Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Well, it’s official. I am a published author. Granted, I didn’t do much; Dan wrote this paper almost singlehandedly, really. I put in a little more work than I did on this paper (this helped), although not much. Any of you who read my rather awkward white paper should immediately recognize that Dan is a…

If the library blogosphere was your only source of current events within libraries, you would think that RSS was new MARC record and that podcasting will alleviate the need for circ rules. This is ridiculous, of course, but that’s not to say that there isn’t merit to RSS (podcasting seems silly to me). RSS (in…

Maybe it’s the bachelor’s degree in a joke major from a football factory school talking here… but why must libraries constantly overthink themselves into obsolescence? Why must the only search that brings back relevant data be an “exact search“? And, even then, why can’t that search include the leading article? I realize metasearch isn’t the…

Art Rhyno, Eric Lease Morgan and Jeremy Frumkin and I. Dan Chudnov, Roy Tennant and I. Todd Holbrook, Calvin Mah, John Durno and Mark Jordan put up with the ‘Murrican Ass that I am. William Wueppelman put up with that, too. Jason White, Aaron Krowne, Will Young and I used to go for “free beer”…

So, we launched the WAGger on Wednesday afternoon… sort of. We created a couple of pages for it, and linked to it from a couple of places. A “soft launch”, as they say. Still, it was a launch, nevertheless, so we needed to tell our public services librarians about it. We held a brownbag on…

–Art Rhyno

Dan says jake could no longer be updated because of the heavy costs of maintenance. Todd (or, rather, Mark) says CUFTS can no longer be free because of the heavy costs of maintenance. They are both (all three of them) right, and it’s incredibly sad. Knowledgebases are expensive to maintain. I use both of these…

The inimitable Art Rhyno and I are working on another project together (W-G?), which consists of several parts: Refine Art’s mind-bending idea of providing a WebDav interface to the OPAC Provide an OAI provider for Voyager ILSes (Hello? Endeavor?!) Try to put a real and legitimate Z39.50 (and SRW/U) server (that supports exact searches, relations,…

The gcs-pcs list (no idea what it stands for) has been buzzing with activity since Eric Hellman released his “Latent OpenURLs in HTML” page to the world. It’s not that Eric’s idea is bad or wrong (the opposite, actually). It’s just different. Dan, Jeremy, Richard, Raymond and I have a paper coming out next month…

We’re planning to (soft) launch WAG the Dog next week on the unsuspecting public. I am a little nervous about this. The WAGger is basically a proof-of-concept and a fun staging ground for developing new ideas. While Tech’s user base may be able to roll with the punches of a less-than-stable system, I also don’t…