Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Metasearch Metadata Metaphor
SRW/U is to Yngwie J. Malmsteen as OpenSearch is to Keith Richards. Yngwie Malmsteen is technically superior, however aesthetically unlistenable (unimplementable, in the case of SRW/U). Keith Richards is sloppy, unsophisticated and writes timeless melodies that resonate with the masses (OpenSearch is sloppy, unsophisticated — while time will tell if OpenSearch becomes “timeless” [seems doubtful,…
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Implementing COinS in the SFX Menu
Since Andrew asked: This should go in your banner.tmpl file. I am not bothering with BANNER_TYPE_3, since I am not really sure how I would represent that in a COinS format, anyway. Thanks to David Walker for showing me how this would work. <TMPL_IF BANNER_TYPE_1> <TMPL_IF ATITLE> <TR valign=”top”> <TD class=”LabelBold”>Title:</TD> <TD class=”Label”><TMPL_VAR NAME=”ATITLE” ESCAPE=’HTML’>…
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All the cool kids are implementing COinS
A little while ago, I added COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) to our SFX menu pages. I have been asked by several people about the motivation of this, since it would seem that the user would know if fulltext was available to them at this stage. Dan Chudnov posted to his worklog one of the advantages…
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Geek Chic
I just caught the end of Dark City. I love this movie, despite its cheesiness, and I think it speak volumes of you, as a nerd, as to where you stand on this flick. In general, I see the computer geek community as comprised of two camps: the slashdot community, made up of the engineering…
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Abstract Artunit
I’ve mentioned several times in this space the OPAC redesign project that Art and I are working on. There hasn’t really been anything to show, to date, because it’s taken a very long time to get actually get the data out of Voyager. There are easier and faster ways we could have done this, probably,…
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Civics lesson
Representative “Democracy” at work. Read it and weep. Via Metafilter.
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Librarians are arrogant asses
Despite our waning patronage (both physically and virtually), librarians never cease their criticism of the barbarism of the unwashed masses for not adopting their love of rich metadata. “Dumbing down the catalog” “I don’t think it’s too much to ask a student to learn what the library catalog is” “Thousands of hits” “Did A9 even…
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Understanding the problem
Fairly recently on the Web4Lib mailing list, a thread started by Jim Campbell (of UVA) and David Walker (of Cal State San Marcos) (and others) prompted me to ask what the role of OPAC is in the modern library. Outside of “Inventory Control System”, I don’t feel like I got a very good or meaningful…
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Dead air
I notice a lot of the ‘blogs I read regularly have recently had a similar posting to this one: Wow, it’s been so long since I last posted. Well, it’s time to catch up. I suspect for many, summer is the busy time of year. This is when you have to pack in all of…
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Behold the awesome power of craigslist
Yesterday I posted my truck, and it sold in 20 minutes. 20 minutes. No wonder the print media is losing classified ad revenue left and right to craigslist. ed. Never mind about clicking the link… I just had to remove the posting, because despite the fact that the ad said “SOLD” all over it, people…
Got any book recommendations?