Coffee|Code: Dan Scott's blog - coding

Coffee|Code: Dan Scott's blog - coding
Librarian · Developer
	Our nginx caching proxy setup for Evergreen
Details of our nginx caching proxy settings for Evergreen
	Enriching catalogue pages in Evergreen with Wikidata
An openly licensed JavaScript widget that enriches library catalogues with Wikidata data
	Wikidata, Canada 150, and music festival data
At CAML 2017, Stacy Allison-Cassin and I presented our arguments in favour of using Wikidata is a good fit for communities who want to increase the visibility of Canadian music in Wikimedia Foundation projects.
	Wikidata workshop for librarians
Interested in learning about Wikidata? I
        delivered a workshop for librarians and archivists at the CAML 2017
        preconference. Perhaps you will find the materials I developed
        useful for your own training purposes.
	Truly progressive WebVR apps are available offline!
I've been dabbling with the A-Frame framework for
creating WebVR experiences for the past couple of months, ever since Patrick
Trottier gave a lightning talk at the GDG Sudbury DevFest in November and a
hands-on session with AFrame in January. The
@AFrameVR Twitter feed regularly highlights
cool new WebVR apps …
	schema.org, Wikidata, Knowledge Graph: strands of the modern semantic web
My slides from Ohio DevFest 2016: schema.org, Wikidata, Knowledge Graph:
strands of the modern semantic web
And the video, recorded and edited by the incredible amazing Patrick Hammond:
In November, I had the opportunity to speak at Ohio DevFest 2016. One of the organizers, Casey Borders, had invited me …
	Google Scholar's broken Recaptcha hurts libraries and their users
Update 2016-11-28: The brilliant folk at UNC figured out how to fix
Google Scholar using a pre-scoped search so that, if a search is launched
from the library web site, it will automatically associate that search with the
library's licensed resources. No EZProxy required!


For libraries, proxying user requests is …
	PHP's File_MARC gets a new release (1.1.3)
Yesterday, just one day before the anniversary of the 1.1.2 release, I
published the 1.1.3 release of the PEAR
File_MARC library. The only
change is the addition of a convenience method for fields called
getContents() that simply concatenates all of the subfields together
in order, with …
	PHP's File_MARC gets a new release (1.1.3)
Yesterday, just one day before the anniversary of the 1.1.2 release, I
published the 1.1.3 release of the PEAR
File_MARC library. The only
change is the addition of a convenience method for fields called
getContents() that simply concatenates all of the subfields together
in order, with …
	Chromebooks and privacy: not always at odds
On Friday, June 10th I gave a short talk at the OLITA Digital Odyssey
2016 conference, which had a theme this year of privacy and security. My
talk addressed the evolution of our public and loaner laptops over the
past decade, from bare Windows XP, to Linux, Windows XP with …
	Chromebooks and privacy: not always at odds
On Friday, June 10th I gave a short talk at the OLITA Digital Odyssey
2016 conference, which had a theme this year of privacy and security. My
talk addressed the evolution of our public and loaner laptops over the
past decade, from bare Windows XP, to Linux, Windows XP with …
	Library stories: 2020 vision: "Professional research tools"
For a recent strategic retreat, I was asked to prepare (as homework) a
story about a subject that I'm passionate about, with an idea of where
we might see the library in the next three to five years. Here's one of
the stories I came up with, in the form …
	Library stories: 2020 vision: "Professional research tools"
For a recent strategic retreat, I was asked to prepare (as homework) a
story about a subject that I'm passionate about, with an idea of where
we might see the library in the next three to five years. Here's one of
the stories I came up with, in the form …
	Querying Evergreen from Google Sheets with custom functions via Apps Script
Our staff were recently asked to check thousands of ISBNs to find out if
we already have the corresponding books in our catalogue. They in turn
asked me if I could run a script that would check it for them. It makes
me happy to work with people who believe …
	Querying Evergreen from Google Sheets with custom functions via Apps Script
Our staff were recently asked to check thousands of ISBNs to find out if
we already have the corresponding books in our catalogue. They in turn
asked me if I could run a script that would check it for them. It makes
me happy to work with people who believe …
	That survey about EZProxy
OCLC recently asked EZProxy clients to fill out a survey about their
experiences with the product and to get feedback on possible future
plans for the product.
About half-way through, I decided it might be a good idea to post my
responses. Because hey, if I'm working to help them …
	That survey about EZProxy
OCLC recently asked EZProxy clients to fill out a survey about their
experiences with the product and to get feedback on possible future
plans for the product.
About half-way through, I decided it might be a good idea to post my
responses. Because hey, if I'm working to help them …
	"The Librarian" - an instruction session in the style of "The Martian"
I had fun today. A colleague in Computer Science has been giving his C++
students an assignment to track down an article that is only available
in print in the library. When we chatted about it earlier this year, I
suggested that perhaps he could bring me in as a …
	"The Librarian" - an instruction session in the style of "The Martian"
I had fun today. A colleague in Computer Science has been giving his C++
students an assignment to track down an article that is only available
in print in the library. When we chatted about it earlier this year, I
suggested that perhaps he could bring me in as a …
	We screwed up: identities in loosely-coupled systems
A few weeks ago, I came to the startling and depressing realization that we had
screwed up. It started when someone I know and greatly respect ran into me in
the library and said "We have a problem".
I'm the recently appointed Chair of our library and archives department, so …
	We screwed up: identities in loosely-coupled systems
A few weeks ago, I came to the startling and depressing realization that we had
screwed up. It started when someone I know and greatly respect ran into me in
the library and said "We have a problem".
I'm the recently appointed Chair of our library and archives department, so …
	Research across the Curriculum
The following post dates back to January 15, 2007, when I had been
employed at Laurentian for less than a year and was getting an
institutional repository up and running.... I think old me had some
interesting thoughts!

Abstract
The author advocates an approach to university curriculum that
re-emphasizes the …
	Research across the Curriculum
The following post dates back to January 15, 2007, when I had been
employed at Laurentian for less than a year and was getting an
institutional repository up and running.... I think old me had some
interesting thoughts!

Abstract
The author advocates an approach to university curriculum that
re-emphasizes the …
	Library and Archives Canada: Planning for a new union catalogue
Update 2015-03-03: Clarified (in the Privacy section) that only
NRCan runs Evergreen.
I attended a meeting with Library and Archives Canada today in my role
as an Ontario Library Association board
member to discuss the plans around a new Canadian union catalogue based
on OCLC's hosted services. Following are some …
	Library and Archives Canada: Planning for a new union catalogue
Update 2015-03-03: Clarified (in the Privacy section) that only
NRCan runs Evergreen.
I attended a meeting with Library and Archives Canada today in my role
as an Ontario Library Association board
member to discuss the plans around a new Canadian union catalogue based
on OCLC's hosted services. Following are some …
	Library catalogues and HTTP status codes
I noticed in Google's Webmaster
Tools that our catalogue
had been returning some Soft 404s. Curious, I checked into some of the
URIs suffering from this condition, and realized that Evergreen returns
an HTTP status code of 200 OK when it serves up a record details
page for a record …
	Library catalogues and HTTP status codes
I noticed in Google's Webmaster
Tools that our catalogue
had been returning some Soft 404s. Curious, I checked into some of the
URIs suffering from this condition, and realized that Evergreen returns
an HTTP status code of 200 OK when it serves up a record details
page for a record …
	Dear database vendor: defending against sci-hub.org scraping is going to be very difficult
Our library receives formal communications from various content/database
vendors about "serious intellectual property infringement" on a
reasonably regular basis, that urge us to "pay particular attention to
proxy security". Here is part of the response I sent to the most recent
such request:

We use the UsageLimit directives that …
	Dear database vendor: defending against sci-hub.org scraping is going to be very difficult
Our library receives formal communications from various content/database
vendors about "serious intellectual property infringement" on a
reasonably regular basis, that urge us to "pay particular attention to
proxy security". Here is part of the response I sent to the most recent
such request:

We use the UsageLimit directives that …
	Putting the "Web" back into Semantic Web in Libraries 2014
I was honoured to lead a workshop and speak at this year's edition of Semantic
Web in Bibliotheken (SWIB) in Bonn, Germany. It was
an amazing experience; there were so many rich projects being described with
obvious dividends for the users of libraries, once again the European library
community fills …
	Putting the "Web" back into Semantic Web in Libraries 2014
I was honoured to lead a workshop and speak at this year's edition of Semantic
Web in Bibliotheken (SWIB) in Bonn, Germany. It was
an amazing experience; there were so many rich projects being described with
obvious dividends for the users of libraries, once again the European library
community fills …
	Social networking for researchers: ResearchGate and their ilk
The Centre for Research in Occupational Safety and
Health asked me to give a lunch'n'learn
presentation on
ResearchGate
today, which was a challenge I was happy to take on... but I took the
liberty of stretching the scope of the discussion to focus on social
networking in the context of …
	Social networking for researchers: ResearchGate and their ilk
The Centre for Research in Occupational Safety and
Health asked me to give a lunch'n'learn
presentation on
ResearchGate
today, which was a challenge I was happy to take on... but I took the
liberty of stretching the scope of the discussion to focus on social
networking in the context of …
	How discovery layers have closed off access to library resources, and other tales of schema.org from LITA Forum 2014
At the LITA Forum yesterday, I accused
(presentation) most
discovery layers of not solving the discoverability problems of
libraries, but instead exacerbating them by launching us headlong to a
closed, unlinkable world. Coincidentally, Lorcan Dempsey's opening
keynote contained a subtle criticism of discovery layers. I wasn't that
subtle.
Here's why …
	How discovery layers have closed off access to library resources, and other tales of schema.org from LITA Forum 2014
At the LITA Forum yesterday, I accused
(presentation) most
discovery layers of not solving the discoverability problems of
libraries, but instead exacerbating them by launching us headlong to a
closed, unlinkable world. Coincidentally, Lorcan Dempsey's opening
keynote contained a subtle criticism of discovery layers. I wasn't that
subtle.
Here's why …
	DCMI 2014: schema.org holdings in open source library systems
My slides from DCMI 2014:
schema.org in the wild: open source libraries++.
Last week I was at the
Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative 2014 conference, where Richard Wallis, Charles MacCathie Nevile and
I were slated to present on schema.org and the work of the W3C Schema.org
Bibliographic Extension …
	My small contribution to schema.org this week
Version 1.91 of the
http://schema.org vocabulary was released a few days ago, and I once
again had a small part to play in it.
With the addition of the workExample
and exampleOfWork properties, we
(Richard Wallis, Dan Brickley, and I) realized that examples of these
CreativeWork example …
	My small contribution to schema.org this week
Version 1.91 of the
http://schema.org vocabulary was released a few days ago, and I once
again had a small part to play in it.
With the addition of the workExample
and exampleOfWork properties, we
(Richard Wallis, Dan Brickley, and I) realized that examples of these
CreativeWork example …
	Posting on the Laurentian University library blog
Since returning from my sabbatical, I've felt pretty strongly that one
of the things our work place is lacking is open communication about the
work that we do--not just outside of the library, but within the library
as well. I'm convinced that the more that we know about the demands …
	Posting on the Laurentian University library blog
Since returning from my sabbatical, I've felt pretty strongly that one
of the things our work place is lacking is open communication about the
work that we do--not just outside of the library, but within the library
as well. I'm convinced that the more that we know about the demands …
	Cataloguing for the open web: schema.org in library catalogues and websites
tldr; my slides are
href="http://stuff.coffeecode.net/2014/understanding_schema">here, and the
slides from Jenn and Jason are also available from
href="http://connect.ala.org/node/222959">ALA Connect.
On Sunday, June 29th Jenn Riley, Jason Clark, and I presented at the ALCTS/LITA
jointly sponsored session …
	Cataloguing for the open web: schema.org in library catalogues and websites
tldr; my slides are
href="http://stuff.coffeecode.net/2014/understanding_schema">here, and the
slides from Jenn and Jason are also available from
href="http://connect.ala.org/node/222959">ALA Connect.
On Sunday, June 29th Jenn Riley, Jason Clark, and I presented at the ALCTS/LITA
jointly sponsored session …
	Linked data interest panel, part 1
Good talk by Richard Wallis this morning at the ALA Annual Conference on
publishing entities on the web. Many of his points map extremely closely
to what I've been saying and will be saying tomorrow during my own
session (albeit with ten fewer minutes).
I was particularly heartened to hear …
	Linked data interest panel, part 1
Good talk by Richard Wallis this morning at the ALA Annual Conference on
publishing entities on the web. Many of his points map extremely closely
to what I've been saying and will be saying tomorrow during my own
session (albeit with ten fewer minutes).
I was particularly heartened to hear …
	RDFa introduction and codelabs for libraries
My RDFa introduction and codelab
materials for
the ALA 2014 preconference on Practical linked data with open
source are now online!
And now I've finished leading the RDFa + schema.org codelab that I've
been stressing over and refining for about a month at the American
Library Association annual conference Practical …
	RDFa introduction and codelabs for libraries
My RDFa introduction and codelab
materials for
the ALA 2014 preconference on Practical linked data with open
source are now online!
And now I've finished leading the RDFa + schema.org codelab that I've
been stressing over and refining for about a month at the American
Library Association annual conference Practical …
	Dropping back into the Semantic Web
I've been at the 2014 Extended (formerly European) Semantic Web Conference (
ESWC) in Anissaras, Greece for four
days now. My reason for attending was to present my paper Seeding structured
data by default in open source library systems (presentation) (paper).
It has been fantastic. As a librarian attending a conference …
	Dropping back into the Semantic Web
I've been at the 2014 Extended (formerly European) Semantic Web Conference (
ESWC) in Anissaras, Greece for four
days now. My reason for attending was to present my paper Seeding structured
data by default in open source library systems (presentation) (paper).
It has been fantastic. As a librarian attending a conference …
	RDFa, schema.org, and open source library systems
Two things of note:

I recently submitted the camera-ready copy for my ESWC 2014 paper,
Seeding Structured Data by Default via Open Source Library Systems
(**preprint**).
The paper focuses on the work I've done with Evergreen, Koha, and
VuFind to use emerging web standards such as RDFa Lite and schema …
	RDFa, schema.org, and open source library systems
Two things of note:

I recently submitted the camera-ready copy for my ESWC 2014 paper,
Seeding Structured Data by Default via Open Source Library Systems
(**preprint**).
The paper focuses on the work I've done with Evergreen, Koha, and
VuFind to use emerging web standards such as RDFa Lite and schema …
	Mapping library holdings to the Product / Offer mode in schema.org
Back in August, I
mentioned
that I taught Evergreen, Koha, and VuFind how to express library
holdings in schema.org via the http://schema.org/Offer class. What I
failed to mention was how others can do the same with their own library
systems (well, okay, I linked to the …
	Mapping library holdings to the Product / Offer mode in schema.org
Back in August, I
mentioned
that I taught Evergreen, Koha, and VuFind how to express library
holdings in schema.org via the http://schema.org/Offer class. What I
failed to mention was how others can do the same with their own library
systems (well, okay, I linked to the …
	What would you understand if you read the entire world wide web?
On Tuesday, February 4th, I'll be participating in Laurentian
University's Research Week lightning talks. Unlike most five-minute
lightning talk events in which I've participated, the time limit for
each talk tomorrow will be one minute. Imagine 60 different
researchers getting up to summarize their research in one minute each,
and …
	What would you understand if you read the entire world wide web?
On Tuesday, February 4th, I'll be participating in Laurentian
University's Research Week lightning talks. Unlike most five-minute
lightning talk events in which I've participated, the time limit for
each talk tomorrow will be one minute. Imagine 60 different
researchers getting up to summarize their research in one minute each,
and …
	Ups and downs
Tuesday was not the greatest day, but at least each setback resulted in
a triumph...
First, the periodical proposal for
schema.org--that I
have poured a good couple of months of effort into--took a step closer to
reality when Dan Brickley announced on the public-vocabs list that
he had …
	Ups and downs
Tuesday was not the greatest day, but at least each setback resulted in
a triumph...
First, the periodical proposal for
schema.org--that I
have poured a good couple of months of effort into--took a step closer to
reality when Dan Brickley announced on the public-vocabs list that
he had …
	Broadening support for linked data in MARC
The following is an
email
that I sent to the MARC mailing
list on January 24, 2014
that might be of interest to those looking to provide better support for
linked data in MARC (hopefully as just a transitional step):

In the spirit of making it possible to express linked …
	Broadening support for linked data in MARC
The following is an
email
that I sent to the MARC mailing
list on January 24, 2014
that might be of interest to those looking to provide better support for
linked data in MARC (hopefully as just a transitional step):

In the spirit of making it possible to express linked …
	Want citations? Release your work!
Last week I was putting the finishing touches on the first serious
academic paper I have written in a long time, and decided that I
wanted to provide backup for some of the assertions I had made.
Naturally, the deadline was tight, so getting any articles via
interlibrary loan was …
	Want citations? Release your work!
Last week I was putting the finishing touches on the first serious
academic paper I have written in a long time, and decided that I
wanted to provide backup for some of the assertions I had made.
Naturally, the deadline was tight, so getting any articles via
interlibrary loan was …
	File_MARC: 1.0.1 release fixes data corruption bug
I released File_MARC 1.0.1
yesterday after receiving a bug report from the most excellent Mark
Jordan about a basic (but data
corrupting) problem that had existed since the very early days (almost
seven years ago). If you generate MARC binary output from File_MARC,
you should upgrade immediately.
In …
	File_MARC: 1.0.1 release fixes data corruption bug
I released File_MARC 1.0.1
yesterday after receiving a bug report from the most excellent Mark
Jordan about a basic (but data
corrupting) problem that had existed since the very early days (almost
seven years ago). If you generate MARC binary output from File_MARC,
you should upgrade immediately.
In …
	Talk proposal: Structuring library data on the web with schema.org: we're on it!
I submitted the following proposal to the Library Technology Conference
2014 and thought it might be of general
interest.

Structuring library data on the web with schema.org: we're on it!

Abstract
Until recently, there has been a disappointing level of adoption of
schema.org structured data in traditional core …
	Talk proposal: Structuring library data on the web with schema.org: we're on it!
I submitted the following proposal to the Library Technology Conference
2014 and thought it might be of general
interest.

Structuring library data on the web with schema.org: we're on it!

Abstract
Until recently, there has been a disappointing level of adoption of
schema.org structured data in traditional core …
	File_MARC makes it to stable 1.0.0 release (finally!)
Way back in 2006, I thought "It's a shame there is no PHP library for
parsing MARC records!", and given that much of my most recent coding
experience was in the PHP realm, I thought it would be a good way of
contributing to the world of code4lib. Thus
File_MARC …
	File_MARC makes it to stable 1.0.0 release (finally!)
Way back in 2006, I thought "It's a shame there is no PHP library for
parsing MARC records!", and given that much of my most recent coding
experience was in the PHP realm, I thought it would be a good way of
contributing to the world of code4lib. Thus
File_MARC …
	Finally tangoed with reveal.js to create presentations
... and I have enjoyed the dance. Yes, I know I'm way behind the times.
Over the past few years I was generating presentations via
asciidoc, and I enjoyed its very functional
approach and basic output. However, recently I used Google Drive to
quickly create a few slightly prettier but much …
	Finally tangoed with reveal.js to create presentations
... and I have enjoyed the dance. Yes, I know I'm way behind the times.
Over the past few years I was generating presentations via
asciidoc, and I enjoyed its very functional
approach and basic output. However, recently I used Google Drive to
quickly create a few slightly prettier but much …
	RDFa and schema.org all the library things
TLDR: The Evergreen and
Koha integrated library systems now express
their record details in the schema.org vocabulary out of the box using RDFa.
Individual holdings are expressed as Offer
instances per the
W3C Schema Bib Extension community group proposal to
parallel commercial sales offers. And I have published a …
	RDFa and schema.org all the library things
TLDR: The Evergreen and
Koha integrated library systems now express
their record details in the schema.org vocabulary out of the box using RDFa.
Individual holdings are expressed as Offer
instances per the
W3C Schema Bib Extension community group proposal to
parallel commercial sales offers. And I have published a …
	A Flask of full-text search in PostgreSQL
Update: More conventional versions of the slides are available from
Google
Docs
or in on Speakerdeck
(PDF)
.
On August 10, 2013, I gave the following talk at the PyCon Canada
2013 conference:


I’m a systems librarian at Laurentian University.
For the past six years, my day job and research …
	A Flask of full-text search in PostgreSQL
Update: More conventional versions of the slides are available from
Google
Docs
or in on Speakerdeck
(PDF)
.
On August 10, 2013, I gave the following talk at the PyCon Canada
2013 conference:


I’m a systems librarian at Laurentian University.
For the past six years, my day job and research …
	Parsing the schema.org vocabulary for fun and frustration
For various reasons I've spent a few hours today trying to parse the
schema.org vocabulary into a nice, searchable
database structure. Unfortunately, for a linked data effort that's two
years old now and arguably one of the most important efforts out there,
it's been an exercise in frustration.

OWL …
	Parsing the schema.org vocabulary for fun and frustration
For various reasons I've spent a few hours today trying to parse the
schema.org vocabulary into a nice, searchable
database structure. Unfortunately, for a linked data effort that's two
years old now and arguably one of the most important efforts out there,
it's been an exercise in frustration.

OWL …
	Linked data irony, example one of probably many
I'm currently ramping up my knowledge of the linked dataworld, and ran
across the Proceedings of the WWW2013 Workshop on Linked Data on the
Web. Which are published on the web
(yay!) as open access (yay!) in PDF (what?). Thus, the papers from the
linked data workshop at the W3 …
	Linked data irony, example one of probably many
I'm currently ramping up my knowledge of the linked dataworld, and ran
across the Proceedings of the WWW2013 Workshop on Linked Data on the
Web. Which are published on the web
(yay!) as open access (yay!) in PDF (what?). Thus, the papers from the
linked data workshop at the W3 …
	PyCon Canada 2013 - PostgreSQL full-text search and Flask
On August 10, 2013, I'll be giving a twenty-minute talk at PyCon Canada
on A Flask of full-text search with
PostgreSQL. I'm
very excited to be talking about Python, at a Python conference, and to
be giving the Python audience a peek at PostgreSQL's full-text search
capabilities. With a twenty …
	PyCon Canada 2013 - PostgreSQL full-text search and Flask
On August 10, 2013, I'll be giving a twenty-minute talk at PyCon Canada
on A Flask of full-text search with
PostgreSQL. I'm
very excited to be talking about Python, at a Python conference, and to
be giving the Python audience a peek at PostgreSQL's full-text search
capabilities. With a twenty …
	CARLCore Metadata Application Profile for institutional repositories
A long time ago, in what seemed like another life, I attended the
Access 2006
conference
as a relatively new systems librarian at Laurentian University. The
subject of the preconference was this totally new-to-me thing called
"institutional repositories", which I eventually worked out were
basically web applications oriented towards content …
	CARLCore Metadata Application Profile for institutional repositories
A long time ago, in what seemed like another life, I attended the
Access 2006
conference
as a relatively new systems librarian at Laurentian University. The
subject of the preconference was this totally new-to-me thing called
"institutional repositories", which I eventually worked out were
basically web applications oriented towards content …
	Making the Evergreen catalogue mobile-friendly via responsive CSS
Back in November the Evergreen community was discussing the desire for a
mobile catalogue, and expressed a strong
opinion that the right
way forward would be to teach the current catalogue to be
mobile-friendly by applying principles of responsive design. In fact, I
stated:

Almost all of this can be …
	Making the Evergreen catalogue mobile-friendly via responsive CSS
Back in November the Evergreen community was discussing the desire for a
mobile catalogue, and expressed a strong
opinion that the right
way forward would be to teach the current catalogue to be
mobile-friendly by applying principles of responsive design. In fact, I
stated:

Almost all of this can be …
	Structured data: making metadata matter for machines
Update 2013-04-18: Now with video of the
presentation, thanks to the
awesome #egcon2013 volunteers!
I've been attending the Evergreen 2013
Conference in beautiful Vancouver.
This morning, I was honoured to be able to give a presentation on some
of the work I've been doing on implementing linked data via
schema …
	Structured data: making metadata matter for machines
Update 2013-04-18: Now with video of the
presentation, thanks to the
awesome #egcon2013 volunteers!
I've been attending the Evergreen 2013
Conference in beautiful Vancouver.
This morning, I was honoured to be able to give a presentation on some
of the work I've been doing on implementing linked data via
schema …
	Introducing version control & git in 1.5 hours to undergraduates
Our university offers a Computer Science
degree, but the formal curriculum does not cover version control (or a
number of other common tools and practices in software development).
Students that have worked for me in part-time jobs or summer positions
have said things like:

if it wasn't for that one …
	Introducing version control & git in 1.5 hours to undergraduates
Our university offers a Computer Science
degree, but the formal curriculum does not cover version control (or a
number of other common tools and practices in software development).
Students that have worked for me in part-time jobs or summer positions
have said things like:

if it wasn't for that one …
	Triumph of the tiny brain: Dan vs. Drupal / Panels
A while ago I inherited responsibility for a Drupal 6 instance and a
rather out-of-date server. (You know it's not good when your production
operating system is so old that it is no longer getting security
updates).
I'm not a Drupal person. I dabbled with Drupal years and years ago …
	Triumph of the tiny brain: Dan vs. Drupal / Panels
A while ago I inherited responsibility for a Drupal 6 instance and a
rather out-of-date server. (You know it's not good when your production
operating system is so old that it is no longer getting security
updates).
I'm not a Drupal person. I dabbled with Drupal years and years ago …
	Finding DRM-free books on the Google Play store
John Mark Ockerbloom recently said, while trying to buy a DRM-free copy
of John Scalzi's
Redshirts
on the Google Play Store: “The catalog page doesn’t tell me what format
it’s in, or whether it has DRM; it instead just asks me to sign in to
buy
it.”
I …
	Finding DRM-free books on the Google Play store
John Mark Ockerbloom recently said, while trying to buy a DRM-free copy
of John Scalzi's
Redshirts
on the Google Play Store: “The catalog page doesn’t tell me what format
it’s in, or whether it has DRM; it instead just asks me to sign in to
buy
it.”
I …
	First Go program: converting Google Scholar XML holdings to EBSCO Discovery Service holdings
Update 2012-06-19: And here's how to implement stream-oriented XML
parsing
Many academic libraries are already generating electronic resource
holdings summaries in the Google Scholar XML
holdingsformat, and it seems to provide most of the metadata you would need to
provide a discovery layer summary in a nice, granular format …
	First Go program: converting Google Scholar XML holdings to EBSCO Discovery Service holdings
Update 2012-06-19: And here's how to implement stream-oriented XML
parsing
Many academic libraries are already generating electronic resource
holdings summaries in the Google Scholar XML
holdingsformat, and it seems to provide most of the metadata you would need to
provide a discovery layer summary in a nice, granular format …
	What does a system librarian do?
Preface: I'm talking to my daughter's kindergarten class tomorrow
about my job. Exciting! So I prepped a little bit; it will probably go
entirely different, but here's how it's going to go in my mind...

My name is Dan Scott. I’m Amber’s dad. I’m a systems librarian …
	Farewell, old Google Books APIs
Since the announcement of the new v1 Google Books API, I've been doing a
bit of work with it in Python (following up on my part of the
conversation).
Today, Google
announced
that many of their older APIs were now officially deprecated. Included
in that list are the Google Books …
	The new Google Books API and possibilities for libraries
On the subject of the new Google Books API that was unveiled during the
Google IO 2011 conference last week, Jonathan Rochkind
states:

Once you have an API key, it can keep track of # requests for that
key — it’s not clear to me if they rate limit you, and …
	Creating a MARC record from scratch in PHP using File_MARC
In the past couple of days, two people have written me email essentially
saying: "Dan, this File_MARC
library sounds great - but I can't figure out how to create a record
from scratch with it! Can you please help me?"
Yes, when you're dealing with MARC, you'll quickly get all weepy …
	Access Conference 2011 in beautiful British Columbia
The official announcement for the Canadian Library Association
(CLA) Emerging Technology Interest Group
(ETIG)-sponsored Access Conference for
2011
went out back in November, announcing Vancouver, British Columbia, as
the host. Note that the schedule has changed from its original dates to
October 19-22!
I've told a number of people …
	Troubleshooting Ariel send and receive functionality
I'm posting the following instructions for testing the ports required by
Ariel interlibrary loan software.
I get requests for this information a few
times a year, and at some point it will be easier to find on my blog
than to
dig through my email archives from over 3 years …
	Chilifresh-using libraries: are you violating copyright?
When I was preparing my Access 2010 presentation about social sharing
and aggregation in library
software,
I came across Chilifresh, a company that
aggregates reviews written by library patrons from across libraries that
subscribe to the company's review service. I was a bit disappointed to
see that the service almost …
	On avoiding accusations of forking a project
Sometimes forking a project is necessary to reassert community control
over a project that has become overly dominated by a single corporate
rules: see OpenIndiana and
LibreOffice for recent
examples. And in the world of distributed version control systems,
forking is viewed positively; it's a form of evolution, where
experimental …
	Library hackers want you to throw down the gauntlet
On October 13th, a very special event is happening: the Access
Hackfest. A tradition
since Access 2002, the Hackfest brings together library practitioners of
all kinds to tackle challenges and problems from the mundane to the
sublime to the ridiculous. If you can imagine a spectrum with three
axes, you …
	File_MARC 0.6.0 - now offering two tasty flavours of MARC-as-JSON output
I've just released the PHP PEAR library
File_MARC 0.6.0. This release
brings two JSON serialization output methods for MARC to the table:

toJSONHash() returns JSON that adheres to Bill Dueber's proposal for
the array-oriented MARC-HASH JSON format at New interest in
MARC-HASH
JSON
toJSON() returns JSON that adheres …
	In which I perceive that gossip is not science
Marshall Breeding published the results of his 2009 International
Survey of Library
Automation a
few days ago. Juicy stuff, with averages, medians, and modes for the
negative/positive responses on a variety of ILS and vendor-related
questions, and some written comments from the respondents. One would
expect the library geek …
	PKG_CHECK_MODULES syntax error near unexpected token 'DEPS,'
The next time you bash your brains against autotools for a while
wondering why your perfectly good PKG_CHECK_MODULES() macro, as cut
and paste directly from the recommended configure.ac entry for the
package you're trying to integrate (in this case
libmemcached),
and you get the error message
PKG_CHECK_MODULES syntax error …
	MARC library for C# coders
C# isn't in my go-to list of programming languages, but I can understand
why others would be interested in developing applications in C#. So it's
good news to the C# community of library developers (it would be
interesting to find out how many of you are out there) that there …
	Doing useful things with the TXT dump of SFX holdings, part 1: database
There must be other people who have much more intelligent things than me
with the TXT dump of SFX holdings that you can generate via the Web
administration interface, but as I've gone through this process at least
twice and rediscovered it each time, perhaps I'll save myself an hour …
	Transparent acquisitions budgets and expenditures for academic libraries
In my most recent
post
over at the Academic Matters site, after a general discussion about "new
books lists" in academic libraries, I tackle one of the dirty laundry
areas for academic libraries: exposing how collection development funds
are allocated to departments. Here's a relevant quote:

For 2008-2009, we decided …
	Making Skype work in a Windows XP VirtualBox guest instance
If you, like me, install Skype in a Windows XP VirtualBox guest instance
running on an Ubuntu host on a ThinkPad T60 with an Intel 2300 dual-core
32-bit processor, it might throw Windows exceptions and generate error
reports as reported in VirtualBox ticket
#1710.
If you then go into your …
	In which my words also appear elsewhere
I'm excited to announce the availability of my first
post
as an invited contributor to the More than Bookends blog over at the
revamped Academic Matters web site.
My fellow contributors are Anne Fullerton and Amy Greenberg, and I'm
delighted to be included with them in our appointed task of …
	Presentation: LibX and Zotero
Direct link to the instructional presentation on LibX and Zotero at
Laurentian University
(ODT)
(PDF)
I had the pleasure of giving an instructional session to a class of
graduate students on Monday, November 24th. The topic I had been asked
to present was an extended version of the Artificially Enhanced …
	Archive of OCLC WorldCat Policy as posted 2008-11-02
I noticed last night (Sunday, November 2nd, 2008) that the new and
much-anticipated / feared OCLC WorldCat Policy had been posted. As far
as the clarified terms went, I was willing to give them the benefit of
the doubt until they were actually posted. I was first alerted to the
freshly …
	Dear Dan: why is using Flash for navigation a bad idea?
I received the following email late last week, and took the time to
reply to it tonight. I had originally been asked by a friend to help
diagnose why his organization's site navigation wasn't working in some
of his browsers. I noticed that the navigation bar was implemented in
Flash …
	Boss me around, s'il vous plait
My place of work, Laurentian University, is looking for a new Director
of the J.N. Desmarais Library. The call for applications closes October
30th. I think our library has done some impressive work (participating
in the food security project for the Democratic Republic of
Congo,
building the Mining Environment …
	Software Freedom Day 2008 - Sudbury
I opted to do something out of the unusual (for me) this year when I
learned about Software Freedom Day;
I signed up to organize an event in Sudbury. Given everything that was
already on my plate, it was pure foolishness to do so - but it was also
important to …
	In which digital manifestations of myself plague the Internets
Over the past few months, I've been fortunate enough to participate in a
few events that have been recorded and made available on the 'net for
your perpetual amusement. Well - amusing if you're a special sort of
person. Following are the three latest such adventures, in chronological
order:

CouchDB: delicious …
	Test server strategies
Occasionally on the #OpenILS-Evergreen IRC
channel, a question comes up what kind
of hardware a site should buy if they're getting serious about trying
out Evergreen. I had exactly the same chat with Mike Rylander back in
December, so I thought it might be useful to share the strategy we …
	Inspiring confidence that my problem will be solved
Hmm. I think I'm in trouble if the support site itself is incapable of
displaying accented characters properly.

Corrupted characters in a problem report about corrupted characters. Oh
dear.
My analysis of the problem is that the content in the middle is
contained within a frame, and is actually encoded …
	CouchDB: delicious sacrilege
Well, the talk about CouchDB (an open-source document database similar
in concept to Lotus Notes, but with a RESTful API and JSON as an
interchange format) wasn't as much of a train wreck as it could have
been. I learned a lot putting it together, and had some fun with …
	Oooh... looks like I've got (even more) work cut out for me
PHP is getting a native doubly-linked list
structure.
This is fabulous news; when I wrote the
File_MARC PEAR package, I ended up
having to implement a linked list
class in PEAR to support
it. File_MARC does its job today (even though I haven't taken it out of
alpha yet), but …
	Geek triumph
What a night. I upgraded Serendipity,
DokuWiki,
Drupal, involving four different servers and
three different Linux distros, and shifted one application from one
server to another (with seamless redirects from the old server to the
new) with close to no downtime. I think this is the first time I've
completed …
	A chance to work at Laurentian University library
Hey folks, if you're interested in working at Laurentian University,
we've got a couple of tenure-track positions looking for qualified
people who can stand the thought of working with me... (nothing like
narrowing the field dramatically, ah well). The following position
descriptions are straight out of the Employment
Vacancies
page …
	Ariel: Go back to your room, NOW!
I've been working on automating the delivery of electronic documents to
our patrons; most of the work over the summer was spent in ensuring that
we had our legal and policy bases covered. I read through the
documentation for Ariel, our chosen ILL software, to ensure that
everything we wanted …
	"A canonical example of a next-generation OPAC?"
Ooh, yes, I remember writing
that
now. Not about Evergreen, which has book bags and format limiters and
facets and whiz-bangy unAPI goodness whose potential for causing mayhem
has barely been scratched - but about
Fac-Back-OPAC, the
Django-and-Solr-and-Jython beast that Mike Beccaria and I picked up from
Casey Durfee's scraps pile …
	The pain: discovery layer selection
I returned from a week of vacation to land solidly in the middle of a
discovery layer selection process -- not for our library, yet, but from
a consortial perspective clearly having some impact on possible
decisions for us further on down the road. As the systems librarian, I
was nominated …
	Access 2007 draft program is online!
I had been getting anxious about the lack of news on the Access 2007
conference front, but just saw in my trusty RSS feed that the draft
program schedule is now
available. I'm already looking forward to Jessamyn
West's opening keynote and Roy Tennant's
closing keynote. They always bring …
	Evergreen VMWare image available for download
After much iteration and minor bug-squashing in my configuration, I am
pleased to announce the Evergreen on Gentoo VMWare
image is
available for download. The download itself is approximately 500MB as a
zipped image; when you unzip the image, it will require approximately
6GB of disk space. (1)
Basic instructions …
	In which I make one apology, and two lengthy explanations
I recently insulted Richard Wallis and Rob Styles of Talis by stating on
Dan Chudnov's blog:

To me it felt like Talis was in full sales mode during both
Richard's API talk and Rob's lightning talk
I must apologize for using the terms "sales mode" and "sales pitch" to
describe …
	FacBackOPAC: making Casey Durfee's code talk to Unicorn
For the past couple of days, I've been playing with Casey Durfee's
code that uses Solr
and Django to offer a faceted catalogue. My challenge? Turn a dense set
of code focused on Dewey and Horizon ILS into a catalogue that speaks LC
and Unicorn. Additionally, I want it to …
	Lightning talk: File_MARC for PHP
I gave a lightning talk at the code4lib
conference today on “File_MARC for PHP”
introducing the File_MARC library
to anybody who hasn't already heard about it. I crammed nine slides of
information into five minutes, which was hopefully enough to convince
people to start using it and provide feedback on …
	Google Summer of code4lib?
Google just
announced
that they will start accepting applications in March for the Google
Summer of Code (GSoC) 2007. In 2006, over 100
organizations
participated in the GSoC, and Google expects to have a similar number
participating in 2007. There are no lack of potential open-source
development projects in the …
	Long time, no wild conjecture
So here's the first of two posts based on purely wild conjecture. In a
lengthening chain of trackbacks, Ryan
Eby
mentioned
Christina's
observation that Springlink has started displaying Google ads,
presumably to supplement their subscription and pay-per-article income.
Ryan goes on to wonder:

Will vendors continue with the subscription model …
	A short-term SirsiDynix prediction
The second of tonight's wild conjecture-based predictions.
One of the things that I was thinking about as I was shovelling the snow
off our driveway on Monday (other than yes! finally some snow... one of
these days Amber is going to go rolling around in it) was the position
that …
	Reflections at the start of 2007
2006 was a year full of change - wonderful, exhausting change. Here's a
month-by-month summary of the highlights of 2006:

January
I did a whole lot of work on the PECL ibm_db2
extension, reviewed a good book on
XML and
PHP,
and finally fixed up my blog a little
bit.
I've …
	Oh, Vista has _acquired_ SirsiDynix...
A little over a week ago, I made the following prediction following the
extremely under-the-radar press release on December 22nd that Vista
Equity Partners was investing in
SirsiDynix:

I'll go out on a limb and say that a merger or acquisition of
SirsiDynix in 2007 is unlikely (33% confidence), but …
	Musing about SirsiDynix's new investment partner
Sirsi Corporation merged with Dynix Corporation in June 2005. Now
SirsiDynix has announced that Vista Equity Partners is
investing
in their company.
Let's take a look at Vista's investment
philosophy:

*We invest in companies that uniquely leverage technology to
deliver best-of-class products or services.*

I wonder if Vista confused "most …
	Save your forehead from flattening prematurely
I gave up on trying to get Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to run ejabberd today;
it looks like there are some fundamental issues going on between the
version of erlang and the version of ejabberd that get bundled together.
That was a fairly serious setback to my "Evergreen on …
	BiblioCommons wireframe walk-through
After the Future of the ILS Symposium wrapped up, Beth Jefferson walked
some of us through the current state of the BiblioCommons mocked-up Web
UI for public library catalogs; the project grew out of a youth literacy
project designed to encourage kids to read through the same sort of
social …
	Future of the ILS Symposium: building our community and a business case
I headed down to Windsor early on Tuesday morning for the Future of the
ILS Symposium hosted by the
Leddy Library at the University of Windsor. It was a good thing I
decided to take the 12 hours of bus + train approach to getting there,
as Sudbury's airport was completely …
	Neat-o: Archimède uses Apache Derby
A while back I mentioned on the DSpace-devel mailing
list
that I was interested in adapting DSpace to use embedded Apache Derby as
the default database, rather than PostgreSQL, as a means of lowering the
installation and configuration barriers involved with setting up access
to an external database. I haven't …
	PEAR File_MARC 0.1.0 alpha officially released
Just a short note to let y'all know that I received the thumbs-up from
my fellow PEAR developers to add
File_MARC as an official PEAR
package.
What does this mean? Well, assuming you have PHP 5.1+ and PEAR
installed, you can now download and install File_MARC and its
prerequisite …
	Belated Access 2006 notes: Saturday, Oct. 14th
Final entry in publishing my own hastily jotted Access 2006 conference
notes--primarily for my own purposes, but maybe it will help you
indirectly find some real content relating to your field of interest at
the official podcast/presentation Web site for Access
2006.
Contents include:

consortial updates from
ASIN,
Quebec …
	Getting the Goods: Libraries and the Last Mile
In my continuing series of publishing my Access 2006 notes, Roy
Tennant's keynote on finishing the task of connecting our users to the
information they need is something to which every librarian should pay
attention.
If you don't understand something I've written, there's always the
podcast
of Roy's talk. In …
	Access 2006 notes: October 12
My continuing summaries from Access 2006. Thursday, October 12th was the
first "normal" day of the conference featuring the following
presentations:

Open access, open source, content deals: who
pays?
(Leslie Weir)
Our Ontario: Yours to
Recover
(Art Rhyno, Walter Lewis)
Improving the Catalogue Interface using
Endeca
(Tito Sierra)
Lightning
talks …
	Library Geeks in human form
So, I think I read somewhere on #code4lib that Dan Chudnov, the most
excellent host of the Library Geeks podcast, refused to make
human-readable links to the MP3 files for the podcasts available in
plain old HTML because he had bought into the stodgy old definition of
podcasts (hah! "stodgy …
	Double-barreled PHP releases
I'm the proud parent of two new releases over the past couple of days:
one official PEAR release for linked list fans, and another revision of
the
File_MARC
proposal for library geeks.

Structures_LinkedList
A few days ago marked the first official PEAR release of the
Structures_LinkedList.
Yes, it's only at …
	Feeling sorry for our vendor
So I'm here in rainy Alabama (the weather must have followed me from
Ottawa) taking a training course from our ILS vendor. I'm getting some
disturbing insights into the company that are turning my general state
of disbelief at the state of the system that we're paying lots of money …
	Backlog of Access 2006 notes
Following on my plea for access to Access
presentations,
I'm in the process of posting the notes I took at the CARL instutitional
repository pre-conference and Access 2006. I probably should have posted
these to a wiki so that others (like the presenters) could go ahead and
make corrections/additions …
	Calling for access to all future Access presentations
It's a bit late now, but as the guy in the corner with the clicky
keyboard desperately trying to take notes during the presentations (when
not stifling giggles and snorts from #code4lib), I would be a lot more
relaxed if I was certain that the presentations were going to be …
	Secretssss of Free WiFi at Access 2006
The bulk of the Access 2006 conference is being held at a
hotel-that-shall-not-be-named-for-reasons-that-will-become-apparent-shortly
in Ottawa this week. I was at the CARL Pre-Conference on Institutional
Repositories today and a kind man (Wayne Johnston from the University of
Guelph) tipped me off that the hotel's pay-for-wifi system is a little
bit …
	Laundry list systems librarians
On the always excellent Techessence, Dorothea Salo posted Hiring a
systems librarian. The blog post
warned against libraries who put together a “laundry-list job
description” for systems librarians:

Sure, it'd be nice to have someone who can kick-start a printer, put
together a desktop machine from scraps, re-architect a website …
	File_MARC and Structure_Linked_List: new alpha releases
Earlier in the month I asked for feedback on the super-alpha MARC
package
for PHP. Most of the responses I received were along the lines of
"Sounds great!" but there hasn't been much in the way of real
suggestions for improvement. In the mean time, I've figured out (with
Lukas …
	Super-alpha MARC package for PHP: comments requested
Okay, I've been working on this project
(let's call it PEAR_MARC, although it's not an official PEAR project
yet) in my spare moments over the past month or two. It's a new PHP
package for working with MARC records. The package tries to follow the
PEAR project standards (coding, documentation …