Dilettante's Ball

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • And, as always, Florida ends the season early

    One freaking point. One… freaking… point…

  • Mission Haiku

    Our Talis Mashup Competition entry did not win. Sorry Art. Always a bridesmaid Never a bride. Second place is first place loser. To: OCLC From: rsinger@gatech The check’s in the mail.

  • The Librarian and the Travel Agent

    I have been thinking a lot this week about how libraries are skirting ever closer to a precipice they generally refuse to acknowledge. While certainly a cynic, I’m not generally a Cassandra, so before proclaiming last rites on the library, I wanted to make sure I had thought about this some. This was probably spurred…

  • Phase I

    Of the ‘experiment’ is complete. Phase II will determine how many more phases there are.

  • Experiment

    I am embarking on an experiment to learn the value of an ALA-accredited MLS. I’ll give details in a couple months when it’s over.

  • Another Chudnov-et-al joint

    Ariadne #48 includes “Introducing unAPI“, written by Dan, Jeremy, Peter, Michael, Mike, Ed and me. It explains the potential of unAPI and shows some examples on implementations. Like the last article I “wrote” with this group, I didn’t have to do much. On the flipside, publishing has such a minute effect (if any) on my…

  • Post-mortem

    The Umlaut “launched” last Monday. I wouldn’t call it the most graceful of take-offs, but I think it’s pretty much working now. We immediately ran into a problem with ProQuest as a source. ProQuest sends a query string that starts with an ampersand (“&ctx_ver=foo…”) which Rails strongly disliked. Thankfully, it was still part of the…

  • Pödcäst

    Dan Chudnov “interviewed” me about the Ãœmlaut for the first “Library Geeks”. It’s crude and show obvious signs of “learning as we’re going”, but if you want to hear more about the Ãœmlaut from my voice and hear my favorite curse word (and boy is it a doozy), take a listen. Note the “3-2-1″ at…

  • One stop shopping

    So, Amazon seems to have thrown their hat in the ring to compete head to head with both Yankee Book Press and OCLC.  Except you’ll only need one purchase order.  Nice. I noticed the presence of LCSH in the Amazon Web Services requests a couple of weeks ago (which I happily consume in the ümlaut),…

  • The Genius of Simplicity

    I’ve been dealing with a lot of dumb technology problems, lately. The Ümlaut has uncovered stupid issues with both Voyager and SFX in the last week (Voyager’s Z39.50 server returns every record in the database if you do an ‘or’ search on the 001 and SFX’s handling of title changes is too complicated to even…

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