Science Library Pad

RedLightGreen Firefox search plugin

redlightgreen.com/firefox.html

via ResourceShelf

Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch

The Cyberinfrastructure Partnership (CIP), a joint, NSF-funded effort of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), this week launched Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch, http://www.ctwatch.org/).

Right now it's some sort of quarterly thing, no RSS, but the site promises "CTWatch Blog coming soon".

from CANARIE CAnet News

UPDATE 2005-03-25: The blog is now active.
 

Google Scholar prefs

scholar.google.com/scholar_preferences

This is very cool.
Google Scholar will link up with your resolver, if you are on the select list.
Presumably the select list may eventually become "every library with a resolver".

from scitech library question

UPDATE:

U of Virginia’s Jim Campbell backed this up with a link to a blurb on the CrossRef site saying CrossRef and Google are working together on this:

Google would like to use the DOI as the primary means to link to an article so CrossRef and Google will be working on this as well as a template for common terms and conditions for use of publishers full text content.

via Bibliotheke

the schedule is for results from CrossRef Search to be delivered from Google Scholar starting in April

via Open Access News

 

UofAlberta library RSS feeds

The University of Alberta is doing RSS feeds of new content with what I expect will become a very popular approach: bypass the OPAC.  More specifically, get/use the OPAC data via a standard interface (Oracle in this case), suck it into a system of your own design and then have at it.

Library Stuff reported this.

scitech library question links to a posting by Kenton Good explaining how it was done.

U Southampton launches mSpace Semantic Web tool

There is lots of news in the library tech world today, I have to apologise on attributions, I have seen the stories reported in many places.

Slashdot reports University Launches Semantic Web Interface, which is rather grand, more accurately the University of Southampton has launched a tool called mSpace.  They currently have a demo for searching classical music info.

seeing all your journals and where they are

MakingLinks reports

  We have been working on an A-Z list for E-Journals that attempts to unite both the SFX Knowledge Base and the entries in our catalogue.

I think that is super cool.

CERN 2004 workshop on OAI

Handouts, videos and PowerPoint slides from the CERN Workshop Series on Innovations in Scholarly Communication: Implementing the benefits of OAI (OAI3) are available.

It took place February 12-14, 2004.

from Catalogablog

OpenURL 2003 seminar

I found an interesting seminar with presentations: OpenURL Day 2003 from the Center for Scholarly Communication at Long Island University.

For example

14:45	Marianne Parkhill, vice-president marketing, Endeavor Information Systems
	OpenURL and what it means for the digital library [PowerPoint]

software development - having a RAD time with GRAPPLE

Or is that GRAPPLEing with RAD?

Amongst my tasks are such diverse elements as: business analysis, enterprise architecture, IT security, project management, and software design.

To support those activities I generally use a combination of Internet searches, books I have. and "just in time" books using Safari.

This week it is software design.  I found a methodology called GRAPPLE that is part of a good UML Tutorial in 7 Days.  It is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach that has some standard phases:

1. Requirements gathering
2. Analysis
3. Design
4. Development
5. Deployment

What I liked about this particular tutorial is at the end it develops an example based on a digital library.

The tutorial appears to be based on the book Teach Yourself UML in 24 Hours which I am using through Safari.

What I like about the GRAPPLE methodology in general is that it gives a specific set of tasks and UML outputs for each phase of the process.  I have for the most part ignored the OO parts, I don't think there's value in my particular case in developing the class diagrams before we do the activity diagrams.

I have also found UML Distilled (I have the Second Edition) to be useful.

The Agile Modelling site also has loads of useful info.
I have used their Activity Diagram and Component Diagram guidelines.

UPDATE: It's important to note that for this type of approach to be successful, there must be a very strong pre-existing requirements and architecture process, and both the requirements and architecture for the area being designed/developed must be substantially complete before you start.

more on conference blogging

Some good ideas from Library Stuff Blogging Conferences - Just the Beginning.
Steve Cohen is a leader in this area.

I have added my opinions in a comment to that posting.

In general, I think discover-using-tag is more in keeping with the decentralized nature of the Internet.
It then becomes a matter of whether you accept all the tagged blogs/postings, or have a filter so that you can weed out tagspam, as well as whether you have additional mechanisms (broader searches, a blog/posting submission mechanism) to add additional untagged/undiscovered blogs/postings to the unified conference blogging stream.

Auditor General 2005 - IT Security

1.1 Despite encouraging signs of improvement, the government has made unsatisfactory progress in strengthening information technology (IT) security since our audit in 2002. It has laid a foundation by developing IT security policies and standards, and lead agencies and departments are more involved and committed to IT security. However, two and a half years after revising its Government Security Policy, the government has much work to do to translate its policies and standards into consistent, cost-effective practices that will result in a more secure IT environment in departments and agencies.

2005 Report of the Auditor General of Canada - Status Report - Chapter 1 - Information Technology Security (also available in PDF version)

quaint Canadian copyright law

I just wrote a long, long posting about Canadian copyright law that was almost finished when Firefox crashed.  It truly is wonderful in our modern age that big chunks of work can just vanish in an instant.
I should just write everything in BBEdit and then paste it in.

Anyway, I will go in reverse of what I posted in the vanished entry.

Copyright and Canadian Libraries from 2002

TPM = Technical Protection Measure

'TPMs': A Perfect Storm for Consumers by Michael Geist in the Toronto Star, protected behind a registration wall because they are wankers.

6th Annual TIP Conference - Sound Bytes, Sound Rights: Canada at the Crossroads of Copyright Law, which took place this past Friday, February 11, 2005.

A blogger has already posted a report on the conference.
I found the report via the Digital Copyright Canada mailing list.

There is a summary of recent Canadian copyright goings-on Copyright Law Poised to Get Much, Much Worse Part II which I found via Loomware.

The Canadian govenment has been pondering these changes for quite a few years now.
With an emphasis on the "ponderous".
Which is fine by me.  I'd be quite happy if they spent the next 50 years thinking about it.

The key is appropriate law, well applied and enforced.
This does not necessarily require new, "modern" laws.
In fact I am very suspicious of those who either believe that everything modern must be better, or who say they do because it supports their agenda.

Whenever you see "antiquated" I suggest you read "inconvenient", or "provides too much protection for the weak from the powerful", or "does not align with my ambitions".

Let's try it, shall we.

The copyright law is antiquated.

The voting law is antiquated.
(The exact quote from the report Access, Integrity and Participation: Towards Responsive Electoral Processes for Ontario is Ontario’s electoral process must respond to such changes in the dynamics of the daily lives of its citizens, to preclude antiquated or otherwise process-oriented roadblocks to voting.  For more information on this topic, visit the Wikipedia entry Electronic voting in Canada.)

The Geneva Convention is antiquated.
(Ok, the exact quote from Mr. Gonzales, who is now the US Attorney-General, is In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions. MSNBC)

more on Firefox sidebars

Incidentally, aside from the fancy extension installer method, there are two other bookmark methods to make pages load in the sidebar.

You can go into Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks... (or just pull down the bookmark menu) then pick the one you want and right-click, select Properties, then check the box that says Load this bookmark in the sidebar, click OK.

If you want to programmatically add a bookmark from a page that will open in the sidebar, use e.g.

<a href="javascript:window.sidebar.addPanel('Sidebar Name','URL','');">install sidebar</a>

The user will get an "Add Bookmark" popup window, and whenever they click on that bookmark, it will open in the sidebar.

Info based on Mozilla Sidebar.

experimental CISTI sidebar for Firefox

A sidebar is basically just a regular web page that Firefox will load in a strip along the left-hand side of the main page.  CISTI provides a lot of services, but they are scattered in various different places.  This sidebar provides some quick access to various searches and links in one place.  Once I put together the sidebar page, Steve Anthony packaged it up properly for Firefox.  When you have it installed, you can open it from menu View->Sidebar->CISTI Search, or by hitting ALT-c (on both Windows and Mac).  There are some known bugs - in particular the links in the sidebar don't show up as highlighted. 

Get the sidebar ("Experimental CISTI Research Sidebar") from Steve's Firefox tech page.

As I mentioned, the content is just a regular web page, so you will see an updated version whenever changes are made.

Feel free to provide any feedback or suggestions.

UPDATE 2005-Dec-22: Get the latest sidebar from CISTI Lab.

ParaCite and the location problem

You've got stuff.  We've got stuff.  Everyone's got stuff and no one can find it.
We need, as many people have already figured out, a unified metadata searching environment so I find some interesting looking citation, I click, and it points me at a bunch of sources, starting with my own internal holdings.

We're not there, but in the meantime, you can hack it various ways.

ParaCite is one approach.
Give it some citation metadata, and it will search around for matches.
Very cool.

If you look at the coverage it provides, you can see it tries everything from DOI, through OAIster, and on to Google Scholar.

banned books exhibit

It is all on display right now in "Nihil Obstat: An exhibition of banned, censored & challenged books in the West, 1491-2000," which opened recently at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.

...

In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition (which continues until April 29 [2005]), Pearce Carefoote has arranged the collection in four principal clusters -- books of religion and science; books of politics and philosophy; books as threats to the social order; and challenged books, including an alarming number in our own country in our own time.

Mr. Carefoote, a young researcher on tenure track at the University of Toronto, has pulled off a considerable feat. Such adventurous academic exhibitions extend our understanding in unexpected ways.

from the Globe and Mail Through the centuries, the books never stay banned

Unfortunately the exhibit link is going to break when it is no longer the "current" exhibit.
Here are some of the books they have on display:

Dante’s Commedia (1491), Tyndale’s Newe Testament (1534), Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1566), Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo tolemaico e copernicano (1632), Descartes’ Les méditations métaphysiques (1647), Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Rousseau’s Du contrat social (1766) ...

 

OLA! more grumbles about conferences

In my dream vision, you easily are able to get all of the info related to a conference: blogging about it, blogging of particular sessions, presentations from those sessions, photos, etc.

I think agreeing on a standard and unique tag for each conference will get most of the way there.
Of course, there are a lot of conferences, and only so many three-or-four letter combinations.

Ontario Library Association Superconference.  OLA2005?  OLAS2005?

Anyway, this rant because it is human nature not to invest much time in something that's complete,
plus it's human nature not to do things that are complicated.

Conferences build these big static websites ahead of time, which after the event, I can see, who wants to go and update everything after you're already done, the event was a success, it's time to move on.

What they should have instead is dynamic pages or a wiki, editable by the presenters.

Anyway, you can find some of the OLA 2005 presentations by navigating through their various session pages.  There does not seem to be one unified all-sessions page.

(report that presentations have been posted via Inforumed)

So you will find some presentations by wandering around the site, but you will also for example find no presentation attached to e.g.

Session: 115
9:00 am - 10:15 am
Technology
HOW TO USE RSS TO KNOW MORE AND DO LESS
Jenny Levine, Internet Development Specialist; The Shifted Librarian.

despite the fact that she has already posted the presentations in her blog.

role for academic libraries: provide OA

Helene Bosc and Stevan Harnad, In a paperless world a new role for academic libraries: Providing Open Access. A written version of their presentation at the symposium, Spreading the word: who profits from scientific publications (Stockholm, August 26, 2004).

from Open Access News

Le protocole OAI et ses usages en bibliothèque

L’OAI-PMH a été élaboré par l’Open Archive Initiative (à l’issue de la Convention de Santa Fe, 1999) pour faciliter la description et la diffusion des métadonnées d’articles scientifiques disponibles en accès ouvert sur Internet, notamment dans des répertoires de pré-publications. Il s’est vite révélé très adapté au partage de métadonnées de documents scientifiques ou culturels, présentes dans des ensembles de ressources homogènes ou hétérogènes, plus ou moins réparties. Après une phase d’expérimentation, le protocole a atteint une certaine stabilité   depuis juin 2002, avec sa version 2, considérée comme la spécification définitive.

Ce protocole permet :

• d’abattre des barrières du " web invisible "     en rendant possible le signalement de ressources non accessibles aux moteurs     de recherche ;
• de faciliter l’interopérabilité des ressources documentaires     culturelles, sans duplication ni déchargement des documents numériques     primaires ;
• de mettre à jour simplement et automatiquement des métadonnées     collectées et des liens, en répercutant les dernières     modifications des réservoirs sources, sans copier à nouveau     l’intégralité des données (la charge n’en étant     que plus légère pour les serveurs) ;
• d’encourager l’utilisation d’un format de description assez générique     pour les besoins transdisciplinaires, même les plus simples, sans interdire     des spécifications adaptées à des besoins plus spécialisés ;
• d'intégrer, de ce fait, des ressources d’origine diverses,     dans des traditions descriptives propres, sans empêcher le maintien     parallèle de ces traditions pour d’autres usages.

from www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/dll/OAI-PMH.htm
part of Direction du livre et de la lecture

link from BiblioAcid

get gridden - Grid computing and Web Services

Leading the way on the open source front is the Globus Alliance - an organization whose most notable contribution to the cause has been a grid toolkit (GT4) that tightly weaves as many enabling standards as it possibly can -- many of which come from the Web services ecosystem -- into an open-source based solution for building grids. GT4 is to grids what an open source solution like Apache is to Web servers or what GNU Linux is to operating systems (even to the extent that both include implementations of well known standards).

...

On the interoperable standards front, GT4 already has many standards baked into it. As more standards come to bear, particularly in the area of Web services, it's likely they'll be absorbed into the standard grid playbook. As it turns out, Web services and grid computing are virtually synonymous. Both compute paradigms subscribe to the idea that computing tasks can be serviced in utility-like fashion by distributed compute nodes that are discoverable and accessible through standard APIs -- the benefits of which are dynamically scalable and resilient systems that do away with over-provisioning as a method of dealing with peak loads.

from Gridless enterprises should be talking to the EGA

ebooks and your library

I get tons of hits on "book/ebook/audiobook torrents/download".

You might consider seeing if there's value in either hosting free electronic book content, or organizing/supporting such hosting, or providing links.

There are big, chunky, recent sources of free content.

Bruce Perens' Open Source Series

Prentice Hall PTR is proud to publish the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series with Bruce Perens, Series Editor. This Series focuses on Linux and Open Source technologies, including new and emerging technologies. It targets professional software developers, system and network administrators, and power users.

The Bruce Perens' Open Source Series is designed to give a voice to up-and-coming Open Source authors. Each book in the Series is published under the Open Publication License, an Open Source compatible book license. Electronic versions will be made available at no cost several months after each book's publication.

I also found the same content at http://www.informit.com/promotion/1041

extending Firefox

I have to type this again, because TypePad lets me wipe out my text by accidentally navigating to another page.  Anyway...

Firefox can be extended in multiple ways.
One of the easiest is the search box in the upper right-hand corner.
You can just click on the default Google G and it will pull down a list of the other installed plugins, as well as a link to add more.  I added Webster for dictionary searching (they already have Dictionary.com but I don't like it as much).

You can also of course write bookmarklets in JavaScript (which really in my head I still think of as LiveScript instead of this meaningless marketing name that has nothing to do with Java programming).

As well, you can add extensions, and create toolbars and sidebars.

And last but not least, you can make quick searches.

Everyone seems to be hot for toolbars, I'm not particularly clear why.
If it's just basic search you want, a search plugin or a quick search makes more sense.

The latest is a Yahoo toolbar.  There is also one for A9.

For some reason, this info doesn't seem to be presented all in one place.

Add search plugins:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/central.html#central-engines
Make search plugins:
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

Quick Searches
The link I have is http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/bookmarks/
unfortunately this is currently down for me
You can get it from the Internet Archive.

You could use this to e.g. set up an ISBN search so that you would just type

isbn 1231231231

into the Firefox address bar.

bookmarklets
http://www.webreference.com/js/column35/

extensions
This tutorial may give you some insight on making Firefox extensions
http://roachfiend.com/archives/2004/12/08/how-to-create-firefox-extensions

HCI seminar at the NRC

Human-Computer Interaction Research at the NRC Institute for Information Technology
Tuesday February 15, 2005
10:00 to 12:00 (EST)

there will be various speakers including
Andrew Patrick: Human Factors of Security Systems
Alain Desilets: Collaborative Story Telling using Wiki (presumably same as previous presentation)

NCBI Web Services

Web Services for PubMed and other NIH databases.

Entrez Utilities Web Service

The NCBI Web service is a web program that enables developers to access Entrez Utilities via the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Programmers may write software applications that access the E-Utilities using any SOAP development tool.

why the webopac should be nopac

Here's the thing.  The OPAC, or the ILS, these are internal inventory management systems.
No one in their right mind tries to use their internal inventory system, designed for experts, as their public interface.

You might say, "but Amazon does this".  So I will tell you a story about Amazon.  It is a fib, but it's short.  I have no idea what Amazon's internal inventory system looks like.  But it certainly COULD look like a green-on-black text terminal where the inventory people enter stuff like

LOC 1231231231 PULL
and it says stuff like

Q30 A10S3L4 R4

that's it.  No fancy graphics, no reviews, no this-is-related.  It's a system to let people find books in a warehouse.  It doesn't need to be any more than that.

Their client-facing system has a completely different set of requirements.

This is how it is put in Panlibus, a blog by some Talis staff

As a community we have to recognise that OPACs are not user-centric. Visitors to the library rarely use them for anything other than specific location information, and the idea that web-enabling OPACs in the current form will extend their reach to a wider audience is flawed.