[CODE4LIB] Recommendations for places to advertise for a library systems guru?

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

I thought I'd ask folks what resources and places one could advertise
positions that might not fall in some of the more traditional for libraries
for systems folks.

The more obvious seem to be LITA/ALA, here at Code4Lib, and perhaps some of
the other library organizations. Also postings in newspapers in the area is
a typical move by us.

But I'm also considering IEEE & ACM job listings and asking CS faculty for
recommendations.

I'm sure there's even more that I haven't thought of. So I'm curious about
other suggestions or ideas? Particularly are there any that have worked to
draw in candidates with a strong IT background?

Jon Gorman
University of Illinois

Re: [CODE4LIB] Book Club software tools and approaches?

[Jon Gorman]

I like the Google Drive Form idea.  MIght be able to do that or some
variation. Thanks!


Jon Gorman


On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 3:39 PM, Matt Cordial  wrote:

> We've been using a G+ community for event announcements and discussions.
> It's been fine. We're pretty small so we don't need a lot in terms of
> management.
>
> https://plus.google.com/communities/113393567679559625537
>
>  For voting, we've used both a Google Drive Form and simply a discussion
> thread.
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 6:38 AM, Jon Gorman 
> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I've been musing on software tools that might be useful for book clubs.
> >
> > I'm not necessarily looking for a turnkey solution explicitly geared
> > towards book clubs, but more a thought experiment of what tools might be
> > useful for an ongoing "in the real world" book club.
> >
> > Some needs that software tools might help keep track of:
> >
> > * A way to vote for what books to read next
> > * Schedule of times
> > * An estimator calculator (reading level of book + length of book,
> > estimated sessions).
> > * way to add notes or linked materials
> > * online discussions to supplement in person meetings
> > * glossary/dictionary functionality perhaps?
> >
> > In my own thoughts some of the online services like GoodReads, Shelfari
> and
> > LibraryThing seems to at least offer some tools and information. A system
> > that I haven't had a chance to explore enough, Loomis, might help with
> the
> > decision making parts.
> >
> >
> > Part of the impetus for this is I've recently joined a technical book
> club.
> > At the moment we're using a wiki, which is working fine, but in
> particular
> > the voting is clunky.  I could picture something where members can
> add/link
> > to something like librarything in a list and the book with the most votes
> > (w/ ties being broken randomly) is the next book in the queue.
> >
> > So anyone out there already doing something similar? Thoughts? Ideas?
> >
> > Jon Gorman
> > University of Illinois
> >
>

[CODE4LIB] Book Club software tools and approaches?

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

I've been musing on software tools that might be useful for book clubs.

I'm not necessarily looking for a turnkey solution explicitly geared
towards book clubs, but more a thought experiment of what tools might be
useful for an ongoing "in the real world" book club.

Some needs that software tools might help keep track of:

* A way to vote for what books to read next
* Schedule of times
* An estimator calculator (reading level of book + length of book,
estimated sessions).
* way to add notes or linked materials
* online discussions to supplement in person meetings
* glossary/dictionary functionality perhaps?

In my own thoughts some of the online services like GoodReads, Shelfari and
LibraryThing seems to at least offer some tools and information. A system
that I haven't had a chance to explore enough, Loomis, might help with the
decision making parts.


Part of the impetus for this is I've recently joined a technical book club.
At the moment we're using a wiki, which is working fine, but in particular
the voting is clunky.  I could picture something where members can add/link
to something like librarything in a list and the book with the most votes
(w/ ties being broken randomly) is the next book in the queue.

So anyone out there already doing something similar? Thoughts? Ideas?

Jon Gorman
University of Illinois

Re: [CODE4LIB] Call for Old Conf Tshirt Logos

[Jon Gorman]

I'll try to do some digging as well

Jon Gorman


On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 9:38 AM, Lisa Rabey  wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 8:30 AM, Francis Kayiwa 
> wrote:
> >
> > +1
> >
> > Go for it Lisa!
> >
> > ./fxk
>
>
> I can start digging into the hows/whys sometime in early May and
> report back. If anyone has anything of interest (past C4L list convos,
> recommendations, etc), pass them along!
>
>
> --
>
> Lisa M. Rabey | @pnkrcklibrarian
>
> 
> http://exitpursuedbyabear.net | http://lisa.rabey.net
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] Call for Old Conf Tshirt Logos

[Jon Gorman]

I've long thought a "friends of code4lib" would be useful organization, but
never quite pulled it together...
On Apr 10, 2014 10:41 PM, "Tom Cramer"  wrote:

> > Is black light a 501c3?
>
> Nope. Just an OSS project with lots of contributors from awesome places : )
>
> Off the top of my head, and in alphabetical order, the obvious (to me)
> ones in this space that might be candidates are DuraSpace and Lyrasis.
>
> In time, DP.LA seems like a great possible candidate, though it is
> US-centric, I'm unsure of its corporate status (though they do seem to be
> able to cash and sign checks), and right now they might view C4L as a
> distraction more than an asset or timely alliance. (Others on this list
> might be in a better position to comment, ahem...)
>
> I'm sure I'm leaving out other possibilities.
>
> - Tom
>
>
>
>
> > Riley Childs
> > Student
> > Asst. Head of IT Services
> > Charlotte United Christian Academy
> > (704) 497-2086
> > RileyChilds.net
> > Sent from my Windows Phone, please excuse mistakes
> > 
> > From: Roy Tennant
> > Sent: 4/10/2014 11:25 PM
> > To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Call for Old Conf Tshirt Logos
> >
> > We should probably toss out some ideas before approaching anyone. Getting
> > the right fit would be important. Which 501(c)3's in our space do we
> think
> > we may want to approach about being our fiscal agent? Maybe we should
> > collect a list of suggestions and then (natch) vote on who to approach?
> We
> > could then go down the list until we got a "yes".
> > Roy
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 8:21 PM, Riley Childs  >wrote:
> >
> >> That might be a better idea then a fully independent code4lib
> organization.
> >>
> >> Riley Childs
> >> Student
> >> Asst. Head of IT Services
> >> Charlotte United Christian Academy
> >> (704) 497-2086
> >> RileyChilds.net
> >> Sent from my Windows Phone, please excuse mistakes
> >> 
> >> From: Tom Cramer
> >> Sent: 4/10/2014 11:20 PM
> >> To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> >> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Call for Old Conf Tshirt Logos
> >>
> >> What about approaching one of the existing 501c3's in our space to see
> if
> >> they might be interested in and able to take this on for the community?
> >>
> >> In addition to shirt revenues and yacht maintenance fees, it would be
> good
> >> to have an agency that could help do banking for scholarships, and
> perhaps
> >> pay forward any surpluses from one year's conference to the next year's
> >> hosts.
> >>
> >> - Tom
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Apr 10, 2014, at 8:10 PM, Riley Childs wrote:
> >>
> >>> No, I think it should go toward my yacht ;P.
> >>> In all seriousness, code4lib needs an entity, simply to collect money
> >> for this sorta thing. LegalZoom any one? ;)
> >>>
> >>> Riley Childs
> >>> Student
> >>> Asst. Head of IT Services
> >>> Charlotte United Christian Academy
> >>> (704) 497-2086
> >>> RileyChilds.net
> >>> Sent from my Windows Phone, please excuse mistakes
> >>> 
> >>> From: Alicia Cozine
> >>> Sent: 4/10/2014 11:07 PM
> >>> To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> >>> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Call for Old Conf Tshirt Logos
> >>>
> >>> Could one of the scholarship sponsors adopt this as a way to fund
> future
> >> conference scholarships?
> >>>
> >>> Alicia
> >>>
> >>> On Apr 10, 2014, at 9:53 PM, Roy Tennant  wrote:
> >>>
>  That's good on the tax front, but it would be nice if eventually we
> >> could
>  find a way to make money to help out with the conference. But that
> will
>  take an organization, and so far we've avoided that.
>  Roy
> 
> 
>  On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 5:42 PM, Riley Childs <
> rchi...@cucawarriors.com
> >>> wrote:
> 
> > It is running though spreadshirt set up with 0% commissions, so no
> >> monies
> > are being collected. I think as long as I don't collect any money, we
> > should be good.
> >
> > Riley Childs
> > Junior
> > IT Admin
> > email: rchi...@cucawarriors.com
> > office: +1 (704) 537-0031 x101
> > cell: +1 (704) 497-2086
> >
> > Please Think Before Hitting Reply All
> > I Do Web Design! RileyChilds.net/services
> > 
> > From: Code for Libraries [CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of
> Cary
> > Gordon [listu...@chillco.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 8:27 PM
> > To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Call for Old Conf Tshirt Logos
> >
> > I hope that the IRS doesn't put a lien on the yacht he buys with the
> > proceeds.
> >
> > You're right, though. Probably better if some organization or
> >> institution
> > could step up. Again we are slightly challenged by o

Re: [CODE4LIB] problem in old etd xml files

[Jon Gorman]

Right, hence my earlier suggestion of just replacing the entities ;). It's
not exactly the approach you describe, as your would would deal with common
cases that didn't get properly set up in the dtd, but it also would be a
bit more difficult to map for weird custom entities.

My email was a bit rambling, but the magic sauce I recommended was
something like

xmllint --loaddtd --noent --dropdtd FRONT.XML > FRONT_nodtdent.xml

(In reality you'd want to automate that a little more, xmllint uses the
libxml libraries if I remember correctly, so there are likely bindings that
do the same thing.)

What that seems to do is loads the dtd (which xmllint no longer does unless
it needs to), takes any entity and replaces it with what's in the dtd, and
then just drops the dtd. I didn't look closely, but it doesn't seem to just
transplant it with the numeric code (ÿ), but use the actual unicode
character.

(You still need to fix the several mistakes that have already been observed
and pointed out by folks like Jason, the xml:stylesheet that needs to be
xml-stylesheet, making sure the filename are actually correct for
case-sensitive OSes.)

Jon G.


On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 7:48 PM, Roy Tennant  wrote:

> For my money, the text transform should look only for exact matches (e.g.,
> "á", " ", "©") and replace them with their numeric
> counterparts.
> Roy
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 5:41 PM, jason bengtson  >wrote:
>
> > For testing purposes I just nixed them. As I noted, to rework the file a
> > person would probably want to use a more critical eye with find and
> > replace. Totally doable.
> >
> >
> > On Dec 9, 2013, at 7:37 PM, Jon Gorman 
> wrote:
> >
> > > How did you fix the ampersands? I ask, because if you just did a simple
> > > text transform from & to &, it would mask the problem of the entity
> > > escaping I think...
> > >
> > > Not at work, so I don't have a good example and the file is downloading
> > > very slowly here, so I'll try to do one from memory.
> > >
> > > There were several á in the XML which mapped to an accent
> > character
> > > in the DTD via the Entity.
> > >
> > > If you just substituted & with &, you'd get á, which
> would
> > > render inline as &accute;. It would superficially solve the issue since
> > > browsers would no longer give the errors about the dtd since it
> wouldn't
> > be
> > > trying to load entities from the DTDs. And depending how you did it,
> you
> > > likely could also replace a correctly encoded one to make &,
> > > leading to some very odd stuff.
> > >
> > > I wouldn't be surprised to find some unescaped ampersands, but the
> > solution
> > > I posted will essentially replace the entities with their text,
> hopefully
> > > causing most characters to appear correctly. You definitely still need
> to
> > > fix some of the other stuff. (I suspect it never worked for most
> browsers
> > > and XML systems, most likely only IE).
> > >
> > > Jon Gorman
> > > University of Illinois
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Jason Bengtson, MLIS, MA
> > Head of Library Computing and Information SystemsAssistant Professor,
> > Graduate CollegeDepartment of Health Sciences Library and Information
> > ManagementUniversity of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center405-271-2285, opt.
> > 5405-271-3297 (fax)
> > jason-bengt...@ouhsc.edu
> > http://library.ouhsc.edu
> > www.jasonbengtson.com
> >
> > NOTICE:
> > This e-mail is intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it
> is
> > addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or
> > otherwise exempt from disclosure. If the reader of this e-mail is not the
> > intended recipient or the employee or agent responsible for delivering
> the
> > message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any
> > dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly
> > prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please
> > immediately notify us by replying to the original message at the listed
> > email address. Thank You.
> >
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] problem in old etd xml files

[Jon Gorman]

How did you fix the ampersands? I ask, because if you just did a simple
text transform from & to &, it would mask the problem of the entity
escaping I think...

Not at work, so I don't have a good example and the file is downloading
very slowly here, so I'll try to do one from memory.

There were several á in the XML which mapped to an accent character
in the DTD via the Entity.

If you just substituted & with &, you'd get á, which would
render inline as &accute;. It would superficially solve the issue since
browsers would no longer give the errors about the dtd since it wouldn't be
trying to load entities from the DTDs. And depending how you did it, you
likely could also replace a correctly encoded one to make &,
leading to some very odd stuff.

I wouldn't be surprised to find some unescaped ampersands, but the solution
I posted will essentially replace the entities with their text, hopefully
causing most characters to appear correctly. You definitely still need to
fix some of the other stuff. (I suspect it never worked for most browsers
and XML systems, most likely only IE).

Jon Gorman
University of Illinois

Re: [CODE4LIB] problem in old etd xml files

[Jon Gorman]

A lot of modern systems won't load entities (or will limit it somehow)
because of the denial of service attack that is possible.  Look for XML
Entity Reference Denial of Service. I can't remember if Public declarations
are treated any differently than System ones. (I would have suspected it to
trust SYSTEM ones more, but they'd still be exploitable by the same bug).


(There's also a fair number of other errors, I'm somewhat skeptical that
the example worked on many browsers even then. It's possible IE was
flexible enough it would have worked).

One thing you might want to do is is take out the entities.

I can't remember why I had to do this, but xmllint seemed to do the trick.
( I found a snippet at
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/614067/how-to-resolve-all-entity-references-in-xml-and-create-a-new-xml-in-c,
but it' smissing the necessary --loaddtd)

xmllint --loaddtd --noent --dropdtd FRONT.xml > FRONT_nodtdent.xml

I mean, you don't need the dtd for validation, particularly since I suspect
given the errors it may not validate anyhow.

It might make the files a little harder to read when reading the raw
source, but I suspect that's not typically a problem.

Jon Gorman
University of Illinois



On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Robertson, Wendy C <
wendy-robert...@uiowa.edu> wrote:

> Back in 1999-2002 a handful of our theses were submitted  as a collection
> of xml files.  We posted the files in our repository several years ago (we
> posted a zipped folder with all the files).  At that time, if you opened
> front.xml you would be able to access the thesis. We have not touched the
> files in the close to 5 years since we posted them, but the files no longer
> open correctly. One of the problem theses is http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/189/.
>
> Front.xml begins
> 
> 
> 
>
> I have tried the following changes but they do not help
>
> 1)  Adding standalone="no"? to the xml declaration  --  version="1.0" " encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
>
> 2)  Changing the case of "UIowa2K1.css" and "UIowa2K.dtd" to match the
> files (which are in all caps)
>
> 3)  Changing xml:stylesheet to xml-stylesheet
>
> Chrome shows errors that entities are not defined, but they are defined in
> the dtd.
>
> I would appreciate any assistance in making these documents available
> again. Thanks!
>
> Wendy Robertson
> Digital Scholarship Librarian *  The University of Iowa Libraries
> 1015 Main Library  *  Iowa City, Iowa 52242
> wendy-robert...@uiowa.edu * 319-335-5821
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] ILLiad - RemoteAuth and OpenURL

[Jon Gorman]

By the way,  a similar thread on the ezproxy list brought up this list:

http://mail.geneseo.edu/mailman/listinfo/workflowtoolkit-l

Which is apparently about ILLiad best practices.  I've just subscribed and
started reading through the archives.

Jon Gorman
University of Illinois


On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 3:53 PM, Jimmy Ghaphery  wrote:

> yeh for us we did go with the documentation as best we could and use an
> ISAPI
> filter. The final straw for us as a hosted site was that OCLC said they
> could not support this method and steered us to the EzProxy auth method.
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Jon Gorman  >wrote:
>
> > > I am also following this conversation, I am wondering if you consult
> the
> > following about RemoteAuth Authentication,
> > > but still failed?
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://prometheus.atlas-sys.com/display/illiad/RemoteAuth+Authentication
> > >
> > > Ling
> > > UIC Library
> >
> > Don't know about Jimmy, but the flow on that page is one of the issues we
> > have. We can't trigger the system to have that login behavior.  From
> what I
> > can tell of the logs, it decides the page to redirect to in a session
> > before it ever checks the user status or the remote user header.  I don't
> > know how, given that, that the flow could really happen that way. (I
> might
> > be missing something).
> >
> > As far as I can tell the other settings are what they should be, after
> all
> > if they weren't I can't imagine that it would work most of the time, just
> > not on the initial logon.
> >
> > We did have an issue with a session heartbeat type of thing that had a
> > similar behavior (the headers would just drop off, somehow associated
> with
> > the heartbeat process). Thankfully we were able to disable that in the
> > authentication software.
> >
> > Does anyone using RemoteAuth actually see that flow (get challenged to
> > either register or update your info after first successful login?)  If
> you
> > do, what are you using as a link into the system?
> >
> >
> > Jon Gorman
> > University of Illinois
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Jimmy Ghaphery
> Head, Digital Technologies
> VCU Libraries
> 804-827-3551
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] ILLiad - RemoteAuth and OpenURL

[Jon Gorman]

> I am also following this conversation, I am wondering if you consult the
following about RemoteAuth Authentication,
> but still failed?
>
> https://prometheus.atlas-sys.com/display/illiad/RemoteAuth+Authentication
>
> Ling
> UIC Library

Don't know about Jimmy, but the flow on that page is one of the issues we
have. We can't trigger the system to have that login behavior.  From what I
can tell of the logs, it decides the page to redirect to in a session
before it ever checks the user status or the remote user header.  I don't
know how, given that, that the flow could really happen that way. (I might
be missing something).

As far as I can tell the other settings are what they should be, after all
if they weren't I can't imagine that it would work most of the time, just
not on the initial logon.

We did have an issue with a session heartbeat type of thing that had a
similar behavior (the headers would just drop off, somehow associated with
the heartbeat process). Thankfully we were able to disable that in the
authentication software.

Does anyone using RemoteAuth actually see that flow (get challenged to
either register or update your info after first successful login?)  If you
do, what are you using as a link into the system?


Jon Gorman
University of Illinois

Re: [CODE4LIB] ILLiad - RemoteAuth and OpenURL

[Jon Gorman]

Actually, we tried just dumping in the default templates in a test
yesterday.  That seemed to fix the issue at the time, but I got distracted
by another thing going on.  This morning I was having the same issue
again.  (This has been tricky to debug, it almost seems as if sometimes
there's a session cookie hanging on or perhaps there's a race condition).

I might try that again in a bit.

One thing I haven't really gotten a good answer on is what is the
state/point of the login forms with RemoteAuth.The impression I got from
some conversations with OCLC was that they're not used with RemoteAuth and
you're supposed to either to the .dll or to illiad.dll?action=10&form=10.

Jon Gorman
University of Illinois


On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 1:09 PM, Durrant, Benjamin E.  wrote:

> Have you added the FORMSTATE token to the login forms? We've been running
> into some similar issues recently and I just dug up this in the
> documentation:
>
> https://prometheus.atlas-sys.com/display/illiad/ILLiad+Web+DLL+Tags#ILLiadWebDLLTags-TheFormstateTag
>
> So it sounds like this was added in 8.1, but if you've modified the pages
> yourself you need to manually add this token into your page code.
>
> I haven't made the change on our pages yet, but I plan to shortly and can
> report back.
>
> Ben Durrant
> Web Developer - UST Libraries
> http://www.stthomas.edu/libraries
> bdurr...@stthomas.edu
> 651-962-5416
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of
> Jon Gorman
> Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2013 12:52 PM
> To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] ILLiad - RemoteAuth and OpenURL
>
> Hi all,
>
> I was wondering if anyone has seen an issue with the ILLiad RemoteAuth
> module and OpenURL where the remote user header doesn't seem to get
> recognized and a session doesn't created successfully.
>
>
> Here's how the flow is going:
>
> 1) User clicks on an OpenURL somewhere
> 2) User hits our authentication system (CA SIteminder) login apge
> 3) they log in
> 4) The open url seems to get parsed
>  into fields and the proper form selected
> 5) The web request goes through, complains it doesn't see an http header
> set and no cookie set and displays the content of the Logon2.html
> page/logoff page
> 6) However, the actual address bar is set just fine. If you hit refresh
> (or return in the address bar in some browsers) it launches a new session
> just fine and auto-fills out the form.
>
> As a workaround we're dong a javascript refresh, which works some of the
> time.  (Will be improving that, but would like to just fix the issue)
>
> This might be related to another issue we're seeing where on the initial
> login (to main menu) it never redirects to NewAuthRegistration.html or
> ChangeUserInformation.html.  If it's a new user, they just get created w/
> defaults.  The page always shown is Main Menu. The documentation & support
> at OCLC indicate that the application is supposed to be smart enough that
> on initial login it'll always either go to the NewAuthRegistration.html or
> ChangeUserInformation.html as appropriate.
>
> As a workaround currently we have a landing page that links to the Main
> Menu, NewAuthRegistration and ChangeUserInformation and advise users to
> register if they haven't or change their info if need be.
>
> The OCLC forums seem on the fritz. Is there any other good places to go
> with ILLiad questions. (I've been talking to OCLC Support, thinking more in
> terms of community support)
>

[CODE4LIB] ILLiad - RemoteAuth and OpenURL

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has seen an issue with the ILLiad RemoteAuth
module and OpenURL where the remote user header doesn't seem to get
recognized and a session doesn't created successfully.


Here's how the flow is going:

1) User clicks on an OpenURL somewhere
2) User hits our authentication system (CA SIteminder) login apge
3) they log in
4) The open url seems to get parsed
 into fields and the proper form selected
5) The web request goes through, complains it doesn't see an http header
set and no cookie set and displays the content of the Logon2.html
page/logoff page
6) However, the actual address bar is set just fine. If you hit refresh (or
return in the address bar in some browsers) it launches a new session just
fine and auto-fills out the form.

As a workaround we're dong a javascript refresh, which works some of the
time.  (Will be improving that, but would like to just fix the issue)

This might be related to another issue we're seeing where on the initial
login (to main menu) it never redirects to NewAuthRegistration.html or
ChangeUserInformation.html.  If it's a new user, they just get created w/
defaults.  The page always shown is Main Menu. The documentation & support
at OCLC indicate that the application is supposed to be smart enough that
on initial login it'll always either go to the NewAuthRegistration.html or
ChangeUserInformation.html as appropriate.

As a workaround currently we have a landing page that links to the Main
Menu, NewAuthRegistration and ChangeUserInformation and advise users to
register if they haven't or change their info if need be.

The OCLC forums seem on the fritz. Is there any other good places to go
with ILLiad questions. (I've been talking to OCLC Support, thinking more in
terms of community support)

[CODE4LIB] Goose Island - quick stupid question - where does bus leave from

[Jon Gorman]

Does the bus leave from the hotel or the uic forum?


Jon Gorman

[CODE4LIB] Code4LIb 2013 - Game Night - hotel card found

[Jon Gorman]

HI folks,

Someone who attended the game night left their room key. It's been
passed along to some of the folks who will be opening the conference
tomorrrow and they'll also make an announcement about it.


Jon Gorman

[CODE4LIB] C4L2013 Game Night - UIC Library

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

Some quick notes:

Again, there's a sign up for individual games. This will make it
easier for us to get started quickly and also help from having a large
crowd of people just standing around,
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2013_game_night .  If you brought a
game and want to play it, add it to the list.

We're going to stop playing a little earlier than we had on the wiki.
we're hoping to close and lock the doors at 10:30, so if people should
be winding down at 10:00.

It's recommend to travel back to the conference hotel in groups.

Please bring your badge with so it'll be a bit easier to make sure
folks in the room are people who are supposed to be there.

If there's overflow, we'll try to form groups at the room to go out to
try to find some spaces to game at.  There's some restaurants on
Halsted by the UIC Forum.

Again, the wiki should have the latest info.

Jon G.

Re: [CODE4LIB] Game Night Code4Lib 2013

[Jon Gorman]

I've add the page at
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2013_game_night.  Sorry, I realize
this is a bit last minute.

If for some reason you can't edit the wiki but want to sign up for a
slot or add a game you're willing to run, send the info to me.  I'll
add it as I get time.

I'll probably be adding some more of my games, but I need to go to dinner ;).

Jon Gorman

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 6:59 PM, Jon Gorman  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Sorry for a bit of delay on posting.  I've got a few folks who have
> volunteered to help. It's hard to tell numbers for sure, since some
> folks might not come and others may show up that haven't signed up.
>
> As Francis says, the solution is likely to be nimble.  (And again, I
> want to thank Francis and the rest of the host crew.  They've been
> doing fabulous with disorganized folks like me ;) ).
>
> First, some logistical details.
>
> I'm thinking that we'll say that a goal will be to have this rough schedule:
>
> 7:30   - start setting up games, getting organized
> 7:45   - start first round of games
> 10:30 - start wrapping up.
> 11:00 - call it a night?  (Walk back or catch the bus as a group to
> various hotels may not be a bad idea)
>
> I've got a plan (with helpful advice from several folks, thanks!), and
> we'll see if it a works. I'm going to work a bit tonight on setting up
> a new page on the wiki. It's going to be structured in a manner that's
> similar to the newcoming dinner, but instead will be games. Each game
> will have a number of seats. If you're bringing a game and are willing
> to play/teach it, add an entry.  Estimate a starting time if it's not
> going to be when it starts.
>
> t'll probably look something like...
>
> Game Name (#n - if more than one entry for the game, add a number to
> make less confusing) 7:45.
> Game description (with maybe link to boardgamegeek)
> 1. Patty Gauzweiller (T)
> 2. Leslie Humphries
> 3. Mona Wert
> 4. Eddie Ramirez
> 5.
>
> To sign up, put your name in one of the seats.  Don't add seats ;). If
> you can teach/lead the game, note it. (If you want to teach but not
> play, that's awesome. I haven't quite figured out how to note this,
> but I'm thinking I'll just add a line at the bottom.)
>
> We'll try to set up sections big enough for the games and put up signs.
>
> Here's the warning.  I'll probably be making judgement calls on what
> games get set up in the "main room", preferring games that I and any
> volunteers just coordinating can teach to go there and also based on
> other factors.  If we hit the reasonable size for the room, we'll try
> to have some recommendations for places to go w the group.
>
> This is probably not the ideal solution as it makes quicker/lighter
> games somewhat tricky, but I'm hoping for some of those some people
> won't mind playing multiple games in the row, maybe teaching someone
> who will teach the next group and allow a little of mingling that way.
>
> Jon Gorman
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Francis Kayiwa  wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 04:39:22PM -0500, Cynthia Ng wrote:
>>> Just an idea if space is really an issue. Would it be possible to
>>> simply get a second room next to (or at least nearby) the first one?
>>> As I image not everyone will be playing the same game, I don't see it
>>> as a problem.
>>
>> As I said to Jon. The people here will have to be nimble. The big
>> problem is as a `historically` commuter campus the open spaces become a
>> premium late and night. What we will need from those who signed up is
>> willingness to track email/wiki for changes. I've asked for other spaces
>> but no word yet. Finally unless you have more than 40, this room will
>> fit the current number without a problem.
>>
>> Also no (as they will find out when they get there) it isn't a matter of
>> spill over to the next room.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> ./fxk
>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Jon Gorman  
>>> wrote:
>>> > Hi all,
>>> >
>>> > I've been getting some questions and I realized there was some
>>> > confusion about the Game night.  I was a bit late in organizing it and
>>> > quite frankly haven't done the best job.
>>> >
>>> > I put out a request for people to express their interest on by Jan.
>>> > 14th by signing up on the wiki or sending me an email, but I didn't
>>> > actually put that date in the wiki and it was only ment

Re: [CODE4LIB] Game Night Code4Lib 2013

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

Sorry for a bit of delay on posting.  I've got a few folks who have
volunteered to help. It's hard to tell numbers for sure, since some
folks might not come and others may show up that haven't signed up.

As Francis says, the solution is likely to be nimble.  (And again, I
want to thank Francis and the rest of the host crew.  They've been
doing fabulous with disorganized folks like me ;) ).

First, some logistical details.

I'm thinking that we'll say that a goal will be to have this rough schedule:

7:30   - start setting up games, getting organized
7:45   - start first round of games
10:30 - start wrapping up.
11:00 - call it a night?  (Walk back or catch the bus as a group to
various hotels may not be a bad idea)

I've got a plan (with helpful advice from several folks, thanks!), and
we'll see if it a works. I'm going to work a bit tonight on setting up
a new page on the wiki. It's going to be structured in a manner that's
similar to the newcoming dinner, but instead will be games. Each game
will have a number of seats. If you're bringing a game and are willing
to play/teach it, add an entry.  Estimate a starting time if it's not
going to be when it starts.

t'll probably look something like...

Game Name (#n - if more than one entry for the game, add a number to
make less confusing) 7:45.
Game description (with maybe link to boardgamegeek)
1. Patty Gauzweiller (T)
2. Leslie Humphries
3. Mona Wert
4. Eddie Ramirez
5.

To sign up, put your name in one of the seats.  Don't add seats ;). If
you can teach/lead the game, note it. (If you want to teach but not
play, that's awesome. I haven't quite figured out how to note this,
but I'm thinking I'll just add a line at the bottom.)

We'll try to set up sections big enough for the games and put up signs.

Here's the warning.  I'll probably be making judgement calls on what
games get set up in the "main room", preferring games that I and any
volunteers just coordinating can teach to go there and also based on
other factors.  If we hit the reasonable size for the room, we'll try
to have some recommendations for places to go w the group.

This is probably not the ideal solution as it makes quicker/lighter
games somewhat tricky, but I'm hoping for some of those some people
won't mind playing multiple games in the row, maybe teaching someone
who will teach the next group and allow a little of mingling that way.

Jon Gorman




On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Francis Kayiwa  wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 04:39:22PM -0500, Cynthia Ng wrote:
>> Just an idea if space is really an issue. Would it be possible to
>> simply get a second room next to (or at least nearby) the first one?
>> As I image not everyone will be playing the same game, I don't see it
>> as a problem.
>
> As I said to Jon. The people here will have to be nimble. The big
> problem is as a `historically` commuter campus the open spaces become a
> premium late and night. What we will need from those who signed up is
> willingness to track email/wiki for changes. I've asked for other spaces
> but no word yet. Finally unless you have more than 40, this room will
> fit the current number without a problem.
>
> Also no (as they will find out when they get there) it isn't a matter of
> spill over to the next room.
>
> Cheers,
> ./fxk
>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Jon Gorman  
>> wrote:
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > I've been getting some questions and I realized there was some
>> > confusion about the Game night.  I was a bit late in organizing it and
>> > quite frankly haven't done the best job.
>> >
>> > I put out a request for people to express their interest on by Jan.
>> > 14th by signing up on the wiki or sending me an email, but I didn't
>> > actually put that date in the wiki and it was only mentioned in the
>> > email on this list (which was on the 10th of Jan if I remember).  That
>> > wasn't a hard and fast deadline, mostly so we could get an idea of
>> > what sized room we need.  However, in the past week or two , we've
>> > gotten a lot more people sign up and I've also heard from several
>> > folks now that they thought the signup was only for bringing games.
>> > As it stand though I realized this morning we had about 15 people
>> > expressing interest a month ago and now are looking at over twice that
>> > number.
>> >
>> > I don't want to turn anyone away, but this does pose some logistical 
>> > hurdles.
>> >
>> > Mea cupla, this is my fault, not any of the Chicago folks.  I'm going
>> > to try to wo

[CODE4LIB] Game Night Code4Lib 2013

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

I've been getting some questions and I realized there was some
confusion about the Game night.  I was a bit late in organizing it and
quite frankly haven't done the best job.

I put out a request for people to express their interest on by Jan.
14th by signing up on the wiki or sending me an email, but I didn't
actually put that date in the wiki and it was only mentioned in the
email on this list (which was on the 10th of Jan if I remember).  That
wasn't a hard and fast deadline, mostly so we could get an idea of
what sized room we need.  However, in the past week or two , we've
gotten a lot more people sign up and I've also heard from several
folks now that they thought the signup was only for bringing games.
As it stand though I realized this morning we had about 15 people
expressing interest a month ago and now are looking at over twice that
number.

I don't want to turn anyone away, but this does pose some logistical hurdles.

Mea cupla, this is my fault, not any of the Chicago folks.  I'm going
to try to work with the folks on the ground on seeing if we can get
another room at the UIC Library. I'll also try to find out some
surrounding locations that can serve as overspill, like cafes that
would be fine having a table of people show up and play.  I'm also
nervous about the number of games vs people who want to play games.
If you are attending and can bring some games and teach them, that
would be wonderful. (Also, I've run gaming events like this up to
about 20 people, but could really use a person or two to serve as a
helper.  Mainly that just means joining people to games, answering
questions, etc) Due to the scale, I have some ideas like signup sheets
for various games at the registration desk, rather like the signups
for the newcomer's dinner.

Again, sorry about this,

Jon Gorman

[CODE4LIB] Code4Lib 2013 - Game Night

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

Just a brief email to say that I sent an email to all the folks who
have supplied contact info for the Game Night. It's not required that
you do so, but if you were thinking of attending, please sign up at
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2013_social_activities#Game_Night.21
so we know how many people are coming.

If you sent me contact info in order to be kept in the loop for last
minute changes and I didn't send an email directly to you a little
while ago, send it again.  I apologize, things have been a bit hectic
lately and I'm almost positive I left someone off that sent me an
email.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Code4Lib Conference streaming?

[Jon Gorman]

Three cheers for UIC folks!

Jon Gorman

[CODE4LIB] C4L2013 Game Night - UIC Library - Tuesday 11th, 7:30 pm

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

Thanks to Francis, we've got a room for the game night at the UIC
Library. Looks like it'll start at 7:30 pm, to give folks time to get
dinner.  Not sure yet how late it can go.

I'm going to be updating/modifying info on the social wiki (will move
some of the stuff out to it's own section).  I'll try to get to that
tonight or tomorrow night.

If you want me to also send you email when I make changes to the wiki
page  (http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2013_social_activities) or
get more info about Game Night, send an email w/ the subject starting
with C4L2013 Game Night. Actually, also reply to me personally with
phone info if you don't mind texting if you want to be alerted of any
last minute changes or the like without checking the wiki.

I'll also try to add notes in the people who signed up on the wiki (or
reply to personal emails) on games they might bring so we don't end up
with 20 sets of regular playing cards taking up valuable luggage space
;).  I'll be bringing a number of games from my personal collection as
well.

Sorry for the brief note, but wanted to get something out.  I'll
probably not send any more emails about this directly to the list, so
again, send me an email starting with C4L2013 Game Night if you want
to be notified or keep an eye on the wiki.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Zoia

[Jon Gorman]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 9:38 AM, Karen Coyle  wrote:

> ... and BTW, if people see Zoia as a bit of a problem during the conference,
> doesn't that mean that Zoia is a bit of a problem all of the time? Is there
> a reason to be polite and inclusive during the conference but not every day?

There's actually two different but closely related issues:

1) Plugins that generate a lot of information/responses which have
been a problem as they can interrupt flow of questions/discussions
during the conference. @blockparty lists what songs people are playing
that have registered their irc nick & scrobble.  It produces a lot of
lines and a couple of calls can cause people's screens to
"scroll-off".  Not a problem with the normal traffic in the room, but
when going from maybe 20/30 active participants to hundreds it can be
an issue.

There's probably some others like @google or @naf with a long response
that could be disabled as well.  @naf is a nice one for demonstrating
zoia, but @marc is pretty compact and also wonderfully library-centric
;).

2) Plugins that are crude/offensive like @mf and the urban dictionary one.

I think the thread kicked off with the first one, but I think it
rapidly brought in the issue of the latter.  I'm in agreement that the
latter category probably should be just removed.  The first category
probably would be useful to disable during the conference but to have.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] A gentle proposal: slim down zoia during the conference

[Jon Gorman]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Michael J. Giarlo
 wrote:
[snip]
> how about we have a few folks volunteer to
> gently ask that folks be mindful of what they are asking zoia to do.  Heck,
> we can even reflect that in the topic, and make an announcement from the
> podium.

Not trying to shout you down, but I'll point out at previous years
when trying to show how to use channel I've requested people to chill
out on using zoia for a bit, which had precisely the opposite affect.
It might help if we have more people or post reminders throughout the
convention.  I do wonder if it's best to remove temptation, at least
for the course of the conference.

I'm certainly not going to stop anyone who's willing to have their own
bot join in channel for @mf, but it would make it a little easier not
to /ignore zoia so she can be useful.

Of course, now I'm pondering having both a friendly, helpful bot, and
then perhaps a wise-cracking one.  There has to be some
demonic/evil/sinister librarian in literature we can reference.

If enough people think it's a bad idea to remove plugins, I don't
think I'd be horribly upset either.  (Is that too wishy-washy?)

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] A gentle proposal: slim down zoia during the conference

[Jon Gorman]

I like the ideas of disabling some of the @zoia bot plugins for the
conference at least.


> For what it's worth, Jon Gorman was working on a version of `@herald`
> that provided introductory information to those new to the IRC
> channel. (I'm hoping he can speak to details.)

Details of Greeter (the Herald-intro bot):

It's my first foray into both supybot and python.  I've got a couple
of things still on the todo list before throwing it in channel. I did
a fork that can be seen here:

https://github.com/jtgorman/supybot-plugins/tree/master/plugins/Greeter

I think off hand I have something that seems to mostly work, but I
want to get @greeter add nick and @greeter remove nick so people can
prevent alternative nicks from being spammed and some sort of init
routine that pulls in a list of nicks to ignore if the db is not
present.  The latter may just end up waiting, I don't know. Feel free
to submit pull requests.  I'll then try to figure out the git magic to
get into code4lib.  (Or I'll just check out a fresh version of the
code4lib and copy the directory and commit that)

Hoping to get something in shape by the end of the week that can be
added to Zoia. Suggestions on the message welcome.  (Right now it has
"Welcome to code4lib! Visit http://code4lib.org/irc to find out more
about this channel. Type @helpers for a list of people in channel who
can help." (Going to change @helpers into @helpers #code4lib)

Thanks to Mark who reminded me about the @helpers plugin. ( I don't think it's


Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Game Night during Code4Lib 2013

[Jon Gorman]

Hi,

At the moment it looks like we've got about 11 people or so interested
in the game night.  I'm thinking at this point of scheduling it for
later on Tuesday to avoid conflicts with the newcomer dinners.  I will
(with the wonderful assistance of the hosts) start looking at some
possible locations and transport.

More details to follow.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] code4lib 2013 location

[Jon Gorman]

Gah, I think I forgot to announce this on the list, but there's also
this google map:
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=213549257652679418473.0004ce6c25e6cdeb0319d&msa=0

which I put on the social page
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2013_social_activities

I'll go ahead and add the hotel and conference site to that as well if
it's not already there.

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 7:12 PM, Bill Dueber  wrote:
> Because it seems like it might be useful, I've started a publicly-editable
> google map at
>
> http://goo.gl/maps/LWqay
>
> Right now, it has two points: the hotel and the conference location. Please
> add stuff as appropriate if the urge strikes you.
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 7:54 PM, Francis Kayiwa  wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 06:41:26PM -0500, Cynthia Ng wrote:
>> > I'm sorry, but that doesn't actually clear up anything for me. The
>> > location on the layrd page just says Chicago. So, is the conference
>> > still happening at UIC? Since the conference hotel isn't super close,
>> > does that mean there will be transportation provided?
>>
>> The entire conference and pre-conference is at UIC. The Forum is a
>> revenue generating part of UIC. The pre-conference will be at the
>> University Libraries on Monday with the exception of the Drupal one.
>>
>> The hotel is a mile or thereabouts from UIC Forum. Here is the problem
>> with us natives planning. It never crossed our minds that walking a mile
>> while on the *upper limit* of our shuttling to and from work is not the
>> norm for everyone. This was brought to our attention and we will have a
>> shuttle from the Hotel to the Conference venue.
>>
>> >
>> > While we're on the subject, are the pre-conferences happening at the
>> > same location?
>>
>>
>> See above.
>>
>> ./fxk
>>
>> >
>> > On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Francis Kayiwa  wrote:
>> > > On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 10:41:54AM -0800, Erik Hetzner wrote:
>> > >> Hi all,
>> > >>
>> > >> Apparently code4lib 2013 is going to be held at the UIC Forum
>> > >>
>> > >>   http://www.uic.edu/depts/uicforum/
>> > >>
>> > >> I assumed it would be at the conference hotel. This is just a note so
>> > >> that others do not make the same assumption, since nowhere in the
>> > >> information about the conference is the location made clear.
>> > >>
>> > >> Since the conference hotel is 1 mile from the venue, I assume
>> > >> transportation will be available.
>> > >
>> > > That's a good assumption to make. As to the confusion  I said to you
>> > > when you asked me about this a couple of days ago.
>> > >
>> > > http://www.uic.edu/~kayiwa/code4lib.html was supposed to be our
>> > > proposal. If you look at the document it also suggests that we were
>> > > going to have the conference registration staggered by timezones. We
>> > > have elected not to update that because as that was our proposal. When
>> > > preparing our proposal we borrowed heavily from Yale's and IU's
>> proposal
>> > > and if someone would like to steal from us I think it is fair to leave
>> > > that as is.
>> > >
>> > > If you want the conference page use the lanyrd.com link below. I can't
>> > > even take credit for doing that. All of that goes to @pberry
>> > >
>> > > http://lanyrd.com/2013/c4l13/
>> > >
>> > > Cheers,
>> > > ./fxk
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >>
>> > >> best, Erik Hetzner
>> > >
>> > >> Sent from my free software system .
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > --
>> > > Speed is subsittute fo accurancy.
>> >
>>
>> --
>> Speed is subsittute fo accurancy.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Bill Dueber
> Library Systems Programmer
> University of Michigan Library

[CODE4LIB] Game Night during Code4Lib 2013

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

I'm trying to gauge interest in Game Night during Code4Lib 2013.  Now,
I've signed up for the Wednesday Goose Island tour, but can back out
of that if Wednesday night works the best.

Right now there's a handful of folks on the wiki that has expressed
interest, but could you send me an email or sign up on
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2013_social_activities by Monday
morning (the 14th) if you would like to go? Also, some indication of
games you might be able to bring or games you like to play would be
useful. I'm just trying to figure out how many folks are interested so
I have a rough idea of number of games and the space we need.

Also I'm leaning towards Monday or Tuesday night, but letting me know
a night preference as well might be useful. (If this is what people
would like for a Wednesday night non-beery alternative, I have other
chances to do a Goose Island tour ;) ).

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] basic IRC question/comments

[Jon Gorman]

And, sorry for being annoying, but some things were pointed out to me
in #code4lib, so I'm issuing yet another followup.

1) the technique freenode uses for cloaks isn't as strong as it used
to be.  Also, it's possible to accidentally log in without a cloak,
etc. Don't expect them to be very secure.

2) There's ways to get a cloak without financial contribution.  How
exactly to do this I leave as an exercise to the reader.  I never
really worried about it too much, the cloak was just a perk when I
made the donation.

3) Apparently most web clients will pass on the browser ip, not the
server ip address.  So don't count on that to make you anonymous.

So the general thrust is, if you really, really need anonymous
communication, be wary of irc.  However, in general people usually
respect the nicks from my experience and won't press people for their
actual identities.

Also, as mentioned before, most irc servers/channels are not encrypted
and pretty easy to log.

Jon Gorman



On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Jon Gorman  wrote:
> Oh, forgot to mention. If you use a web client or use tor, that will
> obscure the connection info by the nature of that connection ;).
>
> Jon Gorman
>
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Jon Gorman  wrote:
>>> You can also choose to anonymize yourself by choosing a nick that best 
>>> represents something you're interested
>>> in or identify with that is not used on other social spheres. It really is 
>>> completely up to you on what you feel most
>>> comfortable with and there is typically no hard/fast rules.
>>
>> One thing to keep in mind is that your nick might be anonymous, but
>> irc in general is done "in the clear"  and some connection information
>> will be published by default. I think that's partially a legacy of how
>> long IRC has been around.
>>
>> When someone logs into a channel you'll see something like
>> foo...@1241workstation.uiowa.edu.  There's ways to "cloak" that id by
>> registering that nick and donating some money to the organization that
>> runs freenode, pdpc.  That's a bit trickier to setup.  The user
>> registration faq of freenode can be useful:
>> http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#userregistration.
>>
>> So when someone who is registered and "cloaked" logs in, the
>> connection will display something like foobar@professional.cloaked has
>> joined the channel.  - I can't remember the exactg string).
>>
>> So just know that if someone is logging the channel (which is
>> possible, there's plenty of clients and ways to do it) and you come in
>> several times with different nicks but the same network address
>> they'll know it's likely the same person.
>>
>> Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] basic IRC question/comments

[Jon Gorman]

Oh, forgot to mention. If you use a web client or use tor, that will
obscure the connection info by the nature of that connection ;).

Jon Gorman

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Jon Gorman  wrote:
>> You can also choose to anonymize yourself by choosing a nick that best 
>> represents something you're interested
>> in or identify with that is not used on other social spheres. It really is 
>> completely up to you on what you feel most
>> comfortable with and there is typically no hard/fast rules.
>
> One thing to keep in mind is that your nick might be anonymous, but
> irc in general is done "in the clear"  and some connection information
> will be published by default. I think that's partially a legacy of how
> long IRC has been around.
>
> When someone logs into a channel you'll see something like
> foo...@1241workstation.uiowa.edu.  There's ways to "cloak" that id by
> registering that nick and donating some money to the organization that
> runs freenode, pdpc.  That's a bit trickier to setup.  The user
> registration faq of freenode can be useful:
> http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#userregistration.
>
> So when someone who is registered and "cloaked" logs in, the
> connection will display something like foobar@professional.cloaked has
> joined the channel.  - I can't remember the exactg string).
>
> So just know that if someone is logging the channel (which is
> possible, there's plenty of clients and ways to do it) and you come in
> several times with different nicks but the same network address
> they'll know it's likely the same person.
>
> Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] basic IRC question/comments

[Jon Gorman]

> You can also choose to anonymize yourself by choosing a nick that best 
> represents something you're interested
> in or identify with that is not used on other social spheres. It really is 
> completely up to you on what you feel most
> comfortable with and there is typically no hard/fast rules.

One thing to keep in mind is that your nick might be anonymous, but
irc in general is done "in the clear"  and some connection information
will be published by default. I think that's partially a legacy of how
long IRC has been around.

When someone logs into a channel you'll see something like
foo...@1241workstation.uiowa.edu.  There's ways to "cloak" that id by
registering that nick and donating some money to the organization that
runs freenode, pdpc.  That's a bit trickier to setup.  The user
registration faq of freenode can be useful:
http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#userregistration.

So when someone who is registered and "cloaked" logs in, the
connection will display something like foobar@professional.cloaked has
joined the channel.  - I can't remember the exactg string).

So just know that if someone is logging the channel (which is
possible, there's plenty of clients and ways to do it) and you come in
several times with different nicks but the same network address
they'll know it's likely the same person.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Mobile device usage (iOS vs. Android)

[Jon Gorman]

> Any thought?

I guess I'd be somewhat wary of comparing general trends to a more
defined population.  I'm guessing your campus population is not
typical of the national population, instead probably skewed towards a
younger population with higher disposable income (and also perhaps
more sensitive to peer pressure) and hence might not follow general
trends ;).

Also, how is your 70% traffic figured?  Do you have any way to
determine if perhaps a few outliers are creating a significant amount
of traffic.  (In other words, do you know if the mobile traffic
actually represents ownership, or might there be a smaller group of
i-phone users who happen to use the library services more? I'd guess
the smaller the population accessing via mobile, the more likely a
small population could skew the results)

Also, how are you measuring the Android users?  Is it possible you're
missing some who would be using non-default browsers or browsers
modified by a carrier?

I don't unfortunately have any stats, but I do seem to remember seeing
some numbers locally that would indicate iOS count of web usage is
still pretty high. Android phones are becoming very, very cheap but
data plans aren't.  Also, the form factor and the processing power of
some of the cheaper androids make web searching less than thrilling.
I could see someone using an Android that they get for free, but not
accessing the library for a variety of reasons.

It would be interesting if one could compare the usage of different
Android devices but the difficulty of data collection here might be
enormous. (I'm not sure off hand if there's an easy way to
distinguish, say, a Samsung Galaxy 2 from a Optimus)

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] It's all job postings!

[Jon Gorman]

Most of them come from the Shortime application that Ed Summers has
been working on and posted about.  It's over at jobs.code4lib.org.

I don't really mind them. I've thought about just filtering out the
emails ^Job: in the subject, but haven't actually bothered yet.

Jon Gorman

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Nate Vack  wrote:
> So... perhaps 90% of the conversations in my Code4lib folder are job
> postings right now. That's not what I want. Does this mean my filters
> (or subscription!) are set up wrong, or that there should be a
> separate jobs list?
>
> Hm...
> -Nate

Re: [CODE4LIB] NON-MARC ILS?

[Jon Gorman]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Matt Amory  wrote:
> Thanks for all the responses.  Perhaps I woke up thos morning on the wrong 
> side of MARC.
> What I'm really after is a way to display links to project Gutenberg titles 
> in III Encore and not having MARC records is one technical hurdle, as is not 
> having consistent display of URLs from field 856.
> Thanks in advance for your thoughts!


I remember reading about a project to generate MARC records for
Project Gutenberg.  I can't find the details, but on the page
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Offline_Catalogs they have two
types of MARC dumps.

Haven't tried either of them yet though.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Sharing code

[Jon Gorman]

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Whitworth, Cliff
 wrote:
> NOOB to list and am appreciative of this discussion. My boss is encouraging 
> me to share code and pointed me to code4lib. the majority of my code is 
> recycled / repurposed from others so I've had reservations about sharing 
> mainly because of what's taken from others. At the least, I'm mindful about 
> leaving acknowledgements intact. Is there a good resource on how to start 
> sharing code and ethical considerations?


Howdy and welcome Cliff!

In short, I think there's a push over the past few years to share more
and more code, even when it's small.  There's a lot of individuals
scattered in the library world who are not necessarily on local teams
who end up doing the same work over and over again.  There's some
tension with this as there's also projects that tend to get abandoned
or just don't have as much support and community as they could.

I've been bad about releasing source myself.  I've got a barrier in
our lawyers, who I really need to push to let me have more leeway for
releasing stuff.


There's been a couple of articles over the years on the code4lib journal, see...

First, an argument on why to just put stuff out there by Dale Askey:
COLUMN: We Love Open Source Software. No, You Can’t Have Our Code
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/527

See Terry Reese's excellent article in the latest issue: Purposeful
Development: Being Ready When Your Project Moves From ‘Hobby’ to
Mission Critical http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/6393

Michael Doran gave an excellent talk a few years back that really
stuck in my head with the very issue I've been reluctant to put more
effort into: lawyers and code:  The Intellectual Property Disclosure:
OpenSource in Academia
21:09 - 4 years ago
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3341633878207243364

There's a lot of other good articles in the journal and on people's
various blog posts.  Github is all the rage these days, so at some
point I'll need to figure out how to use it ;).

Again, welcome!

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Q.: MARC8 vs. MARC/Unicode and pymarc and misencoded III records

[Jon Gorman]

> It used to be that way, at least it was this way when I grew up in open
> source (in the 90s, before Eric Raymond invented the term). And it makes
> sense, for successful projects that have at least a moderate number of
> users.  Just dumping your code on github helps very few people.


You realize this isn't Apache, right?  It seems a small project,
mostly maintained by folks as they get time.  There's no SCRUM
meetings or hallway meetings, no foundation, no checklist.  Surely you
can't generalize two interactions first as reflective as the "culture
of open source".  It seems to have been a small piece of code shared
so others wouldn't have to do it over again and it's grown with time.
The primary thrust seems to be for library developers, not catalogers
or folks learning python code.

The typo you bought up was patched by one of the "team-members" within
a hour or two from what I can tell.  (Assuming you meant issue #22
https://github.com/edsu/pymarc/issues/22).  From what I can tell
someone patched it in less than an hour.

In general though github is the sourceforge of years past, but even
better.  It seems entirely reasonable to ask for a patch to me.
Perhaps it could have been handled more delicately by both sides.
Perhaps you weren't treated as nicely as you'd like.  There's probably
some truth to that.  But at the same time, Ed did include a wink at
the end after requesting the patch.  Had you perhaps cut him some
slack instead of immediately responding incredulously  you'd find it
was fixed when he got time. Or not.  He has his own priorities as do
other folks who contributed to the code.

If you're unhappy with the dump on github approach, then don't use the
software.  No one ran around forcing folks to do it.  It's one of
those lightweight github approaches, just another approach to open
source software.  In all the years I've also been involved with open
source every project has had it's own unique culture.  There's
responsibility on the user before using software to figure out what it
is.  If it doesn't meet their expectation, I see little reason that
the developer should feel compelled to change unless they're getting
paid for the work.  Obviously some people have found the "dump on
github" approach useful if they've contributed patches.

Can't we all just shake hands virtually or something?

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Microsoft Transact-SQL

[Jon Gorman]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Wilfred Drew  wrote:
> I did mean Transact-SQL!!  Sorry.  I am after book recommendations.


Right, sorry, should have made myself clearer.  Do you have previous
experience with creating database queries?  I can't say I have any
real recommendations, but it might help others.  (And you might be
able to get away with a more general book on sql and then look through
the online documentation for specific problems).

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Microsoft Transit-SQL

[Jon Gorman]

> I am looking for a good text on Microsoft Transit-SQL.  I have searched high 
> and low and
> all I find are books focused on Microsoft SQL Server.

Do you mean Transact-SQL (which I usually just see abbreviated T-SQL)
?  The online documentation at msdn isn't great, but it's not
horrible.   That's usually what I use.

I mean, usually it's just a matter of looking up how it implements SQL
and some of the local variants.

(Do you need recommendations for books on SQL?)

Jon Gorman

[CODE4LIB] How to get on irc

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

Quick link for those trying to get on irc for the first time

There's some info on http://code4lib.org/irc

Basic:
download an irc client (I like xchat)
connect to the freenode server
type /join #code4ib

Gotta go, presentation started

Jon Gorman
University of Illinois

Re: [CODE4LIB] Koha in the Running

[Jon Gorman]

> I'm curious to know of this lists current thoughts on Koha as an ILS. Where
> would you rank it among the various options, open source and vendor?


I'm confused, what do you mean by "open source and vendor"?

There's vendors/companies that develop for and support Koha.  Open
source and vendor/commercial activity are not  mutually exclusive.
Did you mean open source and proprietary?  There's lots of combination
of ILSes and how to manage them out there.

Open Source ILS / local servers / no support contracts
Open source ILS / hosted / no support contract
Open source ILS / hosted / support contract

Proprietary ILS / local servers / no support
Open source ILS / hosted / no support contract
Proprietary ILS / hosted / support

Some of those combinations are pretty rare, but I could see all of
them existing.

And you could distinguish between support and development contracts,
with the nice advantage of open source you can always change vendors
or fund someone who's not your usual developer group depending on how
the community around the project has been established.  Harder to do
that with proprietary software, but I've still heard of it happening.

Are you interested in stuff like that?

Or are you more just interested in how people's experience using Koha
software itself compared ot other ILS options out there? Or the actual
overall experience?  Or which Koha vendor is the best?

Jon G.

[CODE4LIB] Code4Lib 2012 Seattle Social Map (cool spots, hangouts, pubs, grubs & other stuff)

[Jon Gorman]

Hi all,

There was a call put out via IRC for a google maps like we've done in
years past that has the cool hangouts, restaurants, pubs, tourist
spots, and the like.  In the past I've helped with some of these maps
but didn't see any, so I just started one.

http://g.co/maps/4m5pk

It's a google map titled "Code4lib 2012 - Seattle - social events,
hangouts, and places to see".

(Thanks Michael Klein for the hints on how to get the shortened url)

Some folks have already started populating it.  I don't know Seattle
as well, so all the help I can get would be great ;).


If you look in the archives, you'll see some of the other social maps
in previous years.  Taking a quick break from my own work to do this,
so don't have the time to look this up.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Obvious answer to registration limitations

[Jon Gorman]

> I had planned to come to code4lib and knew it filled up fast. I joined the 
> mailing list so I could find out about the > registration as soon as it 
> happened. It came out in mid-morning and I happened to be in a meeting until 
> 12 or
> so and by the time I tried to register it was sold out. This is annoying. Why 
> not find a venue that is big enough > to meet the obvious demand? There are 
> surely plenty of larger venues in a city such as Seattle.


The actual time when registration was going to open was published in a
variety of venues (on the wiki, on the mailing lists, and it seemed
someone was asking the question every fifteen minutes in the channel,
including me ;) ).  I purposely avoided scheduling meetings around
that time and rescheduled some that were.

On the other hand, it would be interesting to see a proposal for a
larger code4lib and I imagine Minnesota has lots of places that can
host a larger one.  The deadline isn't until Jan. 22nd See
http://code4lib.org/node/425

As always, if you want Code4Lib to do something or change, all you
have to do is plan and work for it.  That's why we're a loose
collective and not a professional organization.

I personally would not vote on making it much larger.  It seems every
order of magnitude increase takes it away from the techie origins and
more like CiL or Internet Librarian.  On the other hand, regardless of
the size, I still suspect I'll find people willing to discuss the
technical stuff, I just might stop showing up for most of the actual
talks.

Jon Gorman.


On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 8:47 AM, Elfstrand, Stephen F
 wrote:

>
>
> Stephen Elfstrand
> PALS Executive Director
> stephen.elfstr...@mnsu.edu
> 507.389.5059

Re: [CODE4LIB] Any ideas for free pdf to excel conversion?

[Jon Gorman]

> I'm looking for a way to pull 29 pages of pdf tables into excel so I can
> munge the data into an excel project and all my free trials so far have
> only converted a few pages at a time.


copy and paste?

If it needs to be somewhat automated

pdftotext -> some cut & paste / sed / regex -> open in excel?

You might need to fiddle with the pdftotext settings, but I've been
pretty successful with that before doing something else.

Jon G.

Re: [CODE4LIB] server side vs client side

[Jon Gorman]

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Nate Hill  wrote:
> As I was struggling with the syntax trying to figure out how to use
> javascript to load a .txt file, process it and then spit out some html on a
> web page, I suddenly found myself asking why I was trying to do it with
> javascript rather than PHP.
>
> Is there a right/wrong or better/worse approach for doing something like
> that? Why would I want to choose one approach rather then the other?
>

I tend to try to do most stuff server-side.  Javascript I try to keep
just to enhance the GUI system and perhaps do some AJAXy stuff.  There
is the fact that if you're using an external API that's not crucial
you might want to just do it javascript side.  So think about cover
images in a catalog for example.

You could have the server-side script go out, grab the image, put it
in a local cache, then prepare the link within the actual html.  But
if something goes wrong, you might either take really long to return
that page or never return it.

The approach that most folks do is that they have some javascript that
does an AJAX call.  So the page loads on the client and then when the
image comes back the cover image will be added.  If it never happens,
you've sent the page at least.

I know some who tend to always go to javascript because they're used
to not having control of the underlying system except for to add html
to templates and sneak in javascript that way.

However, that's awkward, difficult to maintain, error-prone, and
likely horrible for accessibility.  If you control the underlying
PHPthen yeah, do it on the PHP side ;).

My advice here is somewhat simplistic and general.

You do have my curiosity up now though.  What was you goal with trying
to load that text file?

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Professional development advice?

[Jon Gorman]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 11:50 AM, Kyle Banerjee  wrote:
> Having a playground where you can experiment aggressively is useful. I'm a
> fan of Amazon EC2 because you can create servers in minutes for pennies per
> hour and try things you'd never want to do with real hardware. It's nice
> when you can completely restore a destroyed server in a couple minutes.

Ah, in a similar vein, having a VM setup can help a lot with playing
around.  Look into VirtualBox and set up a VM.  It's a lot easier once
you get the hang of it than the old days when you almost needed a
physical machine to play around.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Professional development advice?

[Jon Gorman]

Probably the most important thing you can do is simply play around
with the technology.  Get some ideas of what you want to play around
with.  Then try to do it or see if someone else has already done it.
If someone else has done it, try to figure out how (open source for
the win).

When I was starting out I liked having classes, just because they
usually create goals and end points.  To be honest though it's been a
little while since I've actually taken a class.  I probably should
again, but life does get busy.

Books and very good websites are a close second.   Look for classes in
either your CS department or the local community college.

If you want to do web development, start looking for a language and
framework you like.  Set up a box, install a webserver on it.  Find a
web application you like and try to get it up and running.  (Give a
try on doing something like running your own koha server!)

I don't know if it will help, but here's some knowledge I'd look for
in any web developer that was looking for a library job:

* What version control systems do they know?

* Do they know project management tools like puppet?

* Why they liked particular projects they worked on and what they may
not liked about them.

* Basic network knowledge.
* Some basic knowledge of design principles and usability testing.
They don't need to be a master, but I hope they're at least aware of
some the techniques.


I'm not really concerned about particular languages or frameworks

Mainly I'm looking for signs that they're comfortable with web
development and know some of the pitfalls and issues that can happen
in the library environment.  Have they run into issues with combining
diacritics,  confused librarian, what to call services?   Also, I'm
watching for any warning signs like like they can't distinguish
between client-side javascript & server-side processing or they only
seem to use "does it display".  That would make me instantly wary.


Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Plea for help from Horowhenua Library Trust to Koha Community

[Jon Gorman]

Hi Joann,

Have you considered sending this to some of the tech podcasts?  I
think both the Command-Line podcast (http://thecommandline.net/) and
Linux Outlaws (http://sixgun.org/linuxoutlaws/) would be great
audiences and receptive to this story.

I'm a regular listener of both and if you want me to contact them so
they would get it from a a regular listener who I'd be more than happy
to forward your message with some personal notes.  (And the paypal
link too ;) ).

Jon Gorman

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 6:51 PM, Joann Ransom  wrote:
> Horowhenua Library Trust is the birth place of Koha and the longest serving
> member of the Koha community. Back in 1999 when we were working on Koha,
> the idea that 12 years later we would be having to write an email like this
> never crossed our minds. It is with tremendous sadness that we must write
> this plea for help to you, the other members of the Koha community.
>
> The situation we find ourselves in, is that after over a year of battling
> against it, PTFS/Liblime have managed to have their application for a
> Trademark on Koha in New Zealand accepted. We now have 3 months to object,
> but to do so involves lawyers and money. We are a small semi rural Library
> in New Zealand and have no cash spare
> in our operational budget to afford this, but we do feel it is something we
> must fight.
>
> For the library that invented Koha to now have to have a legal battle to
> prevent a US company trademarking the word in NZ seems bizarre, butit is at
> this point that we find ourselves.
>
> So, we ask you, the users and developers of Koha, from the birth place of
> Koha, please if you can help in anyway, let us know.
>
> Background reading:
>
>   - Code4Lib article <http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/1638>: How hard
>   can it be : developing in Open Source [history of the development of Koha]
>   by Joann Ransom and Chris Cormack.
>   - Timeline <http://koha-community.org/about/history/> of Koha
>   :development
>   - Koha history visualization <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl1a2VN_pec>
>
>
> Help us
> If you would like to help us fund legal costs please use the paypal donate
> button below.
>
>
>
>
> Otherwise, any discussion, public support and ideas on how to proceed would
> be gratefully received.
>
> Regards
>
>
> Jo.
>
> --
> Joann Ransom RLIANZA
> Head of Libraries,
> Horowhenua Library Trust.
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] ISBN Regular Expression

[Jon Gorman]

Also, I don't know OpenBook to know your source data, but don't forget
a lot of publishers have printed ISBNs in different ways over the past
few years.  The regex would choke on any hyphens.  If users are
copying from printed material, they could type them in. For example,
one of the books near my desk has the ISBN printed like  0-521-61678-6

if this is user input and nothing is striping characters like that
out, it could cause problems.

(I think I've also seen spaces used instead of hyphens, but less
positive about this).

Jon Gorman


On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Jonathan Rochkind  wrote:
> John: That's not going to work, an ISBN can end in "X" as a check digit,
> which is not [0-9].  You are going to be rejecting valid ISBN's, you have a
> bug.
>
> On 10/24/2011 10:40 AM, John Miedema wrote:
>>
>> Here's a php function I use in OpenBook to test if a user has entered a 10
>> or 13 digit ISBN.
>>
>> //test if 10 or 13 digits ISBN
>> function openbook_utilities_validISBN($testisbn) {
>> return (ereg ("([0-9]{10})", $testisbn, $regs) || ereg ("([0-9]{13})",
>> $testisbn, $regs));
>> }
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 1:44 PM,
>> Kozlowski,Brendonwrote:
>>
>>> Hi all.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm somewhat surprised that I've never had to validate an ISBN manually
>>> up
>>> until now. I suppose that's a testiment to all of the software out there.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> However, I now find that I need to validate both the 10-digit and
>>> 13-digit
>>> ISBNs. I realize there's also a check digit and a REGEX cannot check this
>>> value - one step at a time. Right now I just want to work on the REGEX.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Does anyone know the exact specifications of both forms of an ISBN? The
>>> ISBN organization's website didn't seem to be overly clear to me.
>>> Alternatively, if anyone has a full working regular expression for this
>>> purpose I would definitely not mind if they'd be willing to share.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The only thing I'm doing which is abnormal is that I am not requiring the
>>> hyphenation or spaces between numbers since some of this data will be
>>> coming
>>> from a system, and some will be coming from human input.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Brendon Kozlowski
>>> Web Administrator
>>> Saratoga Springs Public Library
>>> 49 Henry Street
>>> Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866
>>> [518] 584-7860 x217
>>>
>>> Please consider the environment before printing this message.
>>>
>>> To report this message as spam, offensive, or if you feel you have
>>> received
>>> this in error,
>>> please send e-mail to ab...@sals.edu including the entire contents and
>>> subject of the message.
>>> It will be reviewed by staff and acted upon appropriately.
>>>
>>
>>
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] marc-8

[Jon Gorman]

>>> In Perl, how do I specify MARC-8 when reading (decoding) and writing
>>> (encoding) data?
>>
>> You can't.  MARC-8 is a character set that is unknown to the operating 
>> system.  Your best bet is to convert MARC-8-encoded records into UTF-8.
>
> /me throws his hands up in the air and screams!
>
> Okay. How do I go about converting MARC-8 encoded records into UTF-8? I know 
> yaz-marcdump changes the encoding bit in MARC leaders. Does it also convert 
> MARC-8 characters to UTF-8? (I guess I could simply try it and see what 
> happens.)
>

I seem to remember there was an older version of yaz-marcdump that
seemed a bit buggy (would just change the header but not change
encoding despite command-line options, if there was a certain
combination chosen).  It's also possible I was just working with a
script that specified the encoding change but not the leader.

I'd say get the most recent version of yaz (don't use anything in an
OS repository) and then follow the docs:
http://www.indexdata.com/yaz/doc/yaz-marcdump.html.  The first example
is what you want:

 yaz-marcdump -f MARC-8 -t UTF-8 -o marc -l 9=97 marc21.raw >marc21.utf8.raw

The -f is the source encoding, the -t is the target encoding, and the
-l 9=97 sets leader to a (decimal of character to change the 9th
character to a).

I've typically found this is one of the easier ways to do the
character set encoding, although the various Perl modules (if they're
recent enough) should be able to handle the conversion as well through
the MARC::Charset library.  Check the cpan pages.

Jon Gorman

ps.  For the love of all that is good, don't try to do anything in
Perl with the raw MARC record to do the encoding change yourself.
I've seen someone really screw records up because they altered
individual characters, which in turn lead to different byte lengths.
This caused all sorts of insanity which meant really weird things
happened with MARC parsers that tried to follow the MARC directory
(which uses byte addresses to deal with variable fields).

Re: [CODE4LIB] is this valid marc ?

[Jon Gorman]

You've gotten some other good responses, but I thought I'd mention the
LoC and OCLC sites on MARC if you haven't seen them yet.

First, the LoC site at http://www.loc.gov/marc/.  This is what I use
as a guide and a reference.

Some folks prefer the OCLC docs http://www.oclc.org/bibformats/en/,
particularly if they're an OCLC member.

Of course, these apply to MARC-21 and not UniMarc.  Not sure what good
resources are out there for UniMARC.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data endpoints

[Jon Gorman]

Just to clarify, are you picturing some sort of feedback loop?  I'm
just trying to get a better picture of the process (sounds like an
interesting project).

In other words, do you have something like:

1) take in a full-text document (like, say, a novel?)
2) Run it through NER, pull out locations, places, things.
3) Have a user who's read the novel (or perhaps display those words in
context?) go through each the locations and pick a lat & long using
Google Maps as an interface.  (Ie says this "Dublin" is Dublin, OH not
Dublin, Ireland).
4) Do something similar with names, only using some sort of resource
like dbpedia to display possible individuals?
5) markup the original file in an XML doc w/ identifiers around those
occurrences?

Is that what you're picturing?

Jon G.

Who doesn't really know enough about linked data to contribute, but is
interested nonetheless.

Re: [CODE4LIB] If you were starting over, what would you learn and how would you do it?

[Jon Gorman]

Here's my take on whether or not the projects are going to be useful
in job hunting.  It's a bit of a gamble and honestly they may not.  On
the other hand, I certainly would take a portfolio as a very good sign
of a candidate in my own hunts.  But realistically, the job market's
just too wild at the moment.  It does seem to be smoothing out though.

Certainly I would run the portfolio by some systems people you really
respect and ask them to give an honest opinion.  Such projects can be
revealing not just in a positive way but a negative one too.  (And I
feel bad being negative, perhaps just blame it on a  bad week.  I've
seen very few portfolio's that detracted from my opinion of a
candidate.)

On the other hand though, personal experience, particularly well
supported through independent study and also discussion with others
gives a huge boost to your skills.  I don't know if a candidate in
this job market can afford NOT to spend at least some personal time in
developing their skills.  Perhaps in an ideal world perhaps school and
on-job training would cover all ground.  If you can though, double-dip
and just take a course assignment to the next level or something like
that.

In other words, such personal work probably won't greatly increase
your chances of beating out the competition, but without it likely
you're going to have a hard time making a good impression.

Of course, hopefully you enjoy this tech stuff so spending personal
time isn't too burdensome ;).  But I understand, these days it seems
like I never have enough time to work on my "personal" geeky projects.

Sorry for the convoluted answer, hopefully  it'll help.  We can always
use more geeky librarians ;).

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] yaz-marcdump

[Jon Gorman]

>From a good article on this at
http://www.indexdata.com/blog/2009/10/z3950-dummies-part-4.

$ yaz-marcdump -f marc-8 -t utf-8 -o marc -l 9=97 part01.dat > part.mrc

(97 = 'a')


If I remember correctly some of this functionality has also changed
over various versions so not sure if this is still needed, but better
safe than sorry.  Might also want to check the man page with your
particular version of yaz-marcdump.

Jon G.

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 9:39 AM, Eric Lease Morgan  wrote:
> Does the -t flag in yaz-marcdump tell the program to convert characters in 
> MARC records to specific character sets, or does merely change the value in a 
> MARC leader to denote the character set of the record as a whole? In other 
> words, will yaz-marcdump do its best to convert MARC-8 characters found in 
> MARC records into a UTF-8 characters?
>
> --
> Eric Morgan
> University of Notre Dame
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] utf8 "\xC2" does not map to Unicode

[Jon Gorman]

> I'm making headway on my MARC records, but only through the use of brute 
> force.
>
> I used wget to retrieve the MARC records (as well as associated PDF and text 
> files) from the
> Internet Archive.

I know IA has some bad marc records (and also records w/ bad encoding)
from my experience with them in the past.  I'm also not sure what the
web server / wget will do to the files as well.

> I did play a bit with yaz-marcdump to seemingly convert things from marc-8 to 
> utf-8, but I'm not so
> sure it does what is expected. Does it actually convert characters, or does 
> it simply change a
> value in the leader of each record? If the former, then how do I know it is 
> not double-encoding
>things? If the later, then my resulting data set is still broken.

There was a bug I seem to remember with yaz-marcdump where it was just
toggling the leader.  (Or a design flaw where you had to specify a
character conversion as well.).  But that was fixed a while ago I
thought. It's probably one of the better tools out there for this type
of stuff.

> If MARC records are not well-formed and do not validate according to the 
> standard, then just like
> XML processors, they should be used. Garbage in. Garbage out.

I'm guessing you meant "they shouldn't be used?" ;).  XML processors
aren't really known for flexibility in this regard.

Unfortunately there's a lot of issues here, not the least of it some
of the worse issues I've seen are introduced by well-meaning folks who
do things like dump a file out into MARCXML and twiddle with bits or a
marc-breaker format and start using tools to dump unicode text into
what is really a marc-8 file.  Then at some point in the pipeline of
conversions enough character encoding conversions happens that the
file ends up being messed up.

And then there's always the legacy data that got bungled up in the an
encoding transfer.  I know we've got some bad CJK characters due to
this.  At some point in converting our marc-8 records one or two
characters got mapped to something that's not in the unicode spec at
all.  At some point we'll clean up those records, you know, when we've
got some spare time :P.

The problem here has been the tools and they pass whatever internal
validations are enforced.  Probably more stages need to check for
validity, but there's a lot of records that would fail if they did.
(I don't even want to think about how many people disable validation,
or use the same software stack that generated the marc in the first
place, or changes within the marc spec itself over time that makes
validation even more difficult.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] utf8 "\xC2" does not map to Unicode

[Jon Gorman]

I'm not quite convinced that it's marc-8 just because there's \xC2 ;).
 If you look at a hex dump I'm seeing a lot of what might be combining
characters.  The leader appears to have 'a' in the field to indicate
unicode.  In the raw hex I'm seeing a lot of  two character sequences
like: 756c 69c3 83c2 a872 (culir).  If I knew my utf-8 better, I
could guess what combining diacritics these are.  Doing a look up on
http://www.fileformat.info seems to indicate that this might be utf-8,
a 'DIAERESIS'

When debugging any encoding issue it's always good to know

a) how the records were obtained
b) how have they been manipulated before you touch them (basically,
how many times may they have been converted by some bungling process)?
c) what encoding they claim to be now?
and
d) what encoding they are, if any?


It's been a while since I used Marc::Batch.  Is there any reason
you're using that instead of just using MARC::Record?  I'd try just
creating a MARC::Record object.

I've seen people do really bizarre things to break MARC files such as
editing the raw binary, thus invalidating the leader and the directory
as the byte counts were no longer right)

I hate to say it, but we still come across files that are no longer in
any encoding due to too many bad conversions.  It's possible these are
as well.

The enca tool (haven't used it much) guesses this at utf-8 mixed w/
"non-text data".

Jon

Re: [CODE4LIB] LAMP Hosting service that supports php_yaz?

[Jon Gorman]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Cindy Harper  wrote:
>  Sorry to bother you all with it.  Everyone's happy family is
> different, to hash a quote, but I hope I'm still welcome in Code4Lib, even
> if I'm not hired to be a library coder. Just a library (Windows) sys admin.
> Or maybe we need a spin-off code4lib for the amateurs among us.

I think Bill meant why are you coming down here with us trolls when
you're at such a nice place?  You're quite welcome, although you've
certainly have my curiosity up about why you want to run php_yaz in
the first place.  You didn't have much in the way of details in your
initial email.  It might change some people's advice if you're not
intending the system to a long-term production system.  (And I'm still
curious what systems are even using php_yaz)

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Code4Lib Community Sponsorship

[Jon Gorman]

I suspect we might be pushing it to get to$ 1,500.  I'd  suggest that
you might want to put some sort of earlier deadline on it if you can
to make the money transfer work smoother.  The Indiana folks might be
able to pipe in with a reasonable deadline as far as time goes.

Jon Gorman

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Kevin S. Clarke  wrote:
> Oh, and we've had three more people contribute since my emails, so
> I'll take that as a vote to push it up to $1500 (which I won't get to
> until later today).  As with anything in Code4Lib, it's an optional
> involvement... no obligation to participate.  Different people may
> also participate for their own reasons...
>
> Kevin
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Jonathan Rochkind  wrote:
>> I'm honestly not sure why we are fund-driving this from individuals, when
>> the conference is, according to it's organizers, already sufficiently
>> funded.  So, no, I see no reason to up the goal.
>>
>> On 1/13/2011 10:25 AM, Kevin S. Clarke wrote:
>>>
>>> Great job Code4Lib!
>>>
>>> You've collectively contributed $960 towards the sponsorship of our
>>> 2011 conference!  The goal was arbitrarily set at $1000, so we're only
>>> $40 short of that...Anyway want to pitch in those
>>> final dollars? 5, 10, 20?
>>>
>>> Also, curious as to whether folks think we should up the goal or stay
>>> with $1000.  I'm thinking we could take the answer from whether anyone
>>> pitches in after we've reached the $1000 point.  If someone
>>> contributes something over $1000, we can take that as a vote to bump
>>> up the goal a bit ($500).  Otherwise, given a little time for people
>>> to think about it, I'll just go ahead and send these funds into
>>> Indiana as "The Code4Lib Community" sponsorship.
>>>
>>> On a personal note, I think this level of participation is really
>>> cool.  Thanks to Dan for the idea to have a community sponsorship!
>>> It's been fun to pitch in and see others do the same...
>>>
>>> Kevin
>>
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] Registration website issues?

[Jon Gorman]

Yup, it's slow going.  It seems so far if you just keep hitting reload
after the errors it eventually gets through.  It's keeping the
information in session somehow.

Of course, I'm on step 8 after 40 minutes.so I'm hoping I don't
have to start over again..


Jon Gorman

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Doran, Michael D  wrote:
> Is anyone else having trouble connecting to the Code4Lib registration website 
> (https://www.confmanager.com/main.cfm?cid=2375)?  It took me about 15 minutes 
> to get connected initially, now it's hanging after page 2 (of 9?).
>
> -- Michael
>
> # Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
> # University of Texas at Arlington
> # 817-272-5326 office
> # 817-688-1926 mobile
> # do...@uta.edu
> # http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
>
>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Karen
>> Coyle
>> Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 9:51 AM
>> To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
>> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Announcing OLAC's prototype FRBR-inspired moving 
>> image
>> discovery interface
>>
>> Quoting "Beacom, Matthew" :
>>
>> Sometimes I feel like we should all have the FRBR diagram tattoo'd on
>> our arms so we can consult it any time anywhere. :-)
>>
>>
>> >
>> > With as complex a thing as a film--so many "authors", images, music,
>> > dialog, acting, sets, costume, etc., etc., etc., applying the FRBR
>> > model is tough, and your implementation is quite sensible. However,
>> > I had a small question about one thing you said about FRBR not
>> > allowing language at the work level. That doesn't seem right to me.
>> > How could the language of a thing that is primarily or even
>> > partially a work made of language--like a novel or a motion picture
>> > with spoken dialogue would not necessarily be considered at the work
>> > level and not at some other level.
>>
>> Matthew, I can't answer how it is possible but I can tell you that it
>> is a fact: language is an attribute of Expression, not of Work. That's
>> kind of the key meaning of frbr:Expression -- it is the Expression of
>> the Work, and the Work doesn't exist until Expressed. So Work is a
>> very abstract concept in FRBR. (Which is why more than one attempted
>> implementation of FRBR that I have seen combines Work and Expression
>> attributes in some way.)
>>
>> Not only that, but Kelley's model uses something that I consider to be
>> missing from FRBR: the concept of a "original Expression." For FRBR
>> (and thus for RDA) all expressions are in a sense equal; there is no
>> privileged first or original expression. Yet there is evidence that
>> this is a useful concept in the minds of users. Some recent user
>> studies [1] around FRBR showed that this is a concept that users come
>> up with spontaneously. Also, I can't think of any field of study where
>> knowing what the original expression of a work was wouldn't be
>> important.
>>
>> > Because of the way we treat translations--not just in FRBR--as what
>> > FRBR calls expressions not as new works, a translation from the
>> > original language to another would be considered an FRBR expression.
>> > Could you explain this a bit more?
>>
>> The FRBR relationship "translation of" is an Expression-to-Expression
>> relationship. (See my personal "cheat sheet" of RDA/FRBR relationships
>> [2]).
>>
>> kc
>> [1] http://www.asis.org/asist2010/abstracts/75.html
>> [2] http://kcoyle.net/rda/group1relsby.html
>>
>> >
>> > Thank you.
>> >
>> > Matthew
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > -Original Message-
>> > ...
>> >
>> >> This also allowed us to get around some of the areas of more
>> >> orthodox FRBR modeling that we found unhelpful. For example, FRBR
>> >> doesn't allow language at the Work level, but we think it is
>> >> important to record the original language of a moving image at the
>> >> top level.
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Karen Coyle
>> kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
>> ph: 1-510-540-7596
>> m: 1-510-435-8234
>> skype: kcoylenet
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] Which O'Reilly books should we give away at Code4Lib 2011?

[Jon Gorman]

So somebody actually attempts to answer your question:


Some O'Reilly books that would probably be a good fit for the conference:

Search/Library related -
Ambient findability
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web Information
Architecture for the World Wide Web
Search Patterns

Conference/culture related -
Confessions of a Public Speaker
Hackers & Painters
Beautiful Code

Just plain fun -
A stack o' Make magazines?


I picked these somewhat from memory and somewhat from using my wand of
serendipity.  If more suggestions are needed, I can probably put more
actual thought into it ;).

Jon Gorman

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Kevin S. Clarke  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> If you have particular O'Reilly titles that you'd like for us to ask
> O'Reilly for, send them to me and I'll put them in our request.
>
> Thanks,
> Kevin
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] unwanted (bogus) characters in marc

[Jon Gorman]

There's something about this that's tugging at my memory that hints it
might not be quite what the error message said as far as an invalid
unicode character.

I guess my first couple of questions:

1) What identifiers/records are you pulling?  I didn't see any actual
examples in your email.  Can you construct the url that the perl
script is doing and give it to us?

I'd guess it's very likely the original marc record is goofed up due
to some transforms.  I've seen it from people doing really weird
things to records as part of the submit process to IA.

2) You're sure that is a unicode marc record and not marc-8, right?

3) What version is your MARC::Record module?  Might want to upgrade if
it's old, there's been some bug fixes.

Jon Gorman


On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 5:51 AM, Eric Lease Morgan  wrote:
> How do I trap for unwanted (bogus) characters in MARC records?
>
> I have a set of Internet Archive identifiers, and have written the followoing 
> Perl loop to get the MARC records associated with each one:
>
>  # process each identifier
>  my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new( agent => AGENT );
>  while (  ) {
>
>    # get the identifier
>    chop;
>    my $identifier = $_;
>    print $identifier, "\n";
>
>    # get its corresponding MARC record
>    my $response = $ua->get( ROOT . "$identifier/$identifier" . "_meta.mrc" );
>    if ( ! $response->is_success ) {
>
>      warn $response->status_line;
>      next;
>
>    }
>
>    # save it
>    open MARC, " > $identifier.mrc" or die "Can't open $identifier.mrc: $!\n";
>    binmode MARC, ":utf8";
>    print MARC $response->content;
>    close MARC;
>
>  }
>
> I then use the venerable marcdump to see the fruits of my labors: marcdump 
> *.mrc. Unfortunately, marcdump returns the following error against (at least) 
> one of my files:
>
>  bienfaitsducatho00pina.mrc
>  utf8 "\xC3" does not map to Unicode at /System/Library/
>  Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Encode.pm line 162.
>
> What is going on here? Am I saving my files incorrectly? Is the original MARC 
> data inherintly incorrect? Is there some way I can fix the MARC record in 
> question?
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] simple,flexible ILS for a small librar

[Jon Gorman]

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 12:05 AM, Susan Kane  wrote:
> I wonder if this person might be better served by some kind of bartering
> software.
>
> I wasn't sure there was such a thing -- but of course, there is.
>
> http://www.curomuto.com/
> http://www.barter-blog.com/?p=51

There's also some book-swap and book exchange sites and projects out
there.  It would be interesting to try to merge the three.  The OP
seems to really want to use VuFind, so if you could use a book swap
software on the administrative side and have that update the catalog
that would be useful.  Or maybe even see if it's possible to create
drivers for some book swap.  The problem with the book-swap is it is
usually one person to one person, end to end.  There's no in-between
library.

Book Mooch is the one I've heard a lot about, although I haven't ever used it.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] simple,flexible ILS for a small library.

[Jon Gorman]

> Perhaps from a usual library perspective, ILL is fancy, but programatically,
> it isn't any more complicated than a borrower.  Except a lender checks a
> book in first and simultaneously creates a record for it.

Most ILL software also offer different options for delivery, automates
much of the communications for requests and the like between
institutions, using systems similar for p2p for electronic document
delivery, ways to set up different shipping and payment methods, allow
individuals to track shipping, copyright control and licensing (does
institution x in Mexico have the right to loan us x), etc.  Most ILL
systems are geared towards sharing with non-partner institutions.
Usually true partner institutions share the same ILS or use some sort
of similar universal borrowing setup.

I'd imagine that's what most people started thinking when you said ILL
was a requirement but it sounds like you might also just be asking
more about universal borrowing configuration.  Typical lingo for what
it sounds like you want is good support for "on the fly" records for
patron and books.  In other words, it's really quick and easy to
create records, even at the point where you're about to circulate.
Universal borrowing setups tend to do this by either grabbing patron
info or having dummy patrons that correspond to the institution.

Illiad is probably our most heavily used ILL system, but we run more
than one for the electronic sharing aspects.

Most ILS systems don't have the ILL integrated with them, mostly due
to historical reasons.   In fact, ILS are increasingly moving away
from monolithic models into more modular ones.  (After all, typically
the catalog interface is a huge part of the ILS, but it sounds like
you want to use VuFind).


If you know all this I apologize, but I think there's some confusion
with how you're using the terms.  Or how I'm understanding your use.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] newbie

[Jon Gorman]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 2:24 PM, jenny  wrote:
> My question is, where would you recommend I would begin? What's hot
> right now in the library world? Python, PERL, Ruby? Any advice you'd
> have for a beginner like me or even recommendations for online courses
> would be extremely appreciated


Hi Jenny,

You've gotten lots of good advice and debate about programming
languages but my advice is going to be a little bit on a different
track.

First, in general I'd re-empathize what some other folks have said.
Projects are great way to learn a language, although i find a "intro
to x language" also useful to work through at the very beginning of a
language.  I have found that classes are useful for me mainly because
they give me deadlines and I usually try to go above and beyond the
call of duty as far as classes go. It's not so much I'm learning from
the lectures as it provides a structure for me to learn from and
deadlines to work toward.  The standards for many classes though are
lower than the standards I set for myself so I tend to do overkill for
actual assignments.

So community college classes might be useful for that purpose.  I'd
also say some really good courses in software design and engineering
can be really good, but it's hard to find good courses in those from
what I can tell.  Some signs of a good course: frequent group
projects, long-term projects, design being taught, a versioning and
feature/bug tracking framework setup for students and students are
expected to use it, professor does code reviews.

Mostly, lots of reading and lots of coding.  Look around for tutorials
on the web that go beyond "hello world".  Safari can be really good
here, and 24x7 isn't bad.  If you can get someone else to pay for it
or use an institutional account that would be good.  Choose some books
on your programming language.  Also read some non-programming language
specific books like The Pragmatic Programmer, Peopleware, and the
Mythical Man-month.  (The latter two are older but still some of the
best non-technical/management type books I've read).

Find a programming environment that's comfortable for you and also try
out some different operating systems and interfaces.  You could start
easy and start looking into various "Live CD" distributions.  That way
you can burn a cd or dvd with a new operating system and boot from it
and poke around.  Another thing you might want to investigate is using
Virtual Machines.  I have to confess that I haven't used virtual
machines in my home environment much, but I suspect it would be
really, really useful for learning.  That way you can set up a
"virtual server" and install things like databases or web servers
without worrying about mucking up your own system.  There is some
(Indeed, had you asked this question six to eight years ago, I'd say
make sure you have a setup where you can mess up your machine but
recover).   Hopefully after trying different operating systems, text
editors, IDEs, version control systems, etc you find tools you really
like.  (Oh yeah, try to start learning some version control tools
too...they're life-savers).

Jon Gorman

I



>
> JC
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] Book recommendation

[Jon Gorman]

For those who enjoyed "The Mythical Man-Month" I'd also recommend
Peopleware (not the software, the book ;) ).

Jon

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 2:58 PM, stuart yeates wrote:
> I can't speak highly enough about "The Mythical Man-Month," by Fred P.
> Brooks (1975).
>
> Let's just say that when they issued the 20th anniversary edition, they
> didn't need to update the examples in the text.
>
> cheers
> stuart
>
>
> Sharon Foster wrote:
>>>
>>> From my software engineering days, I like Steve McConnell's "Code
>>
>> Complete" and "Software Project Survival Guide;" "The Mythical
>> Man-Month," by Fred P. Brooks; "Joel On Software" by Joel Spolsky (who
>> also has a blog); and "The Elements of Programming Style," by Kernigan
>> and Plauger. K&R is directed at the C programming language, but there
>> are enough similarities in syntax with PHP, Java, and a lot of other
>> web developer languages that I think it's still relevant.
>>
>> Sharon M. Foster, JD, MLS
>> Technology Librarian
>> http://firstgentrekkie.blogspot.com/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 12:12 PM, Robert Fox wrote:
>>>
>>> Since this list has librarians, hard core programmers and hybrid
>>> librarian programmers on it, this is probably a good place to ask this sort
>>> of question.
>>>
>>> I'm looking for some book recommendations. I've read a lot of technical
>>> books on how to work with specific kinds of technology, read a lot of online
>>> technical "how tos" and that has been good as far as it goes. But,
>>> technology changes too fast to be wed to one particular programming
>>> language, database technology, metadata standard, etc. I'm interested in
>>> finding books that speak to the issues of programming methodology, design
>>> principles, lessons learned, etc. that transcend any particular programming
>>> technology. Are there good books that distill the wisdom and experience of
>>> veteran developers and /or communicate best practices for things like design
>>> patterns, overall software architecture, learning from mistakes, the
>>> developer mindset and such things?
>>>
>>> Could you recommend perhaps the top three or four books you've read in
>>> these areas?
>>>
>>> Rob Fox
>>> Hesburgh Libraries
>>> University of Notre Dame
>>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Stuart Yeates
> http://www.nzetc.org/       New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
> http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/     Institutional Repository
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] Book recommendation

[Jon Gorman]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Jon Gorman wrote:
> I'd second pretty much every suggestion I've seen so far and add one
> "Refactoring" by Fowler.   It's only really useful if you've had some
> design experience, but
>

Odd, not sure what happened there.  But what I meant to say, "but I
think it can be useful for anyone who's just starting out learning
object-orientated design or design patterns.".

Jon

Re: [CODE4LIB] Book recommendation

[Jon Gorman]

I'd second pretty much every suggestion I've seen so far and add one
"Refactoring" by Fowler.   It's only really useful if you've had some
design experience, but

Some of the others that I really highly recommend would be "The
Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master".  I'm of mixed
feelings on Code Complete.  A lot of the material I've heard better
elsewhere, but I can't think of anywhere else so much material is
brought together.  I'd say read it but then chase down some of the
citations.

Some good reads but not necessarily great ones that come to mind also are:

"Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software",  A bit
long for pretty much a common-sense point, which is log stuff, keep
heartbeats going, and the like.

"Agile modeling: effective practices for eXtreme programming ..." been
a while since I've read this one, but it seemed a good intro.  One of
those books if I had too much money I'd probably purchase.

"Dreaming in Code".  An amusing account of software development from a
reporter's perspective of some aspects of a netscape calendar
project(not quite right, but that's as close as my hazy memory
will get).

I've heard good things about "Beautiful Code" but haven't read it yet.


If you wanted to step away a little from actual software, I'd say
Donald Norman's various books are really good for ideas about
usability.  Lighter fare also includes Stephen Levy's books, some of
Rheingold's stuff although that is a bit outdated, "What the Doormouse
said.",  "IWoz", "Where the Wizards Stay Up Late".  I'm sure I'm
missing some of the light and quick reading of computer culture, but
that's plenty to get started.

At some point today I'll have to figure out what books others have
suggested that I still need to read (or request one of the various
libraries I'm associate with purchase).  Thanks for bringing up this
thread ;).
Jon

Re: [CODE4LIB] proxying Google Book Search and advertising networks to protect patron privacy

[Jon Gorman]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Eric Hellman wrote:
> I doubt that very much. It's very common for corporate sites to channel all
> their traffic through gateways. I would assume that google was smart enough
> to recognize that your usage pattern was not that of many users coming from
> a single IP address, but rather that of a harvesting robot. The two
> activities have very different log signatures.
>

Uh, actually, Google has in the past throttled some services based on
the ip address.  I'm pretty sure it was mentioned before on this list
and I can verify it myself.  Look for some of Jonathan Rochkind's
questions about a year ago.  The original api used with GBS seemed
very prone to this.  I know others hit issues and when our consortium
tried to use a proxy of the original api due to some technical issues
they ran into this.  (First couple of hundred hits would be golden,
the rest just would return http errors).  There's a newer one out
there now that apparently doesn't use this throttling, but I'm not
positive of the details.  An organization may still have to warn
google about it.

There's a reason why the original api strongly encouraged folks to do
things via a ajaxy call on the client.  I'm guessing part of the
reason for the "new api" was to address these issues.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Long way to be a good coder in library

[Jon Gorman]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Ross Singer wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Jon Gorman wrote:
>
>> As far as
>> languages, I'd probably lean towards ruby or python for starters or
>> maybe Java.  Then move into php after you have a grasp of good
>> programming practice.  You'll also figure out more what you like to
>> work on.
>
> Given the plaintive tone of the original post, I disagree with this
> advice.  Development is almost solely based on confidence and
> experience (with the latter affecting the former and vice-versa).
> "Good code" is secondary.
>
> I would almost certainly say start out with a procedural scripting
> language (or at least a procedural approach) that is more common and
> Googleable (PHP immediately comes to mind).
[snipped some more good points for brevity ;) ]

Good point.  One of my main thoughts was that ruby and python are both
"hot" languages right now and there might be a lot of tutorials and
tolerance out there now for the "hello world" type of approaches.  I
also considered for suggesting perl, but was afraid of being stoned
;).  PHP is popular and a pretty common entry language and it does
have a nice feedback loop as you pointed out.  One concern would be
that to get a handle on the web app related stuff you'll need a web
server + php.  That's been getting easier and easier to set up though.


Jon

ps As long as we're throwing out books, I like the first few chapters
of Fowler's Refactoring.  It can give a good feeling how Object
Orientated programming lends itself towards restructuring.

Re: [CODE4LIB] Long way to be a good coder in library

[Jon Gorman]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 10:14 PM, Wayne Lam wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>  I am new in here and i am currently worked in the library too.
> I am always confused that when i read the post in here, there are always
> something i don't understand
> and there are so much to learn.
>  So, the question is, hows everybody learns to be a good coder for
> libraries, what s the secret and what
> kind of technology are most important to learn?
>

Hi Wayne,

There's lots of projects out there in library land and I feel like I
rarely know as much about all the projects and technologies as I would
like.

That being said, what is your background as far as programming and
computing in general?  Also, do you prefer to learn from classes,
working with one or two people, or are you a solitary learner?  I
guess for now I'm going to assume you're working in a library and want
to learn how to be a programmer.

If you're really interested in programming and you are very new to the
field, I'd say the best thing would be to take some basic computer
science classes like systems architecture, algorithms, programming
101, database 101, and a software engineering course.  Whenever you
get an assignment where you can chose what to do, do a problem related
to libraries.  Programming a lot will get you comfortable with
programming, learning more about how everything works and looking at
other people's work should make you a better programmer.  As far as
languages, I'd probably lean towards ruby or python for starters or
maybe Java.  Then move into php after you have a grasp of good
programming practice.  You'll also figure out more what you like to
work on.

One issue is with most college-level cs courses is that they teach
theory but they're not going to teach the tools that will be really
useful to learn for day-to-day programming and practice.  Start
playing around with different Integrated Development Environments
(IDEs).  Maybe try to install something like Gforge onto a spare
machine.  Get into the habit of using a version control system like
svn or git.  I have a tendency to recommend having a linux computer to
learn programming on, although windows/microsoft have become better
again about providing tools for the learning programmer.   Get
comfortable using the command line, there's plenty of documentation
out there now.

If you already have the computer background but are more curious in
library software, that's a whole other set of answers ;).

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] tools for massaging metadata

[Jon Gorman]

What do you mean by metadata "massaging"?  Just text editing?  What
format is this metadata in?

Sorry, you're so broad here I'm not sure where to start.

Oxygen, xml spy, emacs, vi for editing.  Countless of command line
tools (find, awk, xargs, rename, etc).

Iconv for encoding conversions and issues there.

That's off the top of my head.

Jon

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 9:15 AM, Avila, Regina L. wrote:
> Can anybody share some good tools for massaging metadata? For anything from 
> file renaming to cleaning ASCII characters to various formulas?  I know Excel 
> does a lot of things but I'm looking for other useful software to consider. 
> I'm familiar with Parserat, Notepad++, A Better File Rename and a few others. 
>  Any other gems I should know?
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> ___
> Regina Avila
> Librarian
> National Institute of Standards and Technology
> 301-975-3575
> regina.av...@nist.gov
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] HTML mark-up in MARC records

[Jon Gorman]

> You could substitute XML with e.g. Base64 encoding if it makes thinking
> about this stuff easier. For instance email clients often send binary files
> in Base64, but it doesn't mean the file is ruined, as the receiving email
> client can decode it back to the original binary.

A bit of an ironic statement, considering a regular, constant
complaint on several library-related mailing lists I'm on is that
emails are coming in "garbled" or need to be sent again in "plain
text".   Without fail it's because the person is using a client that
won't or can't deal with Base64.  Yes, silly this day and age.

Perhaps I'm just jaded from working into libraries for too long but
your examples assume some logical consistent control through the
process of dealing with MARC data.

Let's think of this scenario instead:
You're using your vendor's ILS system.  You stick some html tags into
a record.  The vendor's ILS does some different stuff with it like
indexing it, storing the complete record for later retrieval, and
pulling data in the record into a semi-normalized scheme in a
database.  Now the librarians that have just enough training to do
some reports for these systems start running them via access and start
shifting the data around in Access, Exce,l and Word.  Then a little
while later they start raising alarms because of either:  they see the
markup in the record and wonder what's happening and how to remove it
or one of those tools treats that area as text, another as xml
content, and somewhere along the way it gets messed up.

The above is not really all that uncommon of a scenario.

Or how about this scenario:
You add some html internally to a MARC record.  You then add it to
your ILS system.  A few years later you go to export and decide to do
it in MARCXML.  Unknown to you, the ILS doesn't do a sane translation
process, but rather rebuilds the MARCXML from information in the
database that was put there by the original MARC.  The code is
horribly setup and hackish and certain fields do not bother to escape
what it's retrieving from the record.  You then go to import to your
new ILS, which validates the MARCXML.  It of course now croaks because
you have something like
pretty.

Would you count on having someone on the staff who will be able to fix
those MARCXML files?  Or did you have someone like that and they
burned out?  How long before the support contract on your old ILS
forces you to abandon it?


Plus the fact there's still unresolved questions.  Let's take RSS as
an example as a format that has been abused by html in the past.  If
you find "html" in RSS, you can't be sure if it valid or well-formed.
Frequently there's no way to know what version of html it is.  Yes, in
the end you can just throw it at a html parser or a browser and hope
for the best, but we have to consider the input mechanisms here. Are
folks going to be entering the html by hand?  Are there going to be
some sort of macros?  Some sort of batch change process?  Each have
different level of risks for having bad html.  How much extra
processing are you going to want to do for each record each time you
might end up displaying it?  What to do with a mistake?  Let your
parser determine or their browser?

It's great to say we should simply re-write our tools, but many of us
work with tools supplied by vendors.  We may be trying to move to more
open tools and the like but ultimately we're constrained by what our
upper managements dictate.

There's both practical reasons (untrustworthy systems) and more
abstract reasons (how to we communicate which version?  namespaces?
etc) issues at play here.  Ultimately I do agree that if it could not
be avoided to try putting in the html into the record itself.  A gain
of better usability and functionality over a couple of years is
probably worth it as the chance of a large issue later on is quite
small.  (Higher chance of small issues though).

I mainly sent out this email though because I don't think the folks
who have been pointing out issues are confused.  It's not that we
don't understand that it should be able to "round-trip" or that we
haven't played around with html in other data formats.  I think we've
used enough software in the library would to not trust all the layers
will work as they should.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] How to access environment variables in XSL

[Jon Gorman]

Try putting somewhere in one of the xslt pages


Version:


Vendor:


Vendor URL:



Jon

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Doran, Michael D wrote:
> Hi Dave,
>
>> What XSLT processor and programming language are you using?
>
> I'm embarrassed to say that I'm not sure.  I'm making modifications and 
> enhancements to already existing XSL pages that are part of the framework of 
> Ex Libris' new Voyager 7.0 OPAC.  This new version of the OPAC is running 
> under Apache Tomcat (on Solaris) and my assumption is that the programming 
> language is Java; however the source code for the app itself is not available 
> to me (and I'm not a Java programmer anyway, so it's a moot point).  I assume 
> also that the XSLT processor is what comes with Solaris (or Tomcat?).  As you 
> can probably tell, this stuff is new to me.  I've been trying to take a Sun 
> Ed XML/XSL class for the last year, but it keeps getting cancelled for lack 
> of students.  Apparently I'm the last person left in the Dallas/Fort Worth 
> area that needs to learn this stuff. ;-)
>
> -- Michael
>
> # Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
> # University of Texas at Arlington
> # 817-272-5326 office
> # 817-688-1926 mobile
> # do...@uta.edu
> # http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
>
>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On
>> Behalf Of Walker, David
>> Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 2:48 PM
>> To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
>> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] How to access environment variables in XSL
>>
>> Micahael,
>>
>> What XSLT processor and programming language are you using?
>>
>> --Dave
>>
>> ==
>> David Walker
>> Library Web Services Manager
>> California State University
>> http://xerxes.calstate.edu
>> 
>> From: Code for Libraries [code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf
>> Of Doran, Michael D [do...@uta.edu]
>> Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 12:44 PM
>> To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
>> Subject: [CODE4LIB] How to access environment variables in XSL
>>
>> I am working with some XSL pages that serve up HTML on the
>> web.  I'm new to XSL.   In my prior web development, I was
>> accustomed to being able to access environment variables (and
>> their values, natch) in my CGI scripts and/or via Server Side
>> Includes.  Is there an equivalent mechanism for accessing
>> those environment variables within an XSL page?
>>
>> These are examples of the variables I'm referring to:
>>     SERVER_NAME
>>     SERVER_PORT
>>     HTTP_HOST
>>     DOCUMENT_URI
>>     REMOTE_ADDR
>>     HTTP_REFERER
>>
>> In a Perl CGI script, I would do something like this:
>>     my $server = $ENV{'SERVER_NAME'};
>>
>> Or in an SSI, I could do something like this:
>>     
>>
>> If it matters, I'm working in: Solaris/Apache/Tomcat
>>
>> I've googled this but not found anything useful yet (except
>> for other people asking the same question).  Maybe I'm asking
>> the wrong question.  Any help would be appreciated.
>>
>> -- Michael
>>
>> # Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
>> # University of Texas at Arlington
>> # 817-272-5326 office
>> # 817-688-1926 mobile
>> # do...@uta.edu
>> # http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
>>
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] How to access environment variables in XSL

[Jon Gorman]

Hi Michael,

Only have time for a quick response.  Like Jonathan Rochkind said,
there's not really a built in way into XSL to refer to these things
like some other languages. The reason is typically the XSL processor
is used by some other language/system to transform a stylesheet, not
connected directly to the web server.  The cgi example works because
you have mod_perl or something similar to set the variables.  In this
case tomcat and the underlying java programs are going to be a layer
between the web server and the actual XSL sheets.  (There's another
model where you send both the xml and the xsl to the client and the
client transforms it, but that's been problematic iin the past).

That being said, XSL does support parameters that can be passed into
the stylesheet.  I know I've used java-type environments that used XSL
that made sure to pass on any "environmental" and http-based variables
in the stylesheet.  At this point perhaps tomcat and saxon (I'd guess
it's using saxon, maybe xalan) might be more tightly intergrated.

Given the application I would suspect you're using though, I wouldn't
count on those types of variables being passed in.  If they are, they
might not be documentted.  If you poke around the xsl files and they
are, you might see something like xsl:param name="myils:server" or
something..  The trick I've seen with a lot of these that you'll have
to explicitly state the parameter at the top in order to use it.
Various parsers might have a way to have the processor dump out what
parameters were passed into it, but I can't think of any off hand.
Many processors have system-properties, and in fact I think they all
are supposed to implement ...system-property('xsl:vendor').  I seem to
remember some processor extending this function to include some other
properties.

You might also want to look at
http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/processor-version.xsl (view
source) for some ideas on how to get a better grip on what XSLT
processor is being used.

(The XSL FAQ is long and a little confusing, but has gret nuggets of
information).
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/sect21.html


Sorry I can't be of more help.

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] Newbie asking for some suggestions with javascript

[Jon Gorman]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Derik Badman wrote:
> Hello all,

> I'm not sure the way I'm checking isbns against the text file is the most
> efficient way to go. Basically I'm making an ajax call to the file that
> takes the data and makes an array of objects. I then query the isbn of each
> journal on the page against the array of objects. If there's a match I pull
> the data and put it on the page. I'm wondering if there's a better way to do
> this, especially since the text file is over 1mb. I'm not looking for code,
> just ideas.


I guess the first question is if it is really necessary to use a text
file?  I'm not entirely clear on this process, but perhaps the text
file could be imported into a database.  You could attempt to use some
sort of function that cleans up ISBNs and use that as the lookup.  You
might run into occasional issues such as ISBNs not being unique, but
it sounds like you could run into that issue in any case.

Then of course perhaps there's some way to add this to the Serials
Solution database directly?  Then you don't need another javascript at
all?

>
> I'm also looking for any pointers about using the file itself and somehow
> auto-downloading it to my server on a regular basis. Right now I just saved
> a copy to my server, but in the future it'd be good to automate grabbing the
> file from ticTOCs server on a regular basis and updating the one on my
> server (perhaps I'd need to use a cron job to do that?).
>

cron + wget/curl would be a good first step it would seem.  You might
want some sort of script that monitors changes or the like.  (Maybe
send you an email if there's no updates in x days or something like
that).

Jon Gorman

Re: [CODE4LIB] LibraryThing Web Services API

[Jon Gorman]

Very cool.

Jon Gorman


On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Tim Spalding <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [ Apologies for cross-posting ]
>
> LibraryThing just released a free, CC-attribution-licensed Web
> Services XML API to our "Common Knowledge" system, including series
> data, fictional characters, author dates and much else. I'm
> particularly stoked about the series data. I think it's of exceptional
> quality, suitable for use in OPACs (eg.,
> http://www.librarything.com/series/Star+Wars). Anyway, in a catalog or
> not, there are a lot of cool things to do with it.
>
> Have fun!
>
> http://www.librarything.com/blog/2008/08/free-web-services-api-to-common.php
>
> Tim
> --
> Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] IDE for cataloging?

[Jon Gorman]

> I was very intrigued by some comments he made regarding the need for
> catalogers to have an "integrated development environment" similar to
> that which many programmers have. I completely agree with him, and I
> was wondering if anybody out there knows of any place or project that
> is working on creating such a tool.

My memory is horrible, so not surprisingly I did neglect to mention
some actual work that was going on in this area ;).  People who know
me know this has been a long standing complaint of mine, but I haven't
done much myself.

There's a couple of projects out there.

 One is called biblios (http://www.biblios.net/).  This was shown at
the code4lib 2008 conference:
http://code4lib.org/conference/2008/catalfo.  The google video seems
busted at the moment, but here's a link the IA:
http://www.archive.org/details/code4lib.conf.2008.pres.OSSWebbasedCatalogingTool.

At least, I'm pretty sure this was the app, the video seems to be down
right now.

Terry Reese also has been doing a lot of work on better cataloging
clients.  I haven't tried his MarcEdit anywhere near as much as I
should but a lot of the catalogers here are excited about it.  
http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/index.php

>  I'm interested in contributing to
> the development of better automated tools to support those who create
> and manage collections of metadata, and I have a 12-month sabbatical
> scheduled for 2009-2010. Since I don't currently have the programming
> knowledge or skills to tackle a software development project on my
> own, I'd love to get hooked up with an existing project.

You might also want to check out some of the videos of past code4lib
conferences.  Some of the xforms talks are quite interesting in this
regard.  It's a bit on the technical end, but it's work that could be
adopted elsewhere.

Hopefully some other folks can mention some more.

Jon Gorman