Posted on Thu 19 November 2015 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, coding
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 …
Posted on Thu 29 October 2015 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, coding
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 …
Posted on Sun 04 October 2015 in misc • Tagged with Coding, coding
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 …
Posted on Wed 15 April 2015 in misc • Tagged with Coding, Libraries, coding, libraries
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!
The author advocates an approach to university curriculum that re-emphasizes the …
Posted on Tue 03 March 2015 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, Structured data, coding, structured data
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 …
Posted on Mon 29 December 2014 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, Evergreen, coding, evergreen
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 …
Posted on Wed 10 December 2014 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, Libraries, coding, libraries
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 …
Posted on Thu 04 December 2014 in Linked Open Data • Tagged with Coding, Evergreen, Libraries, Structured data, coding, evergreen, libraries, structured data
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 …
Posted on Tue 18 November 2014 in misc • Tagged with Coding, Libraries, coding, libraries
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 …
Posted on Sat 08 November 2014 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, Evergreen, Structured data, coding, evergreen, structured data
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 …