Library and Archives Canada: Planning for a new union catalogue

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 …


Continue reading

Library catalogues and HTTP status codes

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 …


Continue reading

Dear database vendor: defending against sci-hub.org scraping is going to be very difficult

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 …


Continue reading

How discovery layers have closed off access to library resources, and other tales of schema.org from LITA Forum 2014

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 …


Continue reading

Posting on the Laurentian University library blog

Posted on Fri 18 July 2014 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, Structured data, coding, structured data

Since returning from my sabbatical, I've felt pretty strongly that one of the things our work place is lacking is open communication about the work that we do--not just outside of the library, but within the library as well. I'm convinced that the more that we know about the demands …


Continue reading

Cataloguing for the open web: schema.org in library catalogues and websites

Posted on Tue 01 July 2014 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, Evergreen, Structured data, coding, evergreen, structured data

tldr; my slides are href="http://stuff.coffeecode.net/2014/understanding_schema">here, and the slides from Jenn and Jason are also available from href="http://connect.ala.org/node/222959">ALA Connect.

On Sunday, June 29th Jenn Riley, Jason Clark, and I presented at the ALCTS/LITA jointly sponsored …


Continue reading

RDFa introduction and codelabs for libraries

Posted on Fri 27 June 2014 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, Evergreen, Structured data, coding, evergreen, structured data

My RDFa introduction and codelab materials for the ALA 2014 preconference on Practical linked data with open source are now online!

And now I've finished leading the RDFa + schema.org codelab that I've been stressing over and refining for about a month at the American Library Association annual conference Practical …


Continue reading

The state of structured data in Evergreen: 2.6 edition

Posted on Sat 22 March 2014 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen, Structured data, evergreen, structured data

Yesterday at the 2014 Evergreen International Conference I presented Structured library data: holdings, libraries, and beyond--a talk about the work I've done specifically with Evergreen and making some of the connections with Koha and VuFind's capabilities. Lots of attendees seemed happy with the talk and the direction that we're …


Continue reading

RDFa, schema.org, and open source library systems

Posted on Thu 20 March 2014 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, FSOSS, Structured data, coding, fsoss, structured data

Two things of note:

  1. I recently submitted the camera-ready copy for my ESWC 2014 paper, Seeding Structured Data by Default via Open Source Library Systems (**preprint**). The paper focuses on the work I've done with Evergreen, Koha, and VuFind to use emerging web standards such as RDFa Lite and schema …

Continue reading

Mapping library holdings to the Product / Offer mode in schema.org

Posted on Mon 03 February 2014 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding, Evergreen, Structured data, coding, evergreen, structured data

Back in August, I mentioned that I taught Evergreen, Koha, and VuFind how to express library holdings in schema.org via the http://schema.org/Offer class. What I failed to mention was how others can do the same with their own library systems (well, okay, I linked to the …


Continue reading