Linked Data for Production - 2018 Workshop
Posted on Tue 08 May 2018 in Libraries • Tagged with libraries, linked data, wikidata
At Stanford for the Linked Data for Production - 2018 Workshop
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Voilà - Canada's new union catalogue is anti-discovery
Posted on Fri 02 February 2018 in Libraries • Tagged with libraries
Canada has a new union catalogue and it is rather disappointing
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Our nginx caching proxy setup for Evergreen
Posted on Thu 24 August 2017 in Libraries • Tagged with evergreen, coding, libraries
Details of our nginx caching proxy settings for Evergreen
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Evergreen as a Progressive Web App?
Posted on Fri 14 April 2017 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen
Progressive Web Apps are pretty cool, and for good reason: the idea is to take advantage of the advanced features of our web browsers to provide capabilities that rival native apps, while still offering good performance and functionality to users of other browsers.
However, if you've done much reading about …
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Google Scholar's broken Recaptcha hurts libraries and their users
Posted on Fri 02 September 2016 in Libraries • Tagged with coding
Update 2016-11-28: The brilliant folk at UNC figured out how to fix Google Scholar using a pre-scoped search so that, if a search is launched from the library web site, it will automatically associate that search with the library's licensed resources. No EZProxy required!
For libraries, proxying user requests is …
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PHP's File_MARC gets a new release (1.1.3)
Posted on Thu 01 September 2016 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, PHP, coding, php
Yesterday, just one day before the anniversary of the 1.1.2 release, I published the 1.1.3 release of the PEAR File_MARC library. The only change is the addition of a convenience method for fields called getContents() that simply concatenates all of the subfields together in order …
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Library stories: 2020 vision: "Professional research tools"
Posted on Sun 08 May 2016 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, coding
For a recent strategic retreat, I was asked to prepare (as homework) a story about a subject that I'm passionate about, with an idea of where we might see the library in the next three to five years. Here's one of the stories I came up with, in the form …
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Querying Evergreen from Google Sheets with custom functions via Apps Script
Posted on Fri 15 April 2016 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, Evergreen, coding, evergreen
Our staff were recently asked to check thousands of ISBNs to find out if we already have the corresponding books in our catalogue. They in turn asked me if I could run a script that would check it for them. It makes me happy to work with people who believe …
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That survey about EZProxy
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 …
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"The Librarian" - an instruction session in the style of "The Martian"
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 …
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