool. Her doctorate is in English, and she has worked in the digital humanities as a designer, manager, and editor since 1995. Bethany's own research lies in the intersection of traditional interpretive methods with innovative social and algorithmic tools. Looking forward to seeing you all in Seattle. --Anj
Re: [CODE4LIB] Location of the first Code4Lib North meeting?
On Jan 20, 2010, at 12:49 PM, John Fereira wrote: Although Kingston is closest to me... +1 for Ottawa +1 for Montreal Agreed on the above. Any reason to return to Montreal is a good one, but I'd consider heading up for any of these locations. I'll be busy in late April so if you end up pushing the schedule back a bit I might crash the party. Great that you're doing this!
Re: [CODE4LIB] Ten years
On Apr 18, 2009, at 4:13 PM, Roy Tennant wrote: Domain Name:OSS4LIB.ORG Created On:17-Nov-1999 23:05:50 UTC That's just the domain. The site, and the list, went online in roughly February 1999, based at yale. Wayback found out about it in april: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://info.med.yale.edu/library/oss4lib So perhaps ten years isn't that far off after all. I also had no idea it was registered by someone in Portugal. All 280 of us here relocated the home office to Lisbon in 2006. Where have you been? And why don't you visit? In case anybody wondered, that list is still alive, as are the majority of its subscribers. Feel free to use it if you like. -Dan
[CODE4LIB] code4libcon schedule updates
To everyone attending code4libcon in Portland next week - be advised that the schedule is rounding into place, with some new additions you might not have heard about if you're not on the code4libcon-list: - The schedule is up to date at: http://code4lib.org/conference/2008/schedule - The three original pre-conference workshops (Evergreen, LibraryFind, Zotero) are all full up but should be great! - A separate KohaCamp will also take place Monday - For anyone not already attending the above, an unconference space is set up for Monday, too - Happy Hours are scheduled for both Tuesday and Wednesday, and everyone is invited! - A page listing proposed breakout sessions is available, please add your ideas in advance to help us all decide which to attend. All of the events mentioned above are scheduled to take place at the conference hotel. Links to more info about KohaCamp, unconference space, and the breakout sessions are right inline on the schedule. I'd encourage everyone attending the conference to consider joining the code4libcon list. You don't have to, but since we don't always make the point of copying every important message to this list, you're less likely to miss something. And you're more likely to be able to help ensure that this conference is the conference you want it to be! Looking forward to seeing everybody soon, -Dan
Re: [CODE4LIB] New LC Permalink Service
Cloutman, David wrote: The only problem is that if you pass a bad URL (i.e. for an invalid LC Card number, the resulting page for either MARC XML or human readable view gives you a response code of 200 instead of 404. This means that if you're basing functionality in your application to grab the data from one of these URLs, you'll have to write a bunch of funky logic rather than relying on the http standard. Definitely a step in the right direction, but it needs tweaking. This is great feedback. I hope you'll consider sending it back through to the developers of this service using the link provided in the FAQ in addition to sharing your thoughts here. :) -Dan
Re: [CODE4LIB] Code4Lib Journal
Jonathan Rochkind wrote: The first issue of the Code4Lib Journal is now available. http://journal.code4lib.org Hooray! Congrats to everybody involved.
Re: [CODE4LIB] Code4Lib journal idea revival?
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Ryan Eby wrote: Perhaps we could start by putting together a few anthology issues similar to what was planned as the lulu/print anthologies that Dchud started organizing? Methinks pbinkley gets/takes the credit/blame for starting and organizing and starting organizing, and not me, I think.
Re: [CODE4LIB] the journal project
On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: I was planning on creating a Google groups list (just cause it's easy) as a space for communicating on this project and working on getting it started. I intend to this before I leave today. Sorry I too am busy with a million things! But I think we can keep this going at a deliberate, if not lightning, pace. I plan to keep pushing the ball. Awesome. Nobody expects a lightning journal. Well, except maybe these people: http://www.thelightningjournal.com/ In any case, hooray for forward ball progress...
[CODE4LIB] not munging reply-to (was Re: [CODE4LIB] E-Resource Access Management Services)
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Ross Singer wrote: Well that probably didn't need to go to the whole world, but there you go. /me votes for turning off reply-to munging on this list.
Re: [CODE4LIB] Video encoding done - Mashup idea request
On Fri, 16 Mar 2007, Noel Peden wrote: We'll wait for the year after to try out 'bullet time' Matrix style shots. :) Any other suggestions? Yuen Woo-Ping for the keynote! And the pre-conference!
Re: [CODE4LIB] Planet code4lib
On Mar 6, 2007, at 5:45 PM, Roy Tennant wrote: It's worth noting that they all do this for no remuneration. Nothing re-indexes my arrays like restoring services from backups. Oh wait, you said re*mun*eration...
Re: [CODE4LIB] Videos?
On Mar 5, 2007, at 6:10 PM, Noel Peden wrote: Yes, I was planning on a mashup, time permitting... Code Monkey is a good fit. Rob Styles wrote: http://www.jonathancoulton.com/ Jonathan Coulton publishes all his work under a liberal CC license, which feels appropriate. One of his biggest hits, which did the rounds a few months back, was Code Monkey, which also felt appropriate. Perhaps a mashup of code4lib videos, photos and code monkey would be in order? If you do, I'd ask for access to raw video without added audio, too. -Dan
Re: [CODE4LIB] 2007 Conference Attendee List [openness]
On Feb 23, 2007, at 7:22 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: Kudos to the leadership. We have met the leadership and she is us.
Re: [CODE4LIB] svn update of frozen gems in rails app
On Feb 21, 2007, at 4:01 PM, [John McGrath] wrote: You might want to look into using svn:externals property on vendor/ plugins. John and Ed, thanks a ton for these. One of these is exactly what we need, we just need to think through the options. (Of course, being a Detroiter, I'm immediately partial to Piston...)
[CODE4LIB] another anthology thought
A quick link-scan of the suggested posts seems to indicate two things: (1) wow, there's a lot of great stuff there already, from a wide range of voices on a wide range of topics; (2) hmm, maybe there's a bit of natural recency bias, as in, most of the posts suggested so far seem to have been written later in the year. As for (2), I guess I'd just encourage everybody to go back to their favorite blogs and page through earlier posts if you haven't already (and, authors, verify that your archives links work). It's been fun rediscovering what had otherwise been barely a distant memory to me and my feedreader! Btw, I added two of my own posts with the comment (added/preferred by author) because I did and do, as was suggested. :) -Dan
[CODE4LIB] getting opac data into memory
Wow, spend a day in meetings and you come out to find a huge thread about OPAC scalability. Have those of you worried about scaling for repeated hits looked into just stuffing this data into memory? Heck, a lot of us could probably serve our whole opacs out of memory these days, query indexes included. Fire up memcached and keep a hash of unique ids to circ counts and status (and whatever else) in there. Tend the cache with a slow query running at night and expire/replace data marginally more aggressively as any item's usage numbers go up. Three cheers for Moore's Law! (Or did somebody already say that?)
[CODE4LIB] job opening in boston area
Fyi - there's an interesting position available for a web producer/developer at the Jewish Women's Archive in the Boston area (Brookline): http://jwa.org/aboutjwa/jobs.html#webproduction This might be a perfect opportunity for somebody with a background in women's studies or jewish studies or archives wanting to do more with their technical skills, or vice-versa. It's a small organization, so this position touches on many aspects of running an online archives, and your expertise would be highly valued. -Dan
Re: [CODE4LIB] Server names at libraries
The first shop with lots of servers I ever worked in went with apt musicians' names, which has stood up well enough that I still use it when I have the chance. hetfield (multi-core), hendrix (huge cpu), kravitz (low-end box but running slackware so it rocked just enough in 1995), monk (minimalist but beatifully evocative), a baby blue sgi server named sinatra, a purple sgi indigo named prince, that kind of thing. I still use this on my own machines. Where I work now there's a decades-long tradition of names of food- related stuff, like traditional dishes: seviche, feijoada, malbec, etc. This works because we always have postdocs coming and going from all over the world, such that nobody here actually knows what every kind of food the servers are named for might look or taste like. Sometimes makes for long server names, though. They all get aliased to more useful public service names, but we still refer to them by their food names here. Worst server naming strategy ever: DDC based on a rough assignment of server roles. e.g.: this one is being used for a blog written by patient caregivers so we're calling it '808.899213620425'. -Dan
[CODE4LIB] sheesh.
I swear, I didn't find those other code search sites just by reading the slashdot entry. I had long since saved them in unalog, and pulled them up just in response to Eric's message here. Honest! I just now saw the slashdot piece. Really! /me sulks away lamely, cheering up only upon thinking of baseball in Detroit in October...
Re: [CODE4LIB] code4lib journal
On May 4, 2006, at 10:16 AM, Eric Hellman wrote: Our software has exception code for THE Journal, but it still is a problem. Mess is lore.
Re: [CODE4LIB] code4lib journal
On May 3, 2006, at 10:27 PM, Eric Hellman wrote: Here's the latest on the code4lib journal: /lib/dev: A Journal for Library Programmers won the journal name vote. (See http://www.code4lib.org/node/96 for more details.) The idea of a journal name that contains punctuation in the title is so breathtakingly /lib/dev: It'll take your breath away! -Dan
Re: [CODE4LIB] really rudimentary catalog [coins] [unapi]
On Mar 20, 2006, at 8:34 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: On Mar 20, 2006, at 8:22 AM, Edward Summers wrote: So, the idea is to insert coins into each of my bibliographic records. After doing so user-agents that crawl the site, or user- agents equipped with some sort of coins-aware tool/plugin will convert the coin into an OpenURL and allow the user to resolve it against their local resolver. No? Yes, that's the idea. But wait, there's more! With the new unAPI spec, you can also allow eager hackers to mashup and rewire your cataloged data and objects web-2.0 style just by including a tiny bit of additional html and a small set of function calls. http://unapi.info/specs/ There's a list of cool examples already in the wild: http://unapi.info/examples.html ...among them, even, a validator from Mr. Summers, to help you to know how your unAPI service is doing. Rudimentary 2.0! -dc
[CODE4LIB] unAPI revision 1
At code4lib last week a good-sized group with insane combinations of expertise in OAI-PMH, SRU, and OpenURL helped to nail down revision one of unAPI. Its background and objectives are: unAPI is a simple website API convention. There are many wonderful APIs and protocols for syndicating, searching, and harvesting content from diverse services on the web. They’re all great, and they’re all already widely used, but they’re all different. We want one API for the most basic operations necessary to perform simple clipboard-copy functions across all sites. We also want this API to be able to be easily layered on top of other well-known APIs. The objective of unAPI is to enable web sites with HTML interfaces to information-rich objects to simultaneously publish richly structured metadata for those objects, or those objects themselves, in a predictable and consistent way for machine processing. http://code4lib.org/specs/unapi/revision-1 This revision is a lot better than unAPI version 0. There are a number of implementations in development and we're hoping to show it off more soon. Also, I did a talk on unAPI last week which I'll post soon (any news on the audio yet?). If this interests anyone here, please consider sending comments/feedback to the gcs-pcs-list, which is the list of record for unAPI development. http://cipolo.med.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/gcs-pcs-list unAPI is a ROGUE 05 specification. The deadline for revision 2 is mid-March. http://www.code4lib.org/wiki/rogue Thanks, -Dan
Re: [CODE4LIB] A code4lib journal proposal
On Feb 21, 2006, at 11:27 PM, Mark Jordan wrote: In other words, http://code4lib.org/ could _be_ the journal but it could be a new type of journal. I'll second this. Four years ago we started /usr/lib/info for roughly this same purpose, and a number of these same people (usual suspects?) were involved in that. Back then things were different web-wise; the interspeedomushification of technorati and bloglines and such didn't exist or weren't what they are now, only a minority of our potential readership/contributorship was in the habit of posting comments to blogs, and this community wasn't what it is now. That all that's changed was made inarguably evident to me in the past month. Today's bloglines or whathaveyou tell you when somebody's writing about whatnot nearly instantly, comments on the new oss4lib.org have practically already surpassed what used to show up in the old one, and we're a strong enough community to pull off a kick-ass conference invented in near real-time. code4lib.org has nearly everything we need already, including the branding, whatever that means, and among us are plenty who know how to make drupal do what it needs or whatever we might invent a need for. So if /usr/lib/info was a fledgling librarians' first effort at transformation, our little community must already be founding that next special issue. All good things to those that write. (Hmm, okay, well, maybe hollywood serial killer wasn't the best motif to reference... you get the point, though.) I've been posting news and revisions of unAPI to code4lib.org because it's already simply the best place to put it. Where else would it go? Seems just about in line with where you're suggesting we head. -dchud
