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AADL Library Camp 2008

Just a reminder that the library camp is tomorrow, Thursday March 20th. More information is on libsuccess.org:

The next Library Camp will be held Thursday, March 20th, 2008, at the Downtown Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library, from 9:30 AM - 4:00 PM.

The goal is to get a bunch of people together, and let them talk about whatever they’d like to talk about, within the rough purview of libraries and library technology. We’ll start with all getting together with a blank schedule to talk about what we’d like to talk about and fill in a few slots on the agenda. We’ve got time for four sessions and room for at least 3 concurrent sessions, so there could easily be 10-12 different things to talk about during the day.

We’re working on providing breakfast; lunch is on your own, but there will surely be groups heading out to nearby places in downtown Ann Arbor. There is also a mid-range hotel near by (The Campus Inn, $200/night, orbitz has for $99/night), and a very cheap place a little further out that’s not half bad (Lamp Post Inn, $45/night).

Txt Book Info

I’m still digesting all the discussions and information from code4lib but I remembered a conversation I eavesdropped on. Casey reminded me it was between him and Adam Brin of Tri-College. The gist was that they had put a “txt this record to me” feature onto the catalog, without any real demand, which then took off to everyone’s surprise. It was one of those “that would be cool” that then turned into a “how did we do without it” for some students. I believe they rapidly went up to 60 messages a day. You can see an example on The Selfish Gene. The feature itself sends the title and location info to your cellphone via SMS. They are using the free SMS email gateways I believe while Casey went with a pay service.

Most of my SMS plans allowed free incoming so I would have probably used this during my long college years. With the potential younger audience at public libraries I’ve heard discussion on whether kids racking up SMS charges using the catalog would be a good thing. Ed would also like free alternatives which probably wouldn’t be hard for email if your already using the email gateways. I’ve already thought about all his options including adding it to our twitter script. When I revisit catwrap I’m going to look more into custom catalog experiences based on profile information such as twitter, email, phone, etc. With a little information in the profile it would be possible to slim down the display with just the applicable features (send to twitter, send to del.icio.us, etc).

Google Books Availability

As you’ve probably read elsewhere Google finally released a way to get book availability on Google Books. It’s a fairly simple web service where you hand it an identifier and it gives back whether the book is on Google Books and how much so (no view, partial view, full view) along with cover images. AADL previously scraped for the information which I’ve now disabled and used the new API instead. It was fairly easy with a little jquery and small changes to catwrap. I’m not yet using ThingISBN/xISBN so the results aren’t that great. LCCN/OCLC identifiers would probably also help.

And as Tim at LibraryThing and jrochkind found they seem to be going for basic and client side which limits what you can do with it. I haven’t had time to look into what’s allowed in terms of caching or how many requests per client before being shut down. It would probably help to do the calls server side and cache for all the lccn/oclc/isbn possibilities in the long run.

Vanishing Librarians

From Library Journal: Blatant Berry: The Vanishing Librarians

Our catalogers began to disappear with the takeover of that function by OCLC, the nonprofit that aspires to be a corporation in this brave new retail library world. The standardized result of the effort is bypassed by patron and librarian alike, as they turn to the more friendly Amazons, Googles, et al., for the less precise, more watered-down “metadata” that has replaced what used to be cataloging. Apparently, users don’t miss the old catalog, except as a familiar artifact, which is testimony to how low this dumbing down has taken us.

…

The resulting “destination” libraries resemble the cookie-cutter design of the grocery store, aimed at making sure everyone who comes in goes out with “product” (books, CDs, DVDs, or downloads). What the patron takes is of as little concern to the storekeeper librarian as it is to the supermarket manager. The success of the enterprise is measured in the number of products collected by patrons, now called “customers.” It is no longer measured in the usefulness or impact of the service on the quality of life in the community served.

Twitter at AADL

I’ve been on and off twitter quite a few times. It never really caught on with me. I commute between two different cities and most of my contacts are elsewhere in the world. The majority of the ones I meet up with aren’t on the site nor are technology inclined. I do see the usefulness of the service for time and location aware information, though. A few things I wish for:

• MDOT feed of lane/road closures on my commute route
• Alerts from my favorite bars when happy hour, new tap, etc happens

There’s actually already a commuter aggregator called CommuterFeed which looks interesting and I remember reading at least one story about a DOT using twitter. Flying Dog is on twitter but i see quite a few business possibilities. Slow hour at the pub? Twitter a special on beers for the next 20 minutes (presuming you have foot traffic).

Quite a few libraries also got on twitter. David Lee King has at least a partial list. Most have gone the route of using rss2twitter or similar to send out additions to their sites, etc. I didn’t really see the major benefit of that so I’ve stayed away from it. I do see the benefit of doing some announcements on it, especially since the audience may be the kind that want’s to try out beta quality apps or are technology friendly.

The big use I see are for events. Since we’ve recently rehauled our event backend I thought I’d try hooking it into Twitter. Since there is a PHP class available for the api, it became really quick and easy to try things out. Now 30 minutes before each event a tweet is sent out as a reminder. I’ve also sent out a few manual tweets asking for feedback on some quick iCal feeds and alerts of some videos added to the site (also built on the new events system). You can follow at twitter.com/aadl if you think you would get benefit from it. The route will likely be towards a SMS/IM bot type of application.

Here are some of the other ideas I’ve had, some more feasible than others. Ed has also been helpful with trying things out and giving some feedback.

• Notices of event cancellations / library closures
• Direct Messages of when holds are ready for pickup
• Direct message to put a hold such as “d aadl hold 1580538908″
• Message for hours, etc

There’s quite a few possibilities for mobile/time/location dependent services a library provides that show potential. You’ll probably see quite a few posts about the event system in the future. It has become the backbone of quite a few services including our recently launched streaming video. Once iCal is done I’ll probably move on to hcal Atom service or similar for building external apps on.

Library Camps 2008

As previously posted there will be a Library Camp here at AADL on March 20, 2008. More information has been posted to libsuccess.org.

Library Camp doesn’t mean burned marshmallows, mosquito bites, or popsicle stick-based art projects. Library Camp is a series of informal Unconference gatherings to share ideas, technologies, and discussions.

The next Library Camp will be held Thursday, March 20th, 2008, at the Downtown Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library, from 9:30 AM - 4:00 PM.

The goal is to get a bunch of people together, and let them talk about whatever they’d like to talk about, within the rough purview of libraries and library technology. We’ll start with all getting together with a blank schedule to talk about what we’d like to talk about and fill in a few slots on the agenda. We’ve got time for four sessions and room for at least 3 concurrent sessions, so there could easily be 10-12 different things to talk about during the day.

For those that can’t get to Ann Arbor there also appears to be a Library Camp Kansas on March 19.

Library Camp Kansas is a library unconference that will be held March 19, 2008 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Hale Library on Kansas State University’s Manhattan campus. Participation is open to anyone who is interested in dialogue and conversation about customer-friendly libraries, library 2.0 and how we can all improve our services and organizations to meet the needs of our communities.

Victory Garden Drive

Photo by cwage

It’s probably a little too early here to even start some of the transplants but for those who like to garden, you might be interested in the Victory Garden Drive.

Pattie Baker, publisher of FoodShed Planet (www.foodshedplanet.com) announces the FoodShed Planet Victory Garden Drive, with a goal of inspiring the creation of two million new organic gardens worldwide in 2008. Backyard gardens, windowsill gardens, community gardens, school gardens. They all count.

The gist is to get some friends and/or neighbors that haven’t to start at least a small garden this year. As for the term victory garden, from wikipedia:

Amid regular rationing of canned food in the United States, a poster campaign (”Plant more in ‘44!”) encouraged the planting of Victory Gardens by nearly 20 million Americans. These gardens produced up to 40 percent of all the vegetable produce consumed nationally. It was emphasised to home front urbanites and suburbanites that the produce from their gardens would help to lower the price of vegetables needed by the War Department to feed the troops, thus saving money that could be spent elsewhere on the military: “Our food is fighting”, one poster read.

Since we’re in a war, I guess now is as good as any time.

Open Source with Commercial Parts

Almost everyone has probably read about Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo. I stopped using Yahoo products long ago, but started up again once they bought ones I used like Upcoming and Flickr.

Another Yahoo product I’ve looked into is Zimbra, a partially open-source collaboration suite which has taken off in recent years. It offers a replacement to Microsoft Exchange with the ability of Outlook and iSync to seamlessly use the calendaring, etc (with installed commercial addon). With quite a few businesses and universities using Zimbra, it looked like a promising product.

Obviously the buyout by Microsoft could mean the death of the commercial version. The interesting discussion was regarding whether the open source part of the product could be forked under the licenses the part is under. The debate regarding GPL versus everything else turned into almost mouth foaming. Still, it was interesting to see the concerns various people had when it seems like many fear open source projects that don’t have a commercial version/option. Many are calling for the commercial code to be put into a escrow that will be released under GPL if the commercial support for the product is pulled or the company bought out. Others hope yahoo spins it off or sells it prior to a takeover. Most didn’t seem to like the alternative of Scalix. You can see some of the debates here:

• Zimbra Forums: MS offering to buy yahoo?
• Groklaw: What will happen to Zimbra

Most of the library open-source ILS projects don’t seem to be in this area. They tend to sell support or custom implementations. The problem seems to occur when the companies start selling the more important features or features that set them apart as commercial. Email? Sure. Exchange replacement? Extra. I don’t see LibLime or Equinox going the route of building pieces that libraries request as only commercial. From what I’ve heard LibLime requires all custom work for libraries to be GPL’d. I could potentially see other vendors like Innovative, SirsiDynix or OCLC releasing part of a product under GPL while keeping the parts libraries actually want closed source. Whether that’s a model you want probably depends on what your looking for, but the yahoo debate should show that you may need to look closely on what they really mean by “open”.

Kindle and Libraries

A nice discussion about the Kindle and loaning in libraries over at Tinfoil+Raccoon. There’s some debate and confusion on what the TOC means:

When I asked for a definite answer, he verified that libraries who loaned the Kindle were violating the ToS.

and

We have reviewed through our Terms and Conditions regarding this matter and the Amazon Kindle. You will be able to purchase Kindles for your library to use for checking out to patrons, as long as you are not reselling the digital content.

One of the other problems that came up is the Amazon 1-click buying on the kindle (without password verification). Some decided to unregister the device from the account preventing purchases from being made though it was unclear if you can reregister later on. Another solution was just to have a policy for patrons:

If I understand correctly, the Sparta Library (the one mentioned in LJ) allows patrons to add 1 new title to the Kindle during the circ period at the library’s expense. Beyond that, they charge the patrons the reimbursement cost of the additional materials.

Sounds like a solution. I’m wondering how the libraries advertise what content is currently available on it.

goliath is missing

SimpleDB

While I still haven’t had time to play around with Amazon’s S3 and EC2, they’ve added yet another offering with SimpleDB.

Amazon SimpleDB makes it really easy and straightforward to store and to retrieve structured data. You no longer need to worry about creating, maintaining, or migrating database schemas, monitoring and tuning the performance of your queries, outgrowing the storage or processing capacity of your database server, making backups, or replicating data.

This offering removes one more barrier to scaling software. Dave Winer comments that Amazon is becoming the place for developers to work with in order to scale their products.

Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It’s amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let’s hope there’s some compatibility.

I’ve thought about using the systems for record indexing and some of the more intensive processes that libraries wouldn’t necessarily have the hardware investment for.

Inside looking out has a nice short breakdown including that it may be written in erlang. Marcelo looked at the API and thinks it’s really a directory service and that search might be the killer use:

Imagine that Redfin is not a gazillion-dollar VC-backed startup. They are just getting started and want to index all listings from MLS to do a kind of search that you cannot do directly to the MLS database. They can put all that data into SimpleDB (the flexible schema is a huge plus) and not have to worry about having Terabytes of data on their own database. Do you know how much it costs in time and money to maintain a Terabyte database? A lot. There is backup, there is perf issues, there is hardware redundancy, etc.

There’s also a breakdown on prices and comparison with the other services on O’reilly radar.

I’ve seen various projects for using S3 as the storage backend for databases like mysql. It will be interesting to see what projects come out for SimpleDB.

Library Camp 2008 at AADL

Save the date: March 20, 2008

From Ed:

We have space for about 100 people, up from the 40 or so that squeezed into the first Library Camp.

More info and sign ups in the near future.

SAFE Act

via jblyberg:

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines of up to $300,000. That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user’s account be retained for subsequent police inspection.

The full article is available on news.com

Pork

We eat quite a bit of pork and since we’re both from farming backgrounds, figured we’d take a stab at growing some. Living in the city doesn’t really allow it (we’re trying to move where we could), but luckily some farmer friends grew some for us. They tend to grow rather quickly over the year, starting off rather small in the spring.

And they end up pretty damn big at the end:

Skinning is probably the most involved of the process, with lots of slicing. It took about an hour with three people.

The cutting goes rather quickly and was almost a social event.

We ended up taking half a pig home, giving the other half to the girlfriend’s brother and sister in law. Overall a good yield, with plenty of bacon, loin and roasting meat. We’re not fans of ham.

check outs

mine arrived the other day

Apache External Filters and PHP Sessions or Cookies

Not needed in most cases but an interesting tool for some special ones. You can take advantage of browsers sending cookies with HTTP requests under a domain by using External Filters in Apache to modify the content based on those cookies. For example below we filter the requests for a specific location through a PHP script that can read the $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE'], get the PHPSESSID, read the Drupal database or similar and modify the content depending on whether someone is logged in, anonymous, etc.

ExtFilterDefine myfilter mode=output cmd=/path/to/your/script.php
<Location /locationfoo>
    SetOutputFilter myfilter
</Location>

The php script would contain the logic of pulling the data out of the cookie, connecting to the DB, modifying content, etc. There’s better ways to do this most of the time but in certain circumstances it could be used for content filtering or faked single sign-on with proxying. Apache will pass the proxied page to the script in that case.

Drupal at AADL Talk

A little late to be posting, but today (Sept 24) at 7pm, Eli from AADL will be talking to the Ann Arbor Drupal Users Group. The title is “Implementing Drupal in the case of aadl.org”.

Anonymous

I’ve seen various discussions that have confused or equated privacy (or freedom) with anonymity. Things such as social DRM which marks items with some unique information. There a nice article by Schneier on the differences and relation to security that is worth reading.

As the name implies, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are anonymous. You don’t have to sign anything, show ID or even reveal your real name. But the meetings are not private. Anyone is free to attend. And anyone is free to recognize you: by your face, by your voice, by the stories you tell. Anonymity is not the same as privacy. That’s obvious and uninteresting, but many of us seem to forget it when we’re on a computer. We think “it’s secure,” and forget that secure can mean many different things.

The article goes on to discuss the Tor software.

Arr

As most who probably read this blog know, it was recently talk like a pirate day. Like the pirate bay usually does, Flickr changed their logo a bit. Via Waxy I found that there were at least a few that were not amused, from those who thought the interestingness was lacking to those who thought their accounts compromised or piracy officially supported.

The pirate bay usually includes an explanation, alt text or links to a search that gives a clue. I missed the Flickr change so can’t say if it was done similarly.