Better 404 Pages

Good idea from Dean Frickey writing in A List Apart (the other ALA), A More Useful 404.

Encountering 404 errors is not new. Often, developers provide custom 404 pages to make the experience a little less frustrating. However, for a custom 404 page to be truly useful, it should not only provide relevant information to the user, but should also provide immediate feedback to the developer so that, when possible, the problem can be fixed.

To accomplish this, I developed a custom 404 page that can be adapted to the look and feel of the website it’s used on and uses server-side includes (SSI) to execute a Perl script that determines the cause of the 404 error and takes appropriate action.

Authority Record Access

Why doesn't LC offer Z39.50 access to the authority files? How about their other thesauri, like the Thesaurus For Graphic Materials? Easy access to these files would be useful. Maybe Z39.50 is "so yesterday" and SRU/SRW or an API is the answer. These are rich resources and access would be useful in ways we can't yet imagine. How about other institutions? AAT or the NASA Thesaurus, or... would be useful. This is not only about bibliographic access, but has wider issues in a Semantic Web environment.

[Later] OCLC does provide access via their Terminologies Project, see the comment for full details.

[21 Nov. 2008] Someone sent me a note saying that the Voyager software used does not support Z39.50 access to the authority records. That they are not a separate database and have very little indexing. Do check out the comments for some useful information.

RSS for TOCs

RSS and Scholarly Journal Tables of Contents: the ticTOCs Project, and Good Practice Guidelines for Publishers by Lisa Rogers provides some advise based on experience.

Publishers are using various versions of feeds such as RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, RSS 0.91 and Atom. RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 are very simple XML formats, and typically only contain the fields for title, description and link. However, RSS 1.0 can easily be extended by the use of modules so as to not only deliver the content, but also provide structured metadata. One such module for extended RSS 1.0 is the Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) module. A variety of publishers such as Nature Publishing Group (6), Inderscience (7) and SAGE (8) are already using PRISM along with Dublin Core Metadata to provide rich metadata in their RSS feeds.

Comment on RDA

Form for comments from the US about RDA.

Koha User Group Meeting

On April 16-17th there will be a Koha innovations and sharing group in Plano Texas (suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth). The 2 day workshop would have lab access and presentation space. There would be a charge to cover lunch both days and other expenses. Any leftover money would be given to the KUDOS users group as seed money. Anticipated cost $100.

Algorithms for Clustering Tags

Clustering Tags in Enterprise and Web Folksonomies by Simpson, Edwin will be published and presented at the International Conference on Weblogs & Social Media, Seattle, March 31st, 2008 (HPL-2008-18 )

Tags lack organizational structure limiting their utility for navigation. We present two clustering algorithms that improve this by organizing tags automatically. We apply the algorithms to two very different datasets, visualize the results and propose future improvements.

RDA Draft

The full draft of RDA is now available for comment. Comments needed.

Indexing Tool

Library catalogs these days are mostly ralational databases and related indexes. LuSql is a tool to create an index from a relational databse.

LuSql is a simple but powerful tool for building Lucene indexes from relational databases. It is a command-line Java application for the construction of a Lucene index from an arbitrary SQL query of a JDBC-accessible SQL database. It allows a user to control a number of parameters, including the SQL query to use, individual indexing/storage/term-vector nature of fields, analyzer, stop word list, and other tuning parameters. In its default mode it uses threading to take advantage of multiple cores.

LuSql can handle complex queries, allows for additional per record sub-queries, and has a plug-in architecture for arbitrary Lucene document manipulation. Its only dependencies are three Apache Commons libraries, the Lucene core itself, and a JDBC driver.

LuSql has been extensively tested, including a large 6+ million full-text & article metadata document collection, producing an 86GB Lucene index.Lots of the Code4Lib folks are working with Lucene indexes.

Lemon8-XML

Adding semantic mark-up to text is something the cataloger in me always finds good. Microformats, XML, or RDF all make searches more precise. Lemon8-XML is a tool to chamge scholarly papers in MS Word or Open Office formats into XML. Sweet idea.

Lemon8-XML is a web-based application designed to make it easier for non-technical editors and authors to convert scholarly papers from typical word-processor editing formats such as MS-Word .DOC and OpenOffice .ODT, into publishing layout formats such as the open, industry-standard NLM Journal Publishing XML format.

To use Lemon8-XML, you don't need to understand XML, all you need is a little time and a general understanding of how scholarly articles are structured. In general, this means a document with:

1. some information about the article and authors at the top
2. usually an abstract
3. several sections, often titled "introduction", "methods", "results", etc.
4. optional figures or tables, either in-text or as appendices
5. a list of references or citations in a standardized format (eg. MLA, APA, etc.)

It is from the Public Knowledge Project.

Preliminary Authority Records

Just what does it take to upgrade a preliminary authority record? I ask because there are some about 25 years old that are still preliminary.

n 83827701
Space Age Astronomy Symposium (1961 : Pasadena, Calif.)

or

n 83827385
Solar Spectrum Symposium (1963 : Rijksuniversiteit te Utrecht)

OpenSearch and unAPI Enrichs the Cataloges

SeeAlso: A Simple Linkserver Protocol by Jakob Voss appears in Ariadne no. 57 (October 2008)

In recent years the principle of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) has grown increasingly important in digital library systems. More and more core functionalities are becoming available in the form of Web-based, standardised services which can be combined dynamically to operate across a broader environment [1]. Standard APIs for searching (SRU [2] [3], OpenSearch [4]), harvesting and syndication (OAI-OMH [5], ATOM [6]), copying (unAPI [7] [8]), publishing, editing (AtomPub [9], Jangle [10], SRU Update [11]), and more basic library operations, either already exist or are being developed.

The creation of the SeeAlso linkserver protocol was occasioned by the need to enrich title views in library catalogues of the German Common Library Network (GBV) with links to additional information. However, instead of integrating those links into title records and tailoring the presentation to our specific OPAC software, we decided to create a general linkserver Web service.

Omeka 0.10

Omeka 0.10 was released yesterday.

Omeka 0.10b incorporates many of the changes you asked for: an unqualified Dublin Core metadata schema and fully extensible element sets to accommodate interoperability with digital repository software and collections management systems; elegant reworkings of our theme API and plugin API to make add-on development more intuitive and more powerful; a new, even more user friendly look for the administrative interface; and a new and improved Exhibit Builder. While the changes are extensive and represent a next-to-last step forward toward a 1.0 release in early 2009, existing users of Omeka should have little trouble switching to 0.10b. New users should have even less trouble getting started. Meanwhile, visitors to Omeka.org will find a new look, a more intuitive information architecture, easily browsable themes and plugins directories, improved documentation and user support, and new ways to get involved in the Omeka community.

OPML

How (and Why) to Create an OPML File by Marshall Kirkpatrick is only new to me. A PR person looks at the Outline Processor Markup Language.

There’s a billion other reasons to use OPML - just ask yourself in what circumstances you can imagine sending someone else one link or file that contains a collection of dynamic sources on any topic. I know these are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night.

I'm not seeing OPML icons as often as I'd expect. Is this another PICS, a good idea that just never gets adopted?

WorldCat Hackathon

WorldCat Hackathon is the impetus for some tool development. From OCLC comes this notice

We added a few more features in this month's xID deployment, hopefully it could be useful in upcoming WorldCat Hackathon.

• support LCCN query such as: http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/lccn/2004273129?fl=isbn,lccn
• support deleted OCLCNUM (marc 019 field) http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/oclcnum/47139964?method=getMetadata In this case OCLCNUM 47139964 was merged into 33100112, and we use a flag "presentOclcnum" to mark present OCLC numbers.
• xISSN project now supports tab-delimited and CSV dissemination http://xissn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/issn/0036-8075?method=getEditions&format=csv&fl=issn,form,title http://xissn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/issn/0036-8075?method=getEditions&format=txt&fl=issn,form,title
  
• start to support php dissemination format in all XID projects http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/0596002815?method=getEditions&fl=*&format=php

Matienzo, Mark has announced that Python WorldCat Module v0.1.0 is now available.

In preparation for the upcoming WorldCat Hackathon starting this Friday, I've made a few changes to worldcat, my Python module for interacting with OCLC's APIs. Most notably, I've added iterators for SRU and OpenSearch requests, which (like the rest of the module) painfully need documentation.

isbn2marc

William Denton has written a program, isbn2marc, that takes and ISBN and returns a MARC record. It uses Z39.50 and is written in Ruby. Mr. Denton is the person responsible for the FRBR Blog, good stuff.

Changes to Dewey

973.931 Administration of George W. Bush, 2001–2009
973.932 Administration of Barack Obama, 2009–

Conference Presentations

Have you done a conference presentation lately? If so, let all that work continue to inform the library community by submitting it to the WebJunction conference page. They already have several presentations, both slides and audio, from several conferences. Well worth a look and listen. Great idea WebJunction, thanks.

Ten Do’s and Don’ts for Conference, Workshop, and Program Organizers

In the wake of Internet Librarian lots of folks have been posting tips for presenters. Conference organizers also have a nice list of hints, Ten Do’s and Don’ts for Conference, Workshop, and Program Organizers. Many of our conferences are arraigned by volunteers who change every year or two. A look at this list and the comments should make for happier speakers.

Thanks to Rachael Singer Gordon for pointing me to this again, I'd lost the link.

New DCMI Documnets

Two new documents from the Dublin Core Metadata Imitative. The first involves concepts that relate to RDA. (Although why we are still working on the intellectual foundation when it it nearly ready....) The second provides a model for interoperability on the Semantic Web. The DCMI folks are looking for comments on both.

Guidelines for Dublin Core Application Profiles describes the key components of an application profile and walks the reader through the process of designing a profile. Addressed primarily to a non-technical audience, the guidelines also provide a technical appendix about modeling the metadata interoperably for use in linked data environments. This draft will be revised in response to feedback from readers.

Interoperability Levels for Dublin Core Metadata, published today as a DCMI Working Draft, discusses the modeling choices involved in designing metadata applications for different types of interoperability. At Level 1, applications use data components with shared natural-language definitions. At Level 2, data is based on the formal-semantic model of the W3C Resource Description Framework. At Level 3, data is structured as Description Sets (i.e., as records). At Level 4, data content is subject to a shared set of constraints (as described in a Description Set Profile). Conformance tests and examples are provided for each level. The Working Draft represents work in progress for which the authors seek feedback.

OCLC News

OCLC has a new policy on sharing records. We have until Feb. to consider this policy and all the implications. There was lots of speculation about this before it was released.