Dave Pattern's blog
The level of noise about "that label" seems to be getting louder of late, so I propose we simply change the name to…
…which of course means we'll get a cool new name for it all next year!
(The above is roughly 85.3% tongue-in-cheek, but if the new name takes off then bagsie I get 25% of [...]
I've just arrived at the Crowne Plaza NEC Birmingham, ready for a meeting with Paul Miller at Talis first thing tomorrow morning, followed by the SirsiDynix Executive Roadshow 2006.
Travelling to Birmingham is never straightforward — today, due to a broken down train, they had to cram two sets of passengers onto a single train.
The Crowne [...]
Inspired by Lorcan Dempsey's post about Coins in Open WorldCat, I've been messing around with adding Coins to our OPAC.
I still need to research the specification in further depth, but it's been relatively easy to add a prototype to our OPAC. Here's how it displays in Firefox using the Openly OpenURL Referrer extension:
I've configured the [...]
I've added a couple more bits of Ajax to the OPAC, although they've not live yet:
links to items with the same (or similar) subject headings
links to related works / other editions (courtesy of OCLC's xISBN service)
As an example, here's the links that appear for the first edition of Learning XML:
Although having links to "people who [...]
I've spent the afternoon Ajax-ing the "did you mean?" code on the OPAC, and also finishing off the serendipity suggestions.
The serendipity suggestions take longer to generate than before, as the the code now considers keyword phrases returned by answers.com, instead of just single keywords. As an example, here's what appears if I try searching for [...]
As mentioned in this post, I've rejigged our HIP server so that it has an Apache instance running in front of it that's acting as a reverse proxy.
Just in case anyone is interested in going down the same route, here's how I did it with Apache and mod_perl…
LibraryThing's Tim Spalding has been in touch with me and he made some suggestions that I've now added into pewbot.
If you pop /extended onto the end of a request, then pewbot will return a richer set of information – e.g.:
http://webcat.hud.ac.uk:4128/pewbot/0750603054/extended/
The attributes returned for each ISBN are:
countthe number of borrowers who borrowed both books
totalDaysthe total number [...]
We've finally got our first bit of Ajax on the OPAC, although it's not currently working with Firefox.
Thanks to the wonderful Scriptaculous, the "people who borrowed this" suggestions in our OPAC are now powered by Ajax – e.g.:
The printing revolution in early modern Europe
…clicking on the "show more" link brings in the next batch of [...]
This is such a great idea — Ann Arbor, and their resident Superpatron Ed Vielmetti, have organised a Library 2.0 unconference:
http://wiki.library2.net/index.php/Main_Page
As Ed notes on his blog:
An unconference or "camp" is a way of organizing a conference so that you focus on bringing the right people to the room and don't stress about who is going [...]
Many thanks to Talis' Paul Miller for inviting me to take part in their latest Talking with Talis today.
Just before the recording session started this afternoon, workmen from the local council pulled up outside our house to do some tree trimming. So, if you detect any odd noises in the background then it's probably their [...]