My recent editorial about metatags generated some helpful reader responses. My basic point still holds. Metadata as currently structured, in the context of a non-ideal world, is open to spam and deception, and most search engines give meta tags very little weight. The overworked site owner would probably find it a relief to simply stop using meta keywords and possibly descriptions entirely.
Friday, September 27, 2002
Metatags
Structured Data
A CMS can significantly improve site searches by normalizing (and even automatically generating) Meta information such as key words, page titles, content descriptions, structured asset descriptors, categories, and so forth. The result is improved site searches for your visitors, potentially improved Internet search engine rankings (Search Engine Optimization), and reduced cost and effort on your part to add these features to your site.
Sound Card
MS Outlook
LITA National Forum
- Contra dance. There is a dance Sat. evening. All are welcome.
- International Dance. There is a dance Fri. evening. This is for those who know the dances.
Wednesday, September 25, 2002
Personality of Catalogers?
Serials
Cataloging
MARC Tools
Safe Computing
Koha
This is an alpha quality release only. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO USE IT IN PRODUCTION SYSTEMS It may cause data corruption or loss, it may confuse patrons, it may cause books to refile themselves in strange places. IT SHOULD BE USED FOR TESTING ONLY. (I hope that's clear enough.) If you are want to use Koha in a production setting, please stick with the stable 1.2 release until the 1.3 series stabilizes enough for us to create Koha 1.4.0.
Significant new features in this release include:
- Data is stored natively in a MARC based format.
- Multiple flavors of MARC are supported.
- Enhanced API supports both the new MARC format and the older Koha specific format.
Please note though, that from a users perspective, this release should look just like a 1.2 series release. All of the work so far has been in redesigning the data format and extending the API. User visible changes will be included once the infrastructure has stabilized.
It is also important to note that the simple acquisition system is currently broken. DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT USING IT. The full acquisition system works correctly.
Paul Poulain
1.4 Release manager
the Koha project
Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki/manager
the Koha project
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Tuesday, September 24, 2002
MarcEdit
The first Service Pack (SP) for MarcEdit 4.1 is now available for download. The SP introduces no new features, but instead, fixes a number of minor and one not so minor issue with the application. The most critical problem that this SP address is a bug that Microsoft introduced into Windows 2000 with the release of SP 3. After speaking with Microsoft, they have acknowledged that they have introduced a bug into the windows RichEdit component. So how does this affect MarcEdit? Well, MarcEdit utilizes the RichEdit in the MarcEditor.
Titles
Technology
Career Development
Monday, September 23, 2002
Houston Area
I like my alma mater. It has been innovative in delivering MLS education to remote areas. I took the extension courses here in Houston. I had been driving 150 miles each way every Sat. to Austin before UNT began the extension courses. Now they offer on-line courses and real-time classes at distributed sites. They are doing interesting work on Z39.50. If interested in the get together, drop me a note and I'll put you in touch with the organizers.
Information Access
This would be a nice way to keep up with 'blogs, news sites, any Web site that changes on a regular basis. Maybe this is common knowledge to PDA users but it was an "AHA" moment to me. We might want to design or redesign sites to display better on these devices. For example, if I placed the link lists on the right side of my 'blog then they should show after the postings. (Maybe someday, but not soon) Less scrolling for the user. What other uses and considerations should be made for the PDA user?
Web Standards
Western language HTML documents are written in the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, with a specified set of escapes for special characters. Blithely ignoring this prescription, as usual, Microsoft use their own "extension" to Latin-1, in which a variety of characters which do not appear in Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0x82 through 0x95--this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode, which reserve this region for additional control characters.
Book Sales
Open Archives Initiative
Serial Subscription Information
Over thirty organizations were surveyed representing serials aggregators, library consortia, vendors of integrated library systems, STM publishers, and serials subscription agents. In parallel, NISO invited the library community-at-large to participate in a web-based survey on this matter.