The new Google Book Search Data API has some really cool features and I'm wondering how much of it I can shoehorn into the OPAC? Our students increasingly expect the OPAC search box to be searching the full-text of our book stock — i.e. they type in several words that it would be useful to [...]
Posts from ‘September, 2008’
Edible Pie Chart
This opens up all sorts of possibilities for tasty representations of data (found at information aesthetics)
Congratulations!
May the road rise up to meet you May the wind be ever at your back May the sun shine warm upon your face And the rain fall softly on your fields Congratulations to our friends, Amanda and Paul, who tied the knot yesterday on a sunny autumnal day in Yorkshire!
Green eco-friendly catalogue PCs
Warning — long blog post ahead! I've been promising to post something about our new catalogue PCs …but first, a bit of background: Like most large(ish) academic libraries, we've got dedicated catalogues PCs… lots of them… on every floor! From memory, we had at least 35 of them before the start of the refurbishment. We [...]
Playing with Processing
Iman first mentioned Processing ages ago, but it's only recently I've gotten around to having a play with it. So, this is my first stab at coming up with something visual and it's in the same vein as Dewey Blobs… …you'll need Java installed to view it. Rather than lay Dewey out on a 2D [...]
World exclusive!
This is a little naughty of me — posting pictures of the two subject floors that have undergone refurbishment this year before many of our library staff have had chance to see them in person Last summer, we refurb'd the entrance floor of the library and rebranded it as the "Student Centre" to reflect the [...]
million pound butts
Do you ever get the feeling you're either still asleep and dreaming, or that you've woken up in a parallel universe? Apparently "artist" Damien Hirst will get £1m just for putting a few used fag ends into a box… Personally, I'm blaming the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider for altering reality. p.s. if [...]
Old Job, New Job
Technically today is the last day of my "old job", which saw me based with the Business Applications Team in Computing Services at the University of Huddersfield. From Monday, I'm still the "Library Systems Manager", but I'll be moving up to join colleagues in the Technical Services Team in the Library. My new role will [...]
"Oh-oh dedication's what you need…
…if you wanna be a record break-er, oooooh!" (full lyrics) I'm not sure if the University of Huddersfield has ever made an appearance in the Guinness book of World Records before, but it looks like we should be in the next edition! Students from the University’s Department of Chemical & Biological Sciences teamed up with [...]