Understanding (e.g.) DOIs for data sets
Data citation is a topic that frequently comes up in conversations around data management. During a call with a community of data curators yesterday, I was a...
Blog
Recent Posts
Ingest: Lessons learned
Now that we have a by-no-means-complete-but-still-useful list of common barriers to ingest, I thought I’d share the lessons learned. We hope to apply these ...
Ingest is a barrier to ingest
Last week I attended the latest iteration of one of my favorite conferences, Code4Lib 2011, which included a full-day CURATEcamp hackfest as a pre-conference...
Impressions from Open Repositories 2010
One minor concern I brought to the conference, which has roots in my attendance at the 2007 conference, was whether it would be too system-oriented to be rel...
Braindump for Q3 2010
Reviewing digital library platforms for the e-Content Stewardship Council – Patricia and I have completed all user interviews and platform demonstration s...
Digital curation community
I wrote before about a potential curation technology unconference which has been dubbed CURATEcamp 2010. Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined just...
JSONovich: Now with code-folding!
Thanks to a clean patch from Sean Coates, I’m releasing v1.5 of JSONovich. It now supports code-folding. Great hack, Sean!
Institutional Identifiers and RDF
In my last braindump, I wrote:
I2: Resource Description
I can hardly believe it’s been eight months since I last wrote about the NISO I2 project. A lot has changed since then1. I continue to work on I2 however; ...
Braindump for Q2 2010
My my, has it really been three months since I wrote up my agenda? I’ve been busy chipping away at the agenda so I thought I’d document my progress now that...
Web discovery and library resources, or, SEO 101
I attended the Penn State library faculty research colloquium on Wednesday, during which I learned all sorts of things about the interesting research being d...
JSONovich crawls into the future
For those of you who use JSONovich rather than, e.g., JSONView, I’ve tweaked the plugin (now at version 1.3) to work with Firefox 3.6.
What’s in a title?
Hamlet. The Declaration of Independence. Gutenberg Bible. Holy Roman Emperor. All of these are words, but more than being words they are titles. Titles ...
My agenda for Q1 2010
My agenda for the first few months of 2010 is becoming clearer. Consider this a snapshot of the things that will be crossing my desk and bouncing around my m...
e-Content Stewardship program kick-off
One of my primary foci is a new program jointly undertaken by the libraries and ITS, known as e-Content Stewardship. (For more background information, Maire...
Data management discussion
My first week on campus is cruising by. On Monday I sat in on a meeting called by our Chief Information Officer (and my boss’s boss), Kevin Morooney, to dis...
Forking
I am not certain if this is a good idea or not, but I decided to set up a “work blog” as I set off on my new path as a digital library architect. The lines ...
Micro-musings after a night of oenophilia
Here’s a list of questions I hope to grapple with. And, yes, I am fixating on terms a bit here. I blame it on the philosophy courses.
Getting Started (with Digital Library Architecture)
I’m not particularly fond of the term “digital library architecture” because it suggests capital ‘A’ architecture. It’s big; it’s monolithic. The term leav...
Exploring curation micro-services
As far as I’m concerned, the most exciting developments this year in repositories and digital curation have come out of the California Digital Library. It ...
Command-line shuffle
Being a nerd, I tend to like the command-line. When I’m working on my laptop at home, I tend to like listening to music. Before I discovered that mplayer h...
I2: Survey results
I wrote in June that the I2 subgroup surveyed “repository managers to determine the current practices and needs of the repository community regarding institu...
JSONovich emerges
JSONovich has now emerged from the Mozilla Add-ons sandbox and is available to the masses: http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10122.
Linking World Digital Library Data
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been learning about linked data in the context of dropping it into the World Digital Library project. I am hopeful we’ll be abl...
Is MARC a data model?
I posted a status update to Twitter, identi.ca, and Facebook late last night hoping to suss out two questions:<ol> Is MARC a data model? But really: wh...
Validating ORE from the Command-line
I’ve been periodically poking at getting Linked Data/RDF views hooked into the World Digital Library web application, following Ed Summers’ lead from his wor...
A Digital Object Defined
What happens to a digital object defined?1 Inspired by Langston Hughes’s “A Dream Deferred” and a spirited conversation in the office today. ...
I2: Survey
[Series]
I2: Strawman
[Series] In the prior I2 post, I wrote about the requirements the repositories subgroup has come up with for an institutional identifier standard (with the ...
I2: Requirements
[Series]
I2: Background
[Series]
State of the Me
Has it really been two months? Why, yes, it has. Oh me, oh my. I have tried to stick somewhat loosely to a schedule of writing here once a month1, but ala...
Ada Lovelace Day
I confess: prior to today, I had never heard of Ada Lovelace. A number of bloggers whom I follow wrote about Ms. Lovelace today, which is apparently Ada Lov...
Rutgers SCILS: What’s in a name?
Former colleague Trevor Dawes has written a thorough piece about a name change proposed by the faculty of Rutgers’ School of Communication, Information and L...
Cataloging and institutional repositories
While doing some reading for a little talk my colleague, Ed Summers, and I are giving at code4lib 2009, I came across a paragraph that sparked a crazy though...
Lynx and HTTPS/SSL on Ubuntu (8.10)
Dear Future Me,
JSONovich update
JSONovich is now up to version 0.6. Recent revisions have added the following functionality: Reads in JSON and converts to UTF-8 for some naive Unicode h...
Molotovs away!
Lest I be criticized for unfairly calling out former employers in my recent Burn the Walled Gardens rant, I share news that the Rutgers University Libraries ...
JSONovich in the sandbox
JSONovich is now in the “sandbox” over at addons.mozilla.org, where it will remain until it’s been tested a bit more, and rated and reviewed by users. Until...
HOWTO: Get Twhirl 0.8.7 working on Ubuntu
I use the Adobe AIR-based Twhirl as a Twitter and identi.ca client on my Ubuntu box. Twitter recently made some changes to their authentication API, apparen...
Burn the Walled Gardens
Issue five of the code4lib journal is out. This issue looks to be just as good as the past four issues, but I’d like to highlight one article in particular:...
Introducing JSONovich
JSONovich is a Firefox extension that pretty-prints and colorizes JSON.
JSON and the Blarghonauts, or, Firefox and Pretty-Printing FAIL
There must be a better way of viewing pretty-printed JSON from Firefox than this. (EDIT: Hail, JSONovich!)
Plugin updates
I finally pushed out some embarrassingly outdated WordPress plugin updates a few moments ago.
Convert Windows shortcuts into Ubuntu shortcuts
[Update: Feel free to grab the code via bzr with bzr branch http://lackoftalent.org/bzr/shortcut_converter.]
Is John McCain a socialist?
Central to the McCain/Palin campaign’s rhetoric lately has been the allegation that Barack Obama is a socialist (which, sadly, is something of a four-letter ...
Call for Proposals - code4lib 2009 conference
Hear ye, hear ye, techie librarians and library techies:
Not to be dramatic
That to secure these rights [of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the co...
Bash, For loop, Files with spaces
Dear Future Me,
The so-called “bailout bill”
Dear elected representatives,
DRM for Librarians
I know precious little about rights management. And what I do know I have gleaned from the occasional Slashdot post or Wired article. Former colleague Gr...
Some shots from Alaska
I don’t ordinarily post pictures around here but I am making an exception. Elizabeth and I recently spent a week in Anchorage, AK, where my in-laws were ga...
Unescaping HTML in Python
Dear Future Me,
ORE plugin updated
I’ve been using my time at RepoCamp today to get the OAI-ORE plugin for WordPress validating again. I’m having some trouble using the validator so I say th...
Sustaining digital libraries
About a month ago, I read on my colleague’s blog that the Emory University Digital Library published a new book on sustaining digital libraries. I’ve final...
Justice and Moral Rectitude
I have been meaning to write up some of my thoughts from the Revolution March and Rally and more generally on my evolving impression of the phenomenon that i...
A founding father on the party system
20 I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let...
Microsoft has the Power(set)
Powerset’s Sr. Product Manager writes: We’re excited to announce officially that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Powerset. ... With any startu...
Stupid terminal tricks
Sometimes I find it useful to keep long-running processes in a session of screen. And sometimes I launch one of said processes outside of screen, and then ...
From a midnight call to self.rand()
I lament the greatest/crappiest dorkcore band (n)ever to have existed, Illegal Operation, with the stellar line-up of Major Crash on drums, General P. Fault ...
Hiccup-y Hardy Heron
In spite of how irksome I find “oh hai i upgrayded!” posts, I’m about to be guilty of same.
Tweet tweet
Guess who is finally on Twitter?
Jython scp
In spite of some open questions, I’ve been making some progress on my Jython-based transport tool. Right now it’s pretty dumb and simple: it copies files to...
Jythons and Javas and bears, oh my!
It’s hard to believe but I’ve been at the new job for six months already, a full half-year come the 29th. Some days it seems like I’ve been here forever; ot...
Rails Deployment
Deploying Rails (to Apache servers) is about to get much easier. Hopefully.
Code4Lib Journal
… meanwhile, the Code4Lib Journal has published its second issue and boy is it packed with articles; Eric Lease Morgan, Coordinating Editor of the issue, doe...
Not quite mint juleps on the veranda
That I very nearly called this post “Southern comfort” reveals me as a long-time yankee from the urban northeast. No, I suppose Arlington, Virginia isn’t q...
Wherein I sort of admit to being a sunshine patriot
THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he ...
“Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber”
Oh frabjous day! I noted with great excitement the following post from “Digital Eccentric,” Leslie Johnston: I was initially very excited by the announceme...
OAI-ORE ResourceMap for WordPress
This is very rough, but here’s a WordPress plugin that provides a resource map for the aggregation of all posts within an installation of WordPress. I’ll be...
My Left Arm for a Teleporter
Moving Day has come. In approximately six-and-one-half hours, movers will show up at my front door to take my crap – which seems to have multiplied, making ...
Using Linux to fix Windows
The hard drive on my laptop is slowly failing and a combination of being busy, lazy, and cheap is preventing me from replacing it. About once every two week...
Self-archiving
Dorothea left a comment on a post announcing the publication of a little conference review some colleagues and I splurted out. In the announcement I lamente...
Use cases for Handle identifiers?
Reading Adam Smith’s D-Lib article has got me thinking about identifiers again. I don’t agree with some of the assertions in the section titled “A Persisten...
WordPress upgrades and the crossing of fingers
On Monday I woke up with a very mild and very annoying bronchial infection. Doctor Me prescribed two days of rest, relaxation, and chicken soup. Where “chi...
October
October has been a month of transition for the past several years.
OAI-PMH in XQuery
Thanks for the nod, Winona. Hopefully you folks will get some good use out of the XQuery-based OAI-PMH data provider I’ve been working on.
Library degrees a mixed bag?
Nicole Engard has posted the results of her library school survey. She writes, Why aren’t we all required to learn a bit of the basics from each area of t...
Code4Lib 2007 Review
Antonio reports that our review of the 2007 Code4Lib conference has been published in volume 27, issue 6 of Library Hi Tech News.
Library Camp NYC 2007
I proposed an NJ Library BarCamp some months ago, not realizing that efforts were already under way to do the same in NYC. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t ...
[1 of 10] Why Ruby on Rails?
1. Ruby
The MLS and library technology
Karen Coombs responds to Ross Singer, re: requiring an MLS degree in library technology positions.
Independence Day
I woke up this morning wanting to do something special, something patriotic. Until I come up with something better, I’m blogging. Yes, that might itself be...
Open source in libraries: Marching on
A couple of interesting stories regarding open source library projects have come out during the past few days.
RESTful Fedora?
Matt Zumwalt of MediaShelf, LLC has been hard at work thinking about how to make Fedora RESTful. There is now a proposal on the Fedora wiki based on a PDF h...
Yawn
There is a series of blog posts that is now getting a lot of press in the biblioblogosphere. I won’t link to it. I won’t refer to it by name. And I will n...
Digital preservation for archivists
At long last, the paper that Ron Jantz and I wrote for the Journal of Archival Organization has been published in a special double issue. It’s titled “Digit...
NJLA 2007 Talk
This is a slightly modified (read: rough) transcription of the talk I gave at this year’s NJLA conference, called “Library Revolution.”
Identifier Persistence: Fundamentals
A friend and former colleague asked if I would comment on a chapter in her upcoming book on digital rights management and I agreed. The chapter is about ide...
Want to work at Princeton?
I was stoked to see our Digital Initiatives Coordinator position posted earlier today. We have been without a full-time field officer for nearly eight month...
Visionary visualization… from Microsoft?
Maybe I’m late to the party – nods to John Blyberg and Rob Styles – but damn(!), does Microsoft have some exciting visualization projects or what?
Edumacation and a call for ILS abstraction
First, I’m stoked to be getting copies of the following books over the course of the next few weeks: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Desig...
[0 of 10] Why Ruby on Rails?
It would be an understatement to say I’ve been enthusiastic about Ruby on Rails for a while now. Okay, I am downright fanatic – just look at that shrine to ...
A farewell to Falwell
I decided a while back that I would use this space exclusively for library- and technology-related bits, that I should not clutter it with more personal or p...
Library Camp NYC
I kicked around the idea of having a Library Camp NJ a few months ago. Response wasn’t fantastic but, then again, I didn’t try very hard to spread the word,...
Five extrabiblioblogospheric blogs
A number of folks have responded to the Liminal Librarian’s original meme asking for a sampling of five non-library blogs folks read.
L’informatique est morte. Vive l’informatique!
Is the discipline of computer science on its last legs? Neil McBride, a lecturer in the School of Computing at De Montfort University, advocates for great c...
Digital librarians: Need a J.O.B.?
Peter Binkley wrote a while back about the crop of neat digital librarian-y jobs that’d been popping up. There’ve been a bunch more lately:
Will Libraries Smell Like Teen Spirit?
I followed a series of links[1] to find this article on the effect of Generation X values upon work culture. The article cites the impending wave of Baby Bo...
Do what now?
I usually travel by ground-based transportation – train when I can, bus when I must – because I hate flying. There is something about this sort of travel th...
Princeton, meet Google
Google and Princeton University went public twenty minutes ago in announcing their arrangement to digitize roughly one million of Princeton’s public domain w...
OpenID plug-in for WordPress
Sam Ruby posted a while back on how to embed LINK tags in your blogs (or other web resources) in order to enable OpenID auto-discovery.
Persistent URL Tools
I’ve posted a couple new tools during the past couple days. One is an update of Devon Smith’s LinkPURL extension for Firefox 2.0.
Useful Trac reports?
I had to create some Trac reports a while back, and figured I would share them with the world wide (time)waste.
New theme
New year, new theme. Technosophia is now comin’ atcha in day-glo green.
Five things you didn’t know and are now worse off for hearing
The “five things” virus has been going around a bunch during the past month or two. While I wasn’t specifically tagged by anyone, I’m foisting my own five ...
Camp for NJ Library Geeks?
I just noticed Ed Summers posted a link to DemoCampDC1, a local BarCamp being organized in the Washington D.C. area, “to build an active community for people...
Finally, unAPI Server for WordPress 1.0
I’ve finally gotten around to updating the unAPI plugin for WordPress so that it fits into the WordPress plugin architecture, making it simple to install and...
Fedora marches forward
I was pleased to see the note that Sandy Payette sent to the fedora-users mailing list earlier today, updating the community on the Fedora 2.2 release date. ...
Marxist ideals and NJLA 2007
The magnanimous folks who are planning the 2007 NJLA conference have invited little ol’ me to give a presentation on unAPI in April. I’m excited about the o...
Access 2006 Presentations
Presentations from the Access 2006 conference have been posted. Slides and audio are provided for many of the talks. Check them out if you were not able ...
RSS Feed for RLG DigiNews
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RlgDiginews The latest in my series of scraped-together feeds: RLG DigiNews
Access 2006 - … and then what?
I assure you that Access 2006 was longer than one day, I really do. My (!*#@$ laptop had the nerve to go and die on me the second night of the conference, ...
Access 2006 - Day One
Day one of the Access 2006 conference is winding down. Two groups of hackers (by trade or in spirit) gathered earlier today at Hackfest and Ad Hockfest, det...
Feed for First Monday
I couldn’t find a good feed for First Monday, so I scraped one together: http://feeds.feedburner.com/FirstMonday (Subscribe with Bloglines) Let me know if yo...
Why Fedora? More answers to the Fedora users survey
I noticed this response to the Fedora users survey on Peter Murray’s blog, and figured I’d post a response. Since my previous employer did not use Fedora, an...
Mission haiku, or, memetic conformity
Public services: “Restrooms are over there, sir!” Cynical, ain’t I?
Introducing unAPI
What is unAPI? Why should you care about it?
Technosophia has moved
Since my staff.washington.edu account will soon go away, I’ve moved the site to my personal domain for the time being. If you have bookmarked the old har...
Object-oriented ontology: conceptual claptrap
I have idly been considering the ontologies proposed by Gottlob Frege in The Thought, and revisited in Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge, in which there are ...
Durable URLs: Case in Point
The title makes this post sound rather more interesting than it is.
Going to Princeton, code4lib++
Though I will miss Seattle and my colleagues at the University of Washington, I am leaving to work at Princeton University Libraries as a digital library dev...
Innovation v. Sustainability
As a community of librarians and technologists, we like to talk about innovation.  A lot: We like it; we support it; we do it; we reward it; we expect it;...
Screenscraped RSS Feeds
I confess; I’m a fan of graphic novels, many of which are published by DC imprints Vertigo and WildStorm. Wanting to keep up with the newest titles without ...
Home of unAPI WP plug-in
The WordPress plug-in for unAPI now lives here: https://mike.giarlo.name/blog/unapi-wordpress-plug-in/
unAPI 1.0 Compliance and a belated haiku!
The page for the unAPI WordPress plug-in has moved to the following location: https://mike.giarlo.name/blog/unapi-wordpress-plug-in/
All Things Must Come To An End, or, Shameless Sentimentality
One such thing, a just recently ended venture, is my bachelorhood. I’ve been away for much of the past couple weeks preparing for, celebrating, and recoveri...
OCLC report on students’ perceptions of libraries
From http://www.oclc.org/reports/perceptionscollege.htm – College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources examines the information-se...
unAPI revision 3 plug-in for WordPress
The unAPI plug-in for WordPress has moved to the following location: https://mike.giarlo.name/blog/unapi-wordpress-plug-in/
unAPI-rev3 compliance
Technosophia is now compliant with unAPI-revision 3. Cruise around and let me know if you turn up any bugs.
Sharing is caring
So I'm finally on del.icio.us. If anyone wants to recommend bookmarks for me (or vice versa), here I am: http://del.icio.us/Technosophia Â
The Jester’s Case for Fedora
Peter Murray has written a series of pieces about the Fedora digital repository system over at the Disruptive Library Technology Jester blog.
Putting a face to a name
During a recent visit to the area, my mother took a photograph of my (soon-to-be) wife and myself which turned out halfway decent, so I figured I would post ...
DSpace.war, what is it good for?
Absolutely nothin’!
Managing Services: From Red Hat to Debian
A note for Linux sysadmins who’re scouring Google for answers to this issue:Â
“Local Service” Services Dying Repeatedly?
One of my Windows 2003 servers began exhibiting very strange behavior a few months ago. That a Windows server behaves badly isn’t strange, of course, but I...
unAPI revision 1-compliant
I noticed Dan Chudnov’s earlier note about the launch of the unAPI website and noted in particular the the unAPI revision 1 specification. I decided to g...
A comparative analysis of keyword extraction techniques [excerpt]
With widespread digitization of printed materials and steady growth of "born-digital" resources, there arise certain questions about access and discoverabili...
The role of skepticism in human-information behavior [excerpt]
NOTE: This article has been revised and published in the Library Student Journal. Even a cursory review of social science literature reveals a wealth of res...
The impact of open access on academic libraries [excerpt]
Broadly defined, open access makes scholarly materials accessible to users at no cost. More specifically, the term is used to describe a model of scholarly c...
Translating ‘pig’ to ‘pork’ and vice versa: A metaphor for library technologists
I’ve been slowly making my way through Melvyn Bragg’s “The Adventure of English,” which tells the story of the English language [1]. I read a bit the other n...
unAPI, COinS-PMH, OpenSearch support
I’ve decided to use this blog partly to write about work-related points of interest but also to futz around with blogging technologies and such.Â
A Mere Test
I used to post my work-related notes here, but decided to give WP a shot.
Ruby on Rails, Revisited
Forget about that Instant Rails stuff. Try the following tutorial instead, which gave me a better sense of how Rails actually works. Very, very helpful.
Unrelated points
I’ve been hearing a lot about the Ruby programming language lately, and specifically about Ruby on Rails. After looking at different strategies to get this s...
Access-based Enumeration & Windows Server 2003 R2
As of the SP1 release, Windows Server 2003 now supports access-based enumeration of file shares. Basically, files and folders to which users lack access will...
Windows Server 2003 still dependent upon WINS / NetBIOS?
Perhaps I am mistaken, but I thought one of the biggest purported benefits of the newest incarnation of Active Directory was its supposed reliance upon the m...
Microsoft Office Viewers
For users who have neither access to Microsoft Office nor desire to dive headfirst into OpenOffice*, Microsoft provides freely downloadable viewers for Offic...
NLB vs. MSCS, or load-balancing versus clustering
Not quite sure you grasp the subtleties of difference between load-balancing (NLB) and server clustering (MSCS)? After all, both are technologies that allow ...
WSF - good for metascripting?
The Windows Script File, .wsf, allows one to mark-up in XML different blocks of scripting. One can, in effect, write a script hooking VBScript, JavaScript, a...
Automated System Recovery
Here is a link describing how one might use ASR – the new term for Emergency Repair Disk – in Windows Server 2003.
Google Maps JavaScript problem in IE
Internet Explorer likes to throw the “Operation Aborted” error when trying to hook into the Google Maps API via JavaScript, at least when the JavaScript is p...
List of Free Software
Here’s a list of all the free software I’m running on my Windows XP workstation, or least the subset that I deem noteworthy. Rather than annotate the list, w...
A restrictive IPSec script
What do you do when you’ve got a server to install and you’re too lazy to burn a CD with all the latest service packs and hotfixes? I suppose you could attac...
Problems joining a Windows 2003 Active Directory domain
One of the first tasks that has been assigned to me is the installation and configuration of a pair of network load-balanced Terminal Servers running Windows...
Home and End keys - PuTTY - bash - Linux
Here’s a simple one. But first, some backstory.