Dilettante's Ball

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Supercharged Ruby MARC

    One of the byproducts of the “Communicat” work I had done at Georgia Tech was a variant of Ed Summers‘ ruby-marc that went into more explicit detail regarding the contents inside the MARC record (as opposed to ruby-marc which focuses on its structure).  It had been living for the last couple of years as a…

  • Where is the outrage?

    For a couple of months this year, the library world was aflame with rage at the proposed OCLC licensing policy regarding bibliographic records.  It was a justifiable complaint, although I basically stayed out of it:  it just didn’t affect me very much.  After much gnashing of teeth, petitions, open letters from consortia, etc. OCLC eventually…

  • I Went As Far As Losing Sleep.

  • Going Solr without Solr

    For a long time, I was massively confused about what the Platform was or did.  Months after I started at Talis I was still fairly unclear of what the Platform actually did.  I’ve now got my head around it, use it, and have a pretty good understanding of why and how it’s useful, but I…

  • The Concept of Where

    There were three main reasons that I took the old lcsh.info data that I had lying around and made http://lcsubjects.org: There were projects (including internal Talis ones) that really wanted to use that data and impatience was growing as to when the Library of Congress would launch id.loc.gov. Leigh Dodds had just released Pho and…

  • Linked Open LibraryThing

    For Ian Davis‘ birthday, Danny Ayers sent out an email asking people to make some previously unavailable datasets accessible as linked data as Ian’s present.  It was a pretty neat idea.  One that I wish I had thought of. Given that Ian is my boss (prior to about a month ago, Ian was just nebulously…

  • Better Paging Through Better Searching

    For the last couple of weeks I’ve returned to working on Alto Jangle connector, at least part-time.  I had shelved development on it for a while; I had a hard time finding anybody interested in using it and had reached a point where the development database I was working against was making it difficult to…

  • Comment from an Alternate Universe

    In a world where library management systems are sophisticated and modern… I was doing some Google searches about SKOS, trying to figure out the exact distinction between skos:ConceptScheme and skos:Collection (it’s much more clear to me now) and I came across this article in XML.com: Introducing SKOS The article is fine, but it’s not what…

  • Why Jeremy Frumkin is Awesome

    It took over a year to actually fit him, but…

  • Mixed Feelings

    I cannot perceive a day that I might charge for a webinar about Jangle.  I expect that that day will never come. Still, it pains me to see a NISO Webinar on Interoperability: http://www.niso.org/news/events/2009/interop09 It pains me for a couple of reasons — a hundred bucks for a webinar?  Come on, NISO, get over yourself.…

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