tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-224515542024-03-08T01:55:46.290-05:00Rapid CommunicationsRapid, but irregular, communications from the frontiers of Library TechnologyDavid J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-85007175030827954722016-04-20T09:35:00.001-04:002016-04-20T09:36:03.348-04:00Mac OS vs Emacs: Getting on the right (exec) PATH<p>One of the minor annoyances about using Emacs on Mac OS is that the PATH environment variable isn't set properly when you launch Emacs from the GUI (that is, the way we always do it). This is because the Mac OS GUI doesn't really care about the shell as a way to launch things, but if you are using <a href="http://brew.sh/">brew</a>, or other packages that install command line tools, you do.</p>
<p>Apple has changed the way that the PATH is set over the years, and the old <tt><a href="https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPRuntimeConfig/Articles/EnvironmentVars.html">environment.plist</a></tt> method doesn't actually work anymore, for security reasons. For the past few releases, the official way to properly set up the PATH is to use the <a href="https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/path_helper.8.html"><tt>path_helper</tt></a> utility program. But again, that only really works if your shell profile or rc file is run before you launch Emacs.</p>
<p>So, we need to put a bit of code into Emacs' <tt>site_start.el</tt> file to get things set up for us:</p>
<p>
<pre>
(when (file-executable-p "/usr/libexec/path_helper")
(let ((path (shell-command-to-string
"eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`;
echo -n \"$PATH\"")))
(setenv "PATH" path)
(setq exec-path (append (parse-colon-path path)
(list exec-directory)))))
</pre>
</p>
<p>This code runs the <tt>path_helper</tt> utility, saves the output into a string, and then uses the string to set both the PATH environment variable and the Emacs <tt>exec-path</tt> lisp variable, which Emacs uses to run subprocesses when it doesn't need to launch a shell.</p>
<p>If you are using the brew version of Emacs, put this code in <tt>/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.el</tt> and restart Emacs.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-37367805011806944012015-01-20T17:27:00.000-05:002015-01-20T17:27:11.997-05:00Finding ISBNs in the the digits of πFor some reason, a <a href="http://artificialphilosophy.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/pisbn-project.html">blog post from 2010</a> about searching for ISBNs in the first fifty million digits of π suddenly became popular on the net again at the end of last week (mid-January 2015). The only problem is that Geoff, the author, only looks for ISBN-13s, which all start with the sequence "978". There aren't many occurrences of "978" in even the first fifty million digits of π, so it's not hard to check them all to see if they are the beginning of a potential ISBN, and then find out if that potential ISBN was ever assigned to a book. But he completely ignores all of the ISBN-10s that might be hidden in π. So, since I already have code to validate ISBN checksums and to <a href="http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8715">look up ISBNs in OCLC WorldCat,</a> I decided to check for ISBN-10s myself.<br />
<br />
I don't have easy access to the first fifty million digits of π, but I did manage to <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=million+digits+of+pi&t=ffsb">find the first million digits</a> online without too much difficulty.<br />
<br />
An ISBN-10 is a ten character long string that uniquely identifies a book. An example is "0-13-152414-3". The dashes are optional and exist mostly to make it easier for humans, just like the dashes in a phone number. The first character of an ISBN-10 indicate the language in which the book is published: 0 and 1 are for English, 2 is for French, and so on. The last character of the ISBN is a "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number#Check_digits">check digit</a>", which is supposed to help systems figure out if the ISBN is correct or not. It will catch many common types of errors, like swapping two characters in the ISBN: "0-13-125414-3" is invalid.<br />
<br />
Here are the first one hundred digits of π:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3.<span style="background-color: red;">1415926535</span>89793238462643383279502884197169399375<br />
1058209749445923<span style="background-color: lime;">0781640628</span>6208998628034825342117067</blockquote>
To search for "potential (English) ISBN-10s", all one needs to do is search for every 0 or 1 in the first 999,990 digits of π (there is a "1" three digits from the end, but then there aren't enough digits left over to find a full ISBN, so we can stop early) and check to see if the ten digit sequence of characters starting with that 0 or 1 has a valid check digit at the end. The sequence "1415926535", highlighted in red, fails the test, because "5" is not the correct check digit; but the sequence "0781640628" highlighted in green <i>is</i> a potential ISBN.<br />
<br />
There are approximately 200,000 zeros and ones in the first million digits of π, but "only" 18,273 of them appear at the beginning of a potential ISBN-10. Checking those 18,273 potentials against the WorldCat bibliographic database results in 1,168 valid ISBNs. The first one is at position 3,102: ISBN 0306803844, for the book <i>The evolution of weapons and warfare</i> by Trevor N. Dupuy. The last one is at position 996,919: ISBN 0415597234 for the book <i>Exploring language assessment and testing : language in action</i> by Anthony Green.<br />
<br />
Here's the <a href="https://app.box.com/successes" rel="nofollow">full dataset</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-78642726479833687272012-03-10T17:21:00.001-05:002012-03-10T17:21:39.625-05:00Software Upgrades and The Parable of the Windows<P>A librarian friend of mine recently expressed some surprise at the fact that a library system would spend almost $140,000 to upgrade their ILS software, when the vendor is known to be hostile to its customers and not actually very good with new development on their products. The short answer is that it's easier to upgrade than to think. Especially when an "upgrade" will be seen as easier than a "migration" to a different vendor's system (note: open ILS platforms like Evergreen and Koha may be read as being different vendors for the sake of convenience). In fact, when an ILS vendor discontinues support for a product and tells its customers that they have to migrate to another product if they want to continue to purchase support, it is the rare library that will take this opportunity to re-examine all its options and decide to migrate to a different vendor's product.</p>
<p>A simple demonstration of this thinking, on a scale that most of us can imagine, is what happened when my partner and I decided that it was time to replace the windows in our house several years ago. There are a couple of things you need to know about replacing the windows in your house, if you've never done this before:</p>
<ol>
<li>Most normal folks replace the windows in their house over the course of several years, doing two or three windows every year or two. If one is replacing the huge bay window in the living room, then that might be the only window that one does that year. Windows are expensive enough that one can't really afford to do them all at once.</li>
<li>Windows are fungible. For the most part, one company's windows look exactly like another company's. Unless you're working hard at getting a particular colour of flashing on the outside of the window, nobody looking at your house from the sidewalk would notice that the master bedroom window and the livingroom window were made by different companies.</li>
</ol>
<p>Like any responsible homeowners, we called several local window places, got quotations from three or four of them for the windows we wanted replaced that year, made our decision about which vendor we were going to use for the first round of window replacements, and placed an order. A month or so later, on a day that the weather was going to be good, a crew from the company arrived, knocked big holes in the front of our house to take out the old windows and install the new ones.</p>
<p>A couple of years went by, and we decided it was time to do the next couple of windows, so my partner, who was always far more organized about this sort of thing that me, called three or four window companies and asked them to come out to get quotations for the work.</p>
<p>At least one of the vendors declined, and another vendor did come out and give us a quote but he was very surprised that we were going through this process again, because normally, once a householder has gone through the process once, they tend to use the same window company for all the windows, even if several years have passed, or if the type of work is very different from the earlier work (such as replacing the living room bay window after a couple of rounds of replacing bedroom windows).</p>
<p>In general, once a decision has been made, people tend to stick with that plan. I think it's a matter of, "Well, I made this decision last year, and at the time, this company was good, so they're probably still good," combined, perhaps, with a bit of thinking that changing vendors in mid-stream implies that I didn't make a good decision earlier.</p>
<p>And there is, of course, always the thought that it's better to stick with the devil you know that the one you don't.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-1446847873955065652011-01-02T19:07:00.004-05:002013-07-04T10:49:57.289-04:00Using QR Codes in the Library<p>This started out as a set of internal guidelines for the staff at MPOW, but some friends expressed interest in it, and it seems to have struck a nerve, so I'm posting it here, so it is easier for people to find and to link to.</p>
<h1>Using QR Codes in the Library</h1>
<p>QR codes are new to North American, but have been around for a while in Japan, where they originated, and where everybody has a cellphone that can read the codes. They make it simpler to take information from the real world and load it into your phone. As such, they should only be used when the information will be useful for somebody on the go, and shouldn't normally be used if the person accessing the information will probably be on a computer to begin with.</p>
<h2>
Do Use QR Codes:</h2>
<ul>
<li>On posters and display projectors to guide users to mobile-friendly websites.</li>
<li>To share your contact information on posters, display projectors, or your business card. This makes it simpler for users to add you to their addressbook without having to type it all in.</li>
<li>In display cabinets or art exhibits to link to supplementary information about the items on display.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
Don't use QR Codes:</h2>
<ul>
<li>to record your contact information in your email signature. Somebody reading your email can easily copy the information from your signature to their addressbook.</li>
<li>to share URLs for rich, or full-sized, websites. The only URLs you should be sharing via QR codes for are mobile-friendly sites.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
When Using QR Codes:</h2>
<ul>
<li>Make sure to include a human readable URL, preferably one that's easy to remember, near the QR code for people without QR Code scanners to use.</li>
</ul>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-87595525437790907202009-04-06T18:13:00.004-04:002009-04-06T18:25:18.706-04:00A Manifesto for the Library<p>Last week <a href="http://www.blyberg.net/">John Blyberg</a>, <a href="http://librariansmatter.com/blog/">Kathryn Greenhill</a>, and <a href="http://citegeist.com/">Cindi Trainor</a> spent some time together thinking about what the library is for and what its future might hold. The result of that deep thinking has now been published on John's blog under the title "<a href="http://www.blyberg.net/2009/04/03/the-darien-statements-on-the-library-and-librarians/">The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians.</a>"</p><p>Opening with the ringing statement that</p><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization</span><br /></blockquote><p>they then provide their own gloss on what this means for individual libraries, and for librarians.</p><p>There is a lively discussion going on in the comments on John's blog, as well as less thoughtful sniping going on in more "annoying" blogs. I think that this is something that will engender quite a bit of conversation in the month's to come.</p>David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-44888011807354172412009-04-05T08:22:00.002-04:002009-04-05T08:35:01.642-04:00I'm a Shover and Maker!Since only a few people can be named "Movers and Shakers" by Library Journal, <a href="http://www.goblin-cartoons.com/">Joshua Neff</a> and <a href="http://stevelawson.name/seealso/">Steven Lawson </a>created the "<a href="http://www.shoversandmakers.net/">Shovers and Makers</a>" awards "for the rest of us," under the auspices of the not entirely serious <a href="http://thelsw.org">Library Society of the World</a>. I'm very pleased to report that I have been named a 2009 <a href="http://www.shoversandmakers.net/2009/david-j-fiander-librarian-programmer">Shover and Maker</a> (by myself, as are all the winners).<br /><br />The Shovers and Makers awards are a fun way to share what we've done over the past year or two and they're definitely a lot simpler than writing the annual performance review that HR wants. Think of this as practice for writing the speaker's bio for the conference keynote you dream of being invited to give.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-33833065405930519292009-01-25T12:34:00.002-05:002009-01-25T13:09:12.447-05:00LITA Tears Down the WallsAt ALA Midwinter 2009, Jason Griffey and the LITA folks took advantage of the conference center's wireless network to provide quick and easy access to the Top Tech Trends panel for those of us that couldn't be there in person. The low-bandwidth option was a <a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/">CoverItLive</a> live-blogging <a href="http://litablog.org/2009/01/24/top-tech-trends-liveblog/">feed of comments</a> from attending that also included photos by Cindi Trainor, and a feed of twitters from attendees. The high-bandwidth option was a live (and recorded) <a href="http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1091395">video stream</a> of the event that Jason captured using the webcam built into his laptop.<br /><br />Aside from the LITA planned events, the fact that we could all sit in meant that there were lots of virtual conversations in chat rooms and other forums that sprung up as people joined in from afar. Unfortunately, because my Sunday morning is filled with laundry and other domestic pleasures, I wasn't able to join in on the "live" chatter going on in parallel with the video or livebloggin.<br /><br />Owing to funding constraints and my own priorities, my participation at ALA is limited. I've been to LITA Forum once, and might go again, but I focus more on the <a href="http://www.accessola.com">OLA</a> other regional events. This virtual option from LITA let me get a peek at what's going on and hear what the "big thinkers" at LITA have to say. I hope they can keep it up, and will definitely be talking to local folks about how we might be able to emulate LITA in our own events.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-46248669830524737522009-01-04T10:48:00.002-05:002009-01-04T11:28:42.825-05:00A (Half) Year in BooksAccording to my <a href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p9Hdo5JbU9n0LAQg4kjqJTA">reading log</a>, I read twenty-five books this year, and nothing since I started <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/46462819"><span style="font-style: italic;">All Families are Psychotic</span></a> in July. I certainly didn't read very much in the fall but, as <a href="http://lisletters.fiander.info/2008/03/on-keeping-reading-journal.html">I predicted</a>, my commitment to recording my reading fell off dramatically. There are at least two or three more books that didn't make it onto the journal.<br /><br />This year I also tried to participate in the <a href="http://bamchallenge.wordpress.com/">Book a Month Challenge</a>, initiated by <a href="http://younglibrarian.blogspot.com/">Katie Dunneback</a>. My participation in the challenge tapered off in July, at about the same time that my reading journal did. The hard part about the challenge wasn't usually reading the book or writing the review, but selecting a title. I had the same problem when I was asked to write a blurb for a new book for the library newsletter at MPOW.<br /><br />But by August, work of various sorts had consumed all my time, leaving little time for recreational reading, beyond my weekly reading of the Economist.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-208706876126800422008-09-30T21:17:00.003-04:002008-09-30T22:48:19.526-04:00The Desk Set Drinking GameAfter hearing that <a href="http://jambina.com/blog">Amy Buckland</a> had never seen <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050307/">Desk Set</a> before, I vowed to rectify this situation. She then proposed the idea of the Desk Set Drinking Game.<br /><br />So, we need some rules. I've got a basic set, but I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Rules<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Drink Every Time:</span></span><br /><ol><li>somebody uses the word "Brain"</li><li>somebody answers a reference question (right or not)<ul><li>make it a double when Bunny answers question</li><li>chug when Richard Sumner answers a question</li></ul></li><li>somebody names Santa's reindeer (since this counts as a reference question, you need to drink twice)<br /></li><li>you see Richard Sumner's socks</li><li>the staff go on "break"</li></ol>So, if you have any other suggestions, please leave a comment!David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-18359357126001390382008-08-31T10:21:00.002-04:002008-08-31T10:26:09.272-04:00July Book a Month Challenge: IndependenceDoctorow, Cory. <i id="p3zt">Little Brother.</i> New York: Tor, 2008.<br /><br />Doctorow has responded to the United States' gradual increase government surveillance of the civilian population and the federal government's use of "terrorists" to clamp down on speech with <i id="h5.z">Little Brother:</i> a short novel describing what happens after San Francisco's Bay Bridge is destroyed. By focusing on a small group of tech-savvy teens, Doctorow shows both how the government might co-opt existing billing and security systems to quickly create a police state, and what domestic resistance to that police state might look like when when mobile phones are portable computers and everybody has access to good encryption technology.<br /><br />While I enjoyed <i id="gxwy">Little Brother,</i> It had several flaws. The most minor of these is the main character's screen name, or alias: when the novel begins, Marcus goes by the name "W1n5t0n", but soon changes it to the more commonplace "M1k3y". If he had only used the names in the opposite order, giving him the name "Winston" for the majority of the novel, and all of the time that he was running his resistance operations, it would have created a stronger tie to Orwell.<br /><br />More seriously, Doctorow seems to be trying to do three different things at once with this novel and, as a result, is not as successful at telling the story as he might have been. The story of Marcus coming of age and maturing both emotionally and politically against the backdrop of the "terrorist crackdown", and his resistance to that crackdown are the two parts of the story that work very well. Unfortunately, Doctorow weighs the novel down with a lot of technical detail that slows the pace. I found the "how to hack" and "how it works" sections of the novel interrupted the flow of the narrative, and I suspect that the readers of this book will either already know this information, or not care about the details. It might have been more appropriate to cut down on the explanations in the body of the text and provide an afterword explaining that much of the tech is possible today and pointing to the 'net for details.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-19847634911174655802008-07-16T18:46:00.002-04:002008-07-16T19:22:47.633-04:00June Book a Month Challenge: KnowledgeYeah. I'm late. Get over it.<br /><br />Tuchman, Barbara W. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Guns of August.</span> New York: Macmillan, 1962.<br /><br />Tuchman covers only the first thirty days of the Great War in this five hundred page book: that time when all the players were moving into the positions that they would then hold for the next five years. Mining archives in Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany, she is able to go behind the scenes of all four governments and show not just what happened on the ground, but how important the personalities of the various players were in setting up foundation for a static war.<br /><br />The first chapter, "A Funeral," shows us how different the world was during the first decade of the Twentieth Century from that of the 1950s and beyond. At the funeral of Edward VII we are introduced to Kaiser William II who, more than anybody else, is responsible for war. Tuchman portrays William as neurotic, desperate for the respect of others, paranoid about how King Edward was "encircling" Germany as he visited all the countries of the continent.<br /><br />The main action begins in chapter two, on August 1, runs through various diplomatic and military alliances to lay the groundwork, and then on to war, which begins with Germany's violation of Belgium's neutrality as it marches through that newly created country on its way to France. Tuchman very clearly shows that at any instant during that first thirty days, if things had gone even the slightest bit differently, the outcome could have been very different. Anything from a swift German victory, if the different parts of the army had followed through on the original plan, or taken advantage of opportunities that they were unaware were available; to the French and British throwing back the German forces and ending the war, if only they had been more willing to cooperate and coordinate their forces, might have been possible.<br /><br />This book clearly shows the effect of the "fog of war" on the plans of men. That fog is not just problems of terrain and the difficulty of communication, though. It is also the internal politics of the armies, and the clash of personalities throughout the chain of command and between commanders of different units. If the aristocratic German generals had been able to suppress their historic design for blood and glory, they might have been better able to retreat in front of the French, leading them deeper into a trap, for example.<br /><br />Tuchman goes into exquisite, and to some extent necessary, detail about the movement of the various units, and the relationships between them on the ground, but it can be very difficult to keep track of who's who and where they all all at any given time. There are a few maps, but with modern printing processes, more maps, and perhaps some colour to ease the reading of them, would make following the action easier. She also shows how a war can seem "inevitable," and how everybody can see that it is only a matter of time before the combat begins (of course, that that is possible should be clear to anybody reading today's headlines).David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-79772475246801241632008-06-18T19:17:00.002-04:002008-06-18T20:07:12.618-04:00Anthony Hope and the Triumph of the Public DomainWhile in a local independent bookstore last weekend, I discovered that Penguin has reprinted <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/49295282">The Prisoner of Zenda</a> as part of their <a href="http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/reds">Red Classics</a> series. While it looks like not everything in the Red Classics series looks like it's in the public domain much of it is.<br /><br />But reprinting classic adventure novels isn't the triumph of the public domain. Everybody knows that <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/52113809">Kiss Me Kate</a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/51479578">West Side Story</a> are reworked Shakespeare, and that when Disney's not fighting to eliminate the public domain, it's <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/25412823">raiding</a> it for <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/695728">plots</a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/18017182">marketing</a> <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/61807930">opportunities</a>. Of course, there's also Alan Moore's <a href="http://internetarchive.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/justice-league-of-public-domain-victorian-characters/">Justice League of Public Domain Victorian Characters</a>, which was made into an <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53041878">execrable movie</a>. That reuse and recycling of older material is the triumph of the public domain.<br /><br />So how does Anthony Hope, the author of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Prisoner of Zenda,</span> fit into this triumph of the public domain? Well, even if you'd never heard of it before today, you've probably seen one of the movies based on it: two of the most faithful adaptations of <span style="font-style: italic;">Zenda</span> starred <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/19498491">Richard Dreyfus</a> and <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/39850195">Kevin Klein</a>. I also seem to recall the same plot being used for episodes of sitcoms over the years as well. And of course, the fictional European country of <a href="http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2005/02/24/a-word-from-ruritania/">Ruritania</a> is almost as famous as the British university of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxbridge">Oxbridge</a>.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-50921940092605809222008-06-01T06:48:00.003-04:002008-06-01T07:59:02.178-04:00May Book a Month Challenge: MotherJackson, Shirley. <span style="font-style: italic;">Life Among the Savages.</span> New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1953.<br /><br />Shirley Jackson is best known today for her sophisticated horror novels, such as <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/285313">The Haunting of Hill House</a>, </span>but in the late '40s and early '50s she was writing light domestic comedy for the likes of <span style="font-style: italic;">Good Housekeeping, Harper's, </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Mademoiselle.</span> These columns were gathered together and published as <span style="font-style: italic;">Life Among the Savages, </span>which tells of an urban pair of writers with two children who move from a New York apartment to a house in suburban Vermont<span style="font-style: italic;">.</span> In 1997, a review in Library Journal described it as "good fun of the Erma Bombeck kind," which, while useful for identifying the genre and most likely readers, does not do it justice. Jackon's work in the antecedent of the rest of the American domestic comedies: Bombeck is good fun of Jackson kind.<br /><br />While <span style="font-style: italic;">Life </span>is well written and entertaining, it has two flaws that made it difficult for me to read at times. The first, and larger, problem for me is the tone of voice with which Jackson tells her stories. She frequently invokes a "cutesy ironic" tone, which might have been amusing in the '50s for her target readership of homemakers, but often grated for me. For example, while I can understand the humour inherent in a mother of three suddenly having to learn to drive, the naivete exhibited while the characters are car shopping is far broader than necessary ("We lacked only a car. This was adjusted by a gentleman who, saying he acted only from pure friendship, sold us one of <span style="font-style: italic;">his </span>cars.").<br /><br />The second flaw is that the stories feel slightly dated. Tales of the problems of hiring and dealing with mothers' helpers, the challenges of getting together for a night of bridge, and running short of money because one forgot to cash the cheque from one's husband do not resonate with the modern reader. I found it particularly difficult to accept the idea that Jackson was so dependent upon her husband for household cash while at the same time being a successful writer with her own income. Another example is Jackson's description of packing to go to hospital to deliver their third child: the idea that one plans for a relaxing getaway of a week or so in hospital following a normal childbirth is, today, inconceivable.<br /><br />Over all, <span style="font-style: italic;">Life Among the Savages</span> is an amusing light read, but not up to the level her other writing.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-7835802195070966312008-05-17T11:54:00.003-04:002008-05-17T12:24:50.424-04:00Eric S. Raymond on Proprietary ILSsThere's been a <a href="http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0805&L=code4lib&T=0&F=&S=&P=11546">discussion</a> going on recently on the code4lib mailing list about Innovative Interfaces' plans to remove some functionality from the terminal-based interface to Innopac/Millennium, nominally due to a security hole in that interface. The problem is that many site have written specialized programs, which interact with the terminal interface, to automate certain common operations, and those programs will no longer work. <a href="http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/">Eric Raymond</a>, a prominent open source advocate, wrote a paper entitled <a href="http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/">The Magic Cauldron</a> (collected in <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45835582">The Cathedral and the Bazaar</a>) that directly addresses the difficulties that we are starting to become more aware of and vocal about:<br /><blockquote>Suppose you go the conventional closed-source route. If you do, then you put your firm at the mercy of a supplier monopoly—because by definition, there is only one place you can go for support, bug fixes, and enhancements. If the supplier doesn't perform, you will have no effective recourse because you are effectively locked in by your initial investment and training costs. Your supplier knows this. Under these circumstances, do you suppose the software will change to meet <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="emphasis"><i xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">your</i></span> needs and <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="emphasis"><i xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">your</i></span> business plan...or your <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="emphasis"><i xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">supplier's</i></span> needs and your <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="emphasis"><i xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">supplier's</i></span> business plan?<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />Contrast this with the open-source choice. If you go that route, <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="emphasis"><i xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> you have the source code</i></span>, and no one can take it away from you. Instead of a supplier monopoly with a chokehold on your business, you now have multiple service companies bidding for your business—and you not only get to play them against each other, you have the option of building your own captive support organization if that looks less expensive than contracting out. The market works for <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="emphasis"><i xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">you</i></span>. (<a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s12.html">cite</a>)</blockquote>I do think that he was overly optimistic about the marketplace providing "multiple service companies bidding" for our support business, but that is beginning to happen. And we're also starting to see the creation of the "captive support organization[s]" that he predicted as larger library systems begin to recognize that it is cheaper to build a new, or adapt an existing, open source ILS than it is to pay for even one year of a license and support contract with the larger proprietary ILSs.<br /><br />I can only wonder how long it will take the large ILS vendors to recognize that the only way they can compete is by opening up their systems and simplifying access to our data, which they are merely storing. Continuing to <a href="http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0805&L=code4lib&D=0&T=0&P=12414">restrict access</a> and <a href="http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0805&L=code4lib&D=0&T=0&P=13118">block innovation</a> will only drive more libraries to systems that let librarians, and their users, be creative.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-64316688566444750002008-05-02T09:32:00.005-04:002008-05-19T08:11:23.470-04:00One Big Library Unconference in TorontoThe Emerging Technology Interest Group at <a href="http://www.library.yorku.ca/">York University Libraries</a> is hosting an Unconference (I think that's just the academically acceptable way to refer to a barcamp) looking at idea originally voiced by <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Dan Chudnov</span> <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Wendy Newman</span> (updated: thanks to William Denton for correcting my misattribution) that<br /><blockquote>"It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special libraries, private libraries. But really there's just One Big Library, with branches all over the world."<br /></blockquote>which is certainly the way that I wish things worked when I'm <span style="font-style: italic;">using </span>the various libraries that I have access to.<br /><br />Join us in Toronto and see how close we can get to One Big Library!David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-4306201767481011062008-05-01T19:30:00.003-04:002008-05-02T09:40:30.053-04:00April Book A Month Challenge: Beauty<span style="font-style: italic;">Fables: Legends in Exile.</span> Bill Willingham, writer, et al. New York: Vertigo, 2002.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Fables: Animal Farm.</span> Bill Willingham, writer, et al. New York: Vertigo, 2003.<br /><br />Hundreds of years ago, the lands of fairy tales and fables were overrun by "The Adversary" and the characters of our favourite stories, forced into exile in the real world. The human fables live quietly in New York, ruled by King Cole, the Mayor of Fabletown, who is merely a figurehead. The true power behind the throne is Snow White, Director of Operations, who is supported by her Sheriff, Bigby (i.e. "Big B.") Wolf, transformed into human shape somehow. That is the premise of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Fables</span> series of graphic novels, which are collections of the Vertigo comic books of the same title. Each title in the series is a complete story arc from the original books.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Legends in Exile,</span> the first novel in the series, is a standards murder mystery, solved by the traditional means of the genre, with no dependency on the special skills of the characters (beyond the fact that Bigby can ID the crime-scene blood by smell). All the usual suspects are dragged out to solve the mystery of the murder of Snow White's estranged wild sister, Rose Red: her sometime boyfriend, Jack the Giant Killer; the wealthy and mysterious Blue Beard; Snow's ex-husband, Prince Charming; and there's even a cameo by the witch of the Black Forest, last seen dining on children in her gingerbread house. <span style="font-style: italic;">Legends</span> is a light take on the noir hard-boiled detective genre, and Bigby doesn't disappoint, solving everything while managing to piss off everybody.<br /><br />The second volume in the series, <span style="font-style: italic;">Animal Farm</span>, is, as suggested by the name, a tale of political upheaval and revolution. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Legend</span>s, we get glimpses of a talking pig, one of the "three little" tormented by the big bad wolf in the homelands, wandering through the scenery as a bit of porcine stage business. At the beginning of <span style="font-style: italic;">Animal Farm </span>it is revealed that Colin has escaped from "The Farm," a sanctuary for the non-human fables in upstate New York. Snow White, and Rose Red leave the city for the Farm to return Colin and to check in with the manager of the Farm. While there, they discover that many of the animals are unsatisfied with they're lives for forced seclusion and dream of returning to the Homelands to fight off The Adversary. This dissatisfaction has risen to the level that many of the animals are considering armed revolt against the human government of Fabletown merely for the chance to try to recapture the Homelands. Because of the animosity of so many animals towards Wolf, he's banned from visiting the Farm, so White and Rose are on their own in the middle of the conflict.<br /><br />These stories are well-told modern tales featuring the characters we remember from childhood (with a few obscure, or more modern references to pique our curiosity). Because of a small amount of sex and slightly larger amounts of blood and violence, the books are not suitable for younger children, but should be fine for young adults (if they're watching CSI, they can read these).<br /><br />Oh, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Legends in Exile</span> opens with Snow White trying to explain to a couple why she can't help them with marriage counseling: Beauty and the Beast.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-88490096817974728202008-04-27T13:53:00.004-04:002008-04-27T14:06:29.594-04:00Thinking About Dates on To-Do List Web Sites<p>The great thing about reading time management books and comparing task management websites is that it's not <em>really</em> procrastinating.</p><p>David Allen's book, <cite><a href="http://worldcat.org/oclc/44868871">Getting Things Done</a>,</cite> is the current hot time management textbook (and has been for the past few years). Like many of these books, it's common sense distilled into a "system", and sold at management consulting rates, with much talk of "next actions", "workflows", "processes", and "models". But it all boils down to to-do lists and a process for reviewing them. While I wouldn't pay to attend a workshop on the method (nor would I send my staff to one), I do think that the book is definitely worth the $15 cover price and the day of time it would probably take to "implement" the system on one's own.<br /></p><p>Because Allen is the current hot property in the time management sphere, task management web sites all claim to support the "GTD" system, and all claim that their competitors are lacking in some way, providing partial support for GTD, at best. I have a couple of pages of notes about two of the more prominent to-do list management sites (<a href="http://www.rememberthemilk.com/">Remember the Milk</a> and <a href="http://www.toodledo.com/">Toodledo</a>), and will be posting my thoughts on them later.</p><p>But all this reflection on to-do management, and my experimenting with two different systems for accomplishing this fairly simple task, has got me thinking about the problem of dates. When I write out the simple sort of to-do lists that I use, I tend not to assign dates to the items on the list, for the simple fact that everything on the list needs to get done <em>now.</em> Of course, this can lead to things getting deferred indefinitely, since there's are no deadlines attached them. Some web systems don't display tasks on their default screen unless they're due "soon", and undated events are never due, according to those sites. So, I put dates on all my tasks on these systems. And that led to the problem: there are two ways to interpret the dates.</p><p><b>A Date is a Deadline.</b> I think most of us think about dates on lists of tasks as deadlines: "My taxes are due on April 30," "I have to write a book review by the end of the month," and so on. Unfortunately, most automated task management systems that I've experimented with over the years (including Palm PDAs and various desktop calendar programs) don't work well with this model. Once you've associated a date with task, the task is tied to that date.</p><p>If a date is a deadline, then I have to be able to tell my task management system how long I think that the task will take, so that I can be reminded of the task in time to be able to finish it by the deadline (a task manager that tells me on Thursday morning that my taxes are due today<em></em> is basically useless). Ideally, the system would also provide a way for me to track progress toward completion, so that tasks slide up and down the list relative to each other depending on their deadlines and how close I am to completing them, relatively speaking.</p><p><b>A Date is Almost an Appointment.</b> Most of the time, the date associated with a task is a deadline, but sometimes it is the date on which we should, or must, perform the task. This is subtly different from an appointment, I think: "go to the optometrist next Wednesday" is an appointment, but "put the garbage out Tuesday evening" is a task to be done at a particular time.</p><p>While this sort of date is much less common, it is the type of date that most automated systems handle well. Online to-do management systems are, primarly, rich systems for managing the old-style "tickler" file.</p><p>Computer people like to talk a lot about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis">Sapir-Worf hypothesis</a> that the language one speaks limits, or at least affects, the way that one thinks about the world. This is probably because in computer programming, that's true: if you're programming in Fortran, you won't be thinking about object-oriented control structures. It seems to me that the same thing can happen in task management. If your task manager associated dates with tasks in a very concrete, way, then those dates will stop being deadlines and become pseudo-appointments.</p><p>I recently ran across a quotation about computer usability:</p> <p></p><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote>Using a computer should be simpler than not using a computer.</blockquote><p></p><p>For the kinds of things that I need to accomplish with my task management, I think that the computer's not quite ready to beat the pad of paper yet. But that won't stop me from trying to figure out how to make it work.</p>David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-2811364696599518132008-04-09T13:04:00.002-04:002008-04-09T13:22:36.208-04:00The Most Important Programming Language I've LearnedI've programmed in a lot of different languages: BASIC, Pascal, Cobol, Fortran, <a href="http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=1447&language=WSL">WSL</a>, C, perl, icon, and more. I've been paid to program in C, perl, Bourne shell, and others, but it turns out that the most important language I learned was one that I picked up on my own, to play with: Scheme.<br /><br />I'm just learning Javascript now, as part of the next phase of <a href="http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=scratchpad:acq_serials">Evergreen</a> development, and it was pretty easy. I just flipped quickly through the first part of the book to get a flavour of the syntax and learn the rules for scoping, and in about thirty minutes, I was ready to get started. The last new language that I learned was Python (which I started working in last year). It took a bit longer to get into Python, because it's a much richer language that Javascript, but it still didn't take long, and Python has become my favourite programming language.<br /><br />But <a href="http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/projects/scheme/">Scheme</a> is the most important language I learned because so many other languages have adopted some of its core concepts. Modern Perl, Javascript, and Python books all spend a great deal of time talking about "lexical scoping" and what this means for variable access, and how one can define functions inside of functions, and what that all means, and they usually give the same tired example of writing a function that returns a function (usually a function that adds 5 to its argument).<br /><br />Yeah.... Like Scheme did back in the '80s (except Scheme calls it "statically scoped"). Everybody keeps reinventing Lisp (and Scheme is just a specialized educational dialect of Lisp), but nobody's managed to do better than Lisp at so many things. The Evergreen guys are regularly doing sexy dynamic function creation stuff without even realizing that they've successfully recreated very-high-level programming methods that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele,_Jr.">Guy Steele</a> considered normal back in the early '80s.<br /><br />Start by learning Common Lisp or Scheme, do some continuation-passing programming, and after that, everything new is just syntax.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-30733231027678937632008-04-06T12:37:00.002-04:002008-04-06T12:53:18.837-04:00Building Systems that Support LibrariansI've said in the past that one reason why the ILS vendors build the systems that they do is because their customers are librarians, not library users. Unfortunately, that doesn't explain the failure of our ILSs and other systems to support the work that we do as librarians.<br /><br />Imagine this scenario: We have some money left at the end of the year, so we're looking at what we can spend it on. One option is to pay the one-time fee to purchase electronic access to journal backfiles (and yes, this is "purchase" for us; it will be loaded on the consortial server to which we will have ongoing access). Of course, in order to decide if buying the backfiles is worth what the Large Dutch Multinational (LDM) is charging, we need to figure out how much the backfiles might be used. One would think that it would be easy to use a list of ISSNs to generate data from the various sources of usage data that are available to us.<br /><br />Unfortunately, that's not the case. Part of this is our own fault, for creating internal processes that are not conducive to gathering statistics as we go, and part of it is the fault of vendors who don't provide convenient access for "small bulk" access to data to which we subscribe, or just don't give us easy access to our own data. For example, given a list of one hundred ISSNs, how hard would it be for you to find out how many ILL requests were placed for each one?<br /><br />As a programmer, I'm willing to accept a certain level of data format inconsistency between systems, since I can write my own tools to even out such problems, but my programming background also makes my sensitive to the data that's just not available, or demands inordinate amounts of manual (ie, typing and browser clicking) to reach it.<br /><br />We must begin to take notice of how all the systems we use professionally fail to mesh, and demand that vendors make it easier for us to gather the scattered data we need for decision-making into a coherent format: a librarian's decision support system.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-43970822352951806732008-03-30T21:23:00.001-04:002008-04-09T16:15:36.504-04:00Book A Month Challenge for March: Craft<p id="jwsm">Morris, William. 1894. <i id="el0c">The Wood Beyond the World.</i> A facsimile of the Kelmscott Press ed. New York: Dover, 1972.</p><p id="jwsm">Although Morris was a late-Victorian contemporary of Conan Doyle and Kipling, he affected a 17th Century style of English in this romantic fantasy about a young man driven to a quest by misfortune at home and by visions of a beautiful Lady and her two mismatched servants. </p><p id="jwsm">Golden Walter, our Hero, is an honourable and handsome, but common, young man. Cursed at home by an unfaithful wife, he leaves on a trading ship to avoid causing a feud between his father's family and that of his estranged wife. While trading in far lands, he sees visions of the Lady, her beautiful maidservant, and an ugly dwarf, but resists the natural urge to hunt for the source of these visions out of his sense of duty to his father's ship. In the farthest reaches of the empire, he receives word that his attempts to avoid a feud have failed, and that his father has died, so he sets out to return home. Unfortunately, the elements conspire against his honour and drive him into strange heathen lands and the country ruled by the Lady of his visions and the maidservant with whom he falls in love. The novel has a strong episodic structure, with Walter moving (or being moved) from encounter to encounter, meeting all of the usual fairy tale tropes until the typical "happily ever after" ending.</p><p id="jwsm">A note on the edition: While many libraries have <a id="u:5." href="http://worldcat.org/oclc/869084" title="The Wood Beyond the World"><i id="u7qn">The Wood Beyond the World</i></a>, my copy is a photo-facsimile of the Morris's original <a id="m6-x" href="http://www.sil.si.edu/exhibitions/picturingwords/PW_MoreViews.cfm?book_id=SIL32-050" title="Images at the Smithsonian">Kelmscott Press edition</a>, which takes some time to get used to reading for the modern reader, but is very pleasing to the eye.</p><p id="jwsm"><br id="p4x_"></p>David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-61978717852731758172008-03-21T12:27:00.001-04:002008-04-09T16:14:53.289-04:00Social Aggregators<p>With Google's <a title="OpenSocial" href="http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/" id="thgb">OpenSocial</a> API, we're starting to see hints of the social networking interoperability I <a title="talked about" href="http://lisletters.fiander.info/2007/03/social-network-interoperability.html" id="d5fp">talked about</a> a while ago, but the idea of "social aggregation" seems to accomplish some of the same goals. Feed aggregators, which gathering together information about updates to websites and present them all together for the reader's convenience have been around for a while, but these new social aggregation sites provide a simple way to gather together information about social network participation and online identity into one place.</p><p>There are two basic models of social aggregation services:</p><ul><li>I aggregate my identities into a portal, which might be a public site I can share with friends as a "portal to all things David", or a private starting point for tracking and accessing my online activities;</li><li>I aggregate all my friends' identities into a portal, so I only have to go to one place to go to see what they're all up to, taking stalking to a whole new level.</li></ul><p>(I came up with the name "social aggregators" independently, but it's pretty <a title="obvious terminology" href="http://mashable.com/2007/07/17/social-network-aggregators/" id="snn2">obvious terminology</a>.)</p><p>Aggregating oneself seems to be a fairly basic way of handling online identity management, especially if one has a broad portfolio of online content and a common name (not a problem for <a title="google search for "David J Fiander" (in quotes)" href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22david+j+fiander%22" id="ob:0">me</a>). The simplest example of this kind of aggregator is the site <a title="ClaimID" href="http://claimid.com" id="h7t.">ClaimID</a>, which doesn't provide information about updates to sites, but just gathers together all of your information into something like an online CV.</p><p>Aggregating all your friends is the more useful service: I don't have to go to every social network that my friends are on to find out what's going on with them. The service that provides the creepiest example of this is <a title="Spokeo" href="http://www.spokeo.com/" id="wf-j">Spokeo</a>. Once you create an account, you can either upload your address book, or, more simply but much less secure, give it your hotmail/yahoo/gmail userid and password and allow it to harvest your address book directly. Once it knows who's in your address book, Spokeo will go out and harvest all the social networks it knows about and reports to you what your contacts are doing on those networks. Spokeo goes to great lengths to explain that it is only accessing information that is publicly available on the net for anybody to see, and thus isn't an invasion of your privacy. But having Spokeo trawling the net for everything about oneself just feels qualitatively different from connecting with friends as one becomes aware of their activities in the various venues.</p><p>Between services like Spokeo and <a title="google alerts" href="http://www.google.com/alerts" id="wsf9">google alerts</a>, the possibilities for <a title="Total Information Awareness" href="http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/" id="br8s">Total Information Awareness</a> aren't limited to just the government. Maybe privacy really is <a title="dead" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3078854/" id="flzl">dead</a>. <br></p>David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-70293360414274332892008-03-16T10:06:00.000-04:002008-03-16T10:07:19.661-04:00On Keeping a Reading JournalI'm usually not very good at keeping a journal or diary (see, for example, the regularity with which I write in this particular venue). I've tried several times over the years, because I think that I <em>should,</em> and I never last for very long. At the beginning of the year when so many blogger were posting various stats about their reading habits last year, I decided to keep a log of what I read. "Nothing could be simpler," I thought, "it's just data gathering!"<br /><br />And so it is. I've got a spreadsheet on google docs. Whenever I start reading a book, I fill in the author and title, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, and the date I started reading. When I finish, I fill in the end date. And I get to do some simple spreadsheet programming to keep various statistics, which is always fun (no, that's not sarcastic, although some people may think it ironic).<br /><br />There are some operational problems. Whenever I start reading a book, I have to remember to record it, at least within a day or so, so I get the start date right. For some reason, recording the end of a book is easier for me to remember. And, of course, I need to be near a computer; I foresee this causing problems during my summer reading binge, when there's not a computer in sight on the upper reaches of the Ottawa River.<br /><br />More interesting than these mechanical issues, which are fairly obvious, I've already started to notice some effects on my reading behaviour. I normally read quickly: for my vacation I usually plan to read one book a day (if nothing else, that means I won't run out of books), but so far this year, it's taken an average of six days to finish a book (of those I've completed). The book I just finished yesterday took seventeen days to complete, but that has nothing to do with the difficulty of the book or my lack of interest in it, and everything to do with the fact that I've started a <a href="http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=scratchpad:acq_serials">big project</a>, and don't have as much spare time to devote to reading.<br /><br />Which leads to the biggest effect of keeping a reading journal on my reading habits: I am loathe to start a new book until I know that I'll have time to devote to it. It seems that the incomplete books on my list (two right now, one dating from Christmas), impart a certain weight, and that, for me at least, recording data has moved me from "always have a book on the go" to "promptly finish the books I start." I suspect that I'll read the same number of books regardless, it's just that I won't start them until I have some spare time, so I'll have short reads with large "illiterate" gaps, rather than continuous slow reading.<br /><br />Of course, if I really wanted to rack up the numbers, I'd just stop reading <A HREF='http://www.economist.com'>The Economist</A> every week (but then, I'm falling behind on that too).David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-29728115187493007972008-03-01T07:29:00.003-05:002008-03-01T07:52:09.800-05:00BAM Challenge: HeartBennet, Alan. The Uncommon Reader. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Focoins.info%3Agenerator&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=The+Uncommon+Reader&rft.title=The+Uncommon+Reader%3A+A+Novella&rft.isbn=0374280967&rft.aulast=Bennet&rft.aufirst=Alan&rft.au=Alan+Bennet&rft.au=Alan+Bennett&rft.date=2007-09&rft.pub=Farrar%2C+Straus+and+Giroux&rft.tpages=120&rft.id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0374280967%253ftag%3Dlinkbaton%2526link_code%3Dxm2%2526camp%3D2025%2526dev-t%3DD2WMXA685PFEEC"> <br /></span><br /><br />Bennet starts with a simple premise: "What would happen if the Queen suddenly developed an interested in reading for pleasure?" This short novel, a mere 120 pages, is a light exploration of that question, and shows how reading leads to neglecting one's duties and avoiding human companionship.<br /><br />But it also shows how she grows through her reading. The Queen, after even just a brief exposure to fiction, seems to think more about the people around her, and show genuine concern for her staff in small ways that she never did before: reading, and exposure to the human condition, has given the Queen more of a heart, made her more compassionate.<br /><br />(Sometimes it can be a stretch to fit a book into the theme, but I know I can do it!)David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-56385693035789161732008-02-10T17:24:00.000-05:002008-02-10T17:27:21.176-05:00Where the Users AreTwo of the technology trends that I talked about at OLA this year are really parts of one over-arching trend: making it easy for our users to integrate the library and its online collections into their normal workflows. That is, going to where they are, in an online kind of way.<br /><br />Over the Christmas break, I started playing with <a title="Google Gadgets" href="http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/index.html" id="xn5-">Google Gadgets</a> as a way of incorporating the library's catalogue into my home page at iGoogle. It was surprisingly easy. In fact, it was surprisingly easy to set up a prototypical <a title=""Western" iGoogle template" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/bookgeek/2158740630/" id="ht.0">"Western" iGoogle template</a>. Shortly after I started working on this, I discovered, via the <a title="Panlibus blog" href="http://blogs.talis.com/panlibus/archives/2007/12/library_20_in_a.php" id="pr41">Panlibus blog</a>, that the Dublin City (Ireland) public library is doing something similar with a different service called <a title="pageflakes" href="http://www.pageflakes.com/" id="ls:r">Pageflakes</a>. Netvibes is another service that does the same sort of thing. Google and Netvibes both claim to provide programming interfaces that allow their gadgets and widgets (respectively) be incorporated into all sorts of different sites. Then, just a few weeks into January, Proquest announced their <a title="widget builder" href="http://www.proquest.com/products_pq/proquest/widgets/index.shtml" id="yf6c">widget builder</a>, which simplifies creating Proquest search boxes in library (or other) home page. Of course, this sort of embedding is more about making the starting point more convenient, since it's not hard to get to the catalogue, or to a database just by bookmarking them.<br /><br />The more interesting way, for me, of embedding our services into our users lives and workflows is the newer area of mobile web access. With the launch of the iPhone in the US last year, and the much rumoured launch here in Canada (supposedly any day now), with it's large screen, it suddenly makes sense to search the web standing wherever one might be. Just before Christmas, Bell Canada launched the new HTC Touch smartphone with the option of unlimited web browsing on the phone for a mere $7/month (this should not be confused with unlimited data, which it probably isn't). Suddenly, surfing the web on your phone isn't really geeky, but is actually useful: I have actually searched Amazon.ca's mobile interface while standing in my local Chapters store, just to see how much cheaper the book might be online. The <a title="Thunder Bay Public Library" href="http://www.tbpl.thunder-bay.on.ca/" id="lxyb">Thunder Bay Public Library</a> has purchased Innovative Interfaces's "<a title="AirPac" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/bookgeek/2228472581/" id="w8h_">AirPac</a>" mobile web interface for their catalogue. If my local library had a mobile interface, I'd probably use it instead of Amazon's when looking for books in Chapters.<br /><br />Discovery happens everywhere. We need to make sure that when our users discover something, that we're there too, to deliver it to them.David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22451554.post-13652058170397275282008-02-10T17:19:00.001-05:002008-02-10T17:24:47.588-05:00My Top Technology Trends SlidesI've already written a bit about my top tech trends, and I have a couple more posts to make about them that will go into more detail, but here's a slightly modified version of my slides (only modified to make it simpler to see what's going on without me rambling).<br /><br /><iframe src="http://docs.google.com/EmbedSlideshow?docid=dcztrg5d_68f7p4fmfv" frameborder="0" height="342" width="410"></iframe>David J. Fianderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08649853579641241634noreply@blogger.com0