Mike Giarlo is a coder for libraries

Blog Archive

2012

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...

Back to Top ↑

2011

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...

Back to Top ↑

2010

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!

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...

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...

Back to Top ↑

2009

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 ...

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: 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 ...

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...

Back to Top ↑

2008

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.

Plugin updates

I finally pushed out some embarrassingly outdated WordPress plugin updates a few moments ago.

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

Back to Top ↑

2007

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

Back to Top ↑

2006

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...

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...

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-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 ...

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...

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.

Back to Top ↑

2005

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...

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...

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...

Back to Top ↑