Hard News: Detritus
83 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 2 3 4 Newer→ Last
-
Also: that it's something I would find useful if other people did it with their books.
And that, too.
-
Collage Degree by mail...
If scalpels and redundant technology fill
that special place in yer psyche... step right up
to The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies.
I can smell the wax now...yrs reprographically
Bro Mide & Bull Gum
and I thought a Red Light Area
was a Dark Room... -
Obscured by clouds...
For amusement, compare the racy cloud for Chad Taylor's Electric.
With the earnest, cardigan-wearing language of my book.Interestingly your cloud includes Race
and Chad's includes CardiganSpooky - inverse, reverse and perverse
Yrs commonly
Go Ogle-Cluster
Vapour and the Trails -
JoJo,
Anyone know anything about the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement? [Also, FAQs]
Specifically, the wisdom of opting out or not?
There's a heap of information (including different publishers' opinions) on Beatties Book Blog.
I've been talking to a few NZ publishers about it, and most seem to feel that opting in is the best option - out of two pretty stink options.
-
The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies.
Awesome. (I studied several years after all that vanished completely.)
Expect pantone books. What possessed them to include pantone books?
-
They "fixed" that. Twice.
I own that second version on VHS (although I'm not sure if it still works as I've not owned a VHS player for most of a decade now). It kinda works and the extra footage is mostly very good, clearly being sliced out originally because Gf II was bloody long already and something clearly had to go to keep Paramount happy.
I watched I & II again this week with my 14 year old, at her request (she wanted to see the movie before she played the game on her Wii, and is now somewhat obsessed, so it's III tonight, and I've had to tell her to stop sketching horses' heads) and, although my memories of the films as being visually stunning at the time of release, were dampened somewhat, I think I'll stick to the original sequence.
Forget forum trolling, if you want GF II embarrassing, I think this may be it
-
And I'm enjoying this one half the respondents think Obama attempting to indoctrinate children with socialism with his upcoming back-to-school speech.
And the comments are rather excellent too. I get a weird sense of amusement out of this stuff. Yes, odd, I know.
-
sooooo, this sample of USAers is about as intelligent as a sample of the cream-of-the-crop-of-NZers offering their wisdom on heraldyourviews...quite surprising reallly
-
Google Book Grab:
I opted out.
Beattie's Book Blog has the best cache of settlement stuff, including many links over the past 2 months.
What Google has done goes against their supposed "Dont be evil' 'creed' - it tramples all over the Berne Convention. I find sundry publishers' attitudes interestingly self-serving - IF the Book Registry goes ahead, guess who the dollars are paid out to first? Hint: not non-publisher copyright-holders...
My own (informed) guess is that either the Oct 7th hearing will find against Google on 'fairness' grounds; or, the USA anti-trust people will rule against them; or the coalition of Amazon et al will be successful in their suit, or, the rest-of-the-world, especially suits from Europe & Japan will kill the whole thing.
It was - o, 'is' for the moment- an illadvised sneaky attempt to corner the entire ebook market - despite pacifying noises about ' making orphan & o/o
print works available to the entire reading universe. -
Library catalogues do have a history of being feral like that. I'm not really sure what it is.
I'm not a systems librarian, but I can offer a few observations having worked in Libraries (currently the National Library).
1. Library software is generally poor quality software. I'm not sure why (though I can certainly speculate). It just is. And it's pricey too.
2. Z39.50. There is a horrid abomination of a standard for library search called Z39.50 that a lot of library systems used (and still use). Z39.50 is a stateful protocol, unlike HTTP which is stateless. In simple terms this means that to make it work online you have to add sessions. I would guess that a lot of these session-based catalogue search implementations are the result of either (1) asking a developer who has worked on Z39.50 to design an online search service, or (2) writing an online search service that relies on Z39.50 to provide the back-end search.
3. You say "catalogue", I say "content management system". Many online library catalogues are also library content management systems, which librarians essentially use to manage inventory (i.e. books, etc). The idea that regular people should be able to search the catalogue online is (in many cases) relatively new functionality that is tacked on the side, and therefore not always well-integrated or reliable, and certainly not the original purpose of the software.
(And while it is relatively new functionality for the CMS, library catalogue search was a fairly early internet application, so the implementations don't always follow what we now recognise as best practice for searching, hence the session timeouts and lack of useful links and so on.)
4. Finally, while the software is lousy and not designed for patrons, it is very complex and it is essential to running the business. It's not a case of replacing the search functionality on your website, it is a case of replacing a piece of workflow software shared by your entire organisation (and in some cases it has been in use for decades). This is very hard and very expensive. And Libraries are not exactly overfunded.
But there is good news. The current solution to these problems is that you create a separate, public-facing system that is designed to support patron search and access, and that keeps a separate copy of the catalogue data that is automatically refreshed from the CMSs (that the librarian's use) overnight. As a result, you should get happier patrons (because the software is designed for them) and librarians (because load is reduced on the CMS and patrons can find what they want more easily). These technologies are by-and-large still in development, but are a promising way forward.
HTH.
Gordon -
I'll third the comment about EndNote, I will always be an afficionado for ProCite. That was a Real Database (TM) that was, unlike EndNote which wouldn't know the first thing about being a database. My PhD thesis was referenced using ProCite and it worked flawlessly.
My first references database I built myself using Reflex for the Mac after my honours year. I brushed up my touch typing putting all of 100 references on file cards into it.
BTW despite forever clicking the 'remember me' and 'keep me logged in on this computer' check boxes when logging in I get logged out with pretty much every page refresh. This does not happen on other sites, what gives?
-
It's not a case of replacing the search functionality on your website, it is a case of replacing a piece of workflow software shared by your entire organisation
Actually, despite my being the Yappy Little Dog of Hating the MLIS More Than Anyone Has Ever Hated Anything, that's a good point. The catalogue is just the front end of a multi-faceted system that goes back into lots of different departments - acquisitions, cataloguing, circulation, blah blah blah, and is used by everyone all the time.
-
Thank you for the explanation, Gordon. The problem sounds kind of fundamental.
-
Thanks for the interesting post Gordon. This reminds me of a few other things.
The reason why catalogues interface with the library backend is to do with the current status of the book (how many copies, are the on the shelf, lost, cataloguing etc.). One way to get around this would be to have a stand alone search tool that only interfaces with the backend when you click on 'holdings'. I think some of the systems used to do this a little bit, as some of the systems have separate indexes for public searching.
This perhaps comes back to price. I used to work in a library that used a Napier Computer System system. Why would a New Zealand company develop a library system; I'll guess that it was cheaper than dynix. (I don't know if NCS still produce a library system). The backend hardware was also often hilariously antiquated.
I guess it's quite specialised software, and there is not an enormous pool of customers.
-
It would have been nice to know of alternatives to EndNote before I used it in my thesis - had to manipulate thousands of bibliographic records to get data for my last chapter...
-
Luuuxury! When *I* were a young lass writing my thesis, Sam, we typed out all our bibliographies by hand! And we were happy to do it! Oh yes! :)
-
Ah, that's the thing - believe it or not I didn't bother to actually figure out how to do the bibliography in EndNote, and thus did the lot manually...
I only used EndNote to find global holdings of books and journals from a particular publisher, then work out roughly what was published, when, and so on - part of the last, more quantitative chapter of my history thesis. I do wish I'd known of a dedicated program to do this stuff!
I was able to check the amount of records in libraries worldwide against the publisher's own statistics, so was confident I'd gotten the bulk of what was produced on record. And yes, the data work was as boring as it sounds, but I got some good conclusions out of it and was able to order in ~100 items from various places - plenty of reading to keep me entertained (!).
-
I mean to say, the records obviously didn't come from EndNote but from WorldCat online - I exported it all to EndNote and worked with it from there.
-
I, um, used that famous piece of bibliographic software, Excel <cough>, and a very long and dirty CONCATENATE to output my references in BibTeX. \citeA{embarrassed09}
I wouldn't go as far as to say that I prefer Excel to Endnote, but I definitely prefer BibTeX to CiteWhileYouWrite (Endnote's intext integration). -
I feel bibliographically challenged in this company. Downloaded Zotero, and that's as far as I have got.
-
Join with me now in saying EWWWW =IF($B310="incollection",(CONCATENATE("@incollection{",$A310,",author={",$C310,"},year={",$D310,"},title={",$E310,"},booktitle={",$F310,"},editor={",$G310,"},pages={",$H310,"},publisher={",L310,"},address={",M310,"}}")),"")
-
BTW despite forever clicking the 'remember me' and 'keep me logged in on this computer' check boxes when logging in I get logged out with pretty much every page refresh. This does not happen on other sites, what gives?
Unfortunately, I don't know: it's just something that seems to affect a few people, islander included.
I'm still on the schedule for a forums upgrade and and update to the latest version of out CMS, so hopefully that'll sort it out. Hang in there!
-
3410,
Thanks, Russell, Lyndon, JoJo, and Islander, for your thoughts on the Google book thing.
-
I'd just like to ask WHY Pitch Black are playing the night before I arrive in Auckland. ARGH.
The only time I've been able to check out Mr Free (and any of his collaborators) live was in the Mesh days. And Mesh were totally Orsome. Pitch Black even toured London when I was living there, but the tickets sold out before I even heard of the gig.
Maybe one day before I'm 90?
-
Here's another vote for Zotero as a reference manager. It fucking rocks, and is one of my top 10 pieces of software, full stop.
I totally agree that most library software sucks big time. I suspect because the heaviest users are public institutions, and there's not a heck of a lot of dosh to go around. Leaving aside the fact that public institutions don't have a lot of cash to acquire something in the first place, they generally have loooong upgrade cycles as well.
One thing about retail users is that the profits they generate do go back into R&D of various software suites. Library systems are like other specialist industry packages - expensive and clunky because there simply isn't the economies of scale and investment.
I am just hoping that the open source movement (packages like Koha/Evergreen) will fill some of those gaps and/or provide sufficient competition for the other vendors to raise their game.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.