Access Conference 2011 in beautiful British Columbia

Posted on Wed 19 January 2011 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding

The official announcement for the Canadian Library Association (CLA) Emerging Technology Interest Group (ETIG)-sponsored Access Conference for 2011 went out back in November, announcing Vancouver, British Columbia, as the host. Note that the schedule has changed from its original dates to October 19-22!

I've told a number of people …


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Oh those kids

Posted on Fri 26 November 2010 in Family • Tagged with Amber, Arik

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The orange hair gel didn't make my hair very orange, but it did a great job on my face. Don't ask me what I'm supposed to have been; I was just there for the yuks.

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Daddy's side of the jack'o'lantern.

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Amber's side of the jack'o'lantern, transferred from her conceptual drawing …


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Troubleshooting Ariel send and receive functionality

Posted on Wed 27 October 2010 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding

I'm posting the following instructions for testing the ports required by

Ariel interlibrary loan software. I get requests for this information a few

times a year, and at some point it will be easier to find on my blog than to

dig through my email archives from over 3 years …


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Chilifresh-using libraries: are you violating copyright?

Posted on Fri 22 October 2010 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding

When I was preparing my Access 2010 presentation about social sharing and aggregation in library software, I came across Chilifresh, a company that aggregates reviews written by library patrons from across libraries that subscribe to the company's review service. I was a bit disappointed to see that the service almost …


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Standard Social Sharing and Aggregation on the Go: Access 2010 presentation

Posted on Sun 17 October 2010 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen

Earlier this week, I had the honour of speaking at the Access 2010 conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The title of my talk was rather unwieldy, but what it boiled down to was:

  • An environmental scan of how libraries are currently offering users of their services the ability to share their …

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On avoiding accusations of forking a project

Posted on Wed 29 September 2010 in misc • Tagged with Coding, Evergreen

Sometimes forking a project is necessary to reassert community control over a project that has become overly dominated by a single corporate rules: see OpenIndiana and LibreOffice for recent examples. And in the world of distributed version control systems, forking is viewed positively; it's a form of evolution, where experimental …


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Library hackers want you to throw down the gauntlet

Posted on Mon 27 September 2010 in Libraries • Tagged with Coding

On October 13th, a very special event is happening: the Access Hackfest. A tradition since Access 2002, the Hackfest brings together library practitioners of all kinds to tackle challenges and problems from the mundane to the sublime to the ridiculous. If you can imagine a spectrum with three axes, you …


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Responding to the Evergreen "research" article in Information Technology and Libraries

Posted on Mon 20 September 2010 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen

Update 2010-09-28: Fixed link


The home page for ***Information Technology and Libraries*** states:

*Information Technology and Libraries* ( ITAL) (ISSN 0730-9295) is a refereed journal published quarterly by the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association.

The September 2010 issue of ITAL contained an article …


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Evergreen on FLOSS Weekly: the aftermath!

Posted on Wed 01 September 2010 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen

Update 2010-09-28: pedantic XHTML fix


The recorded version of the Evergreen episode of the FLOSS Weekly show was released over the weekend. I'm happy to say that Lynn watched it without looking too pained at any given point, and the Evergreen project has already had several responses to our plea …


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Non-stop Evergreen, or "What I'm doing on my summer vacation"

Posted on Thu 26 August 2010 in Libraries • Tagged with Evergreen

Last week, I started my summer vacation with a weekend at a friend's cottage. By Tuesday I was deeply engrossed in some Evergreen enhancement work for the International Institute of Social History. I'm building an authorities management user interface that properly exposes Evergreen's powerful authority support in the 2.0 …


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