Tom Keays

Bruce D'Arcus has been working on a python implementation of the CSL language he designed. Basic idea is sort of like BibTeX for the web. It now uses HTML + RDFa (using BIBO) as the native/internal model. So you feed the processor a CSL style + some JSON data, and it spits out HTML + RDFa (with other output modes possible). - Tom Keays

Serials Solutions is releasing a meta-search killer in the form of its open access tool, SUMMON. University of Liverpool Library is the second public beta of the product. - Tom Keays

If you’re thinking the tip might fall off every time you do one of your stunning stage moves, don’t worry—this isn’t a cheap magnetic toy. The neodymium magnet is so strong that none of the GP editors could break off the tip by tugging it straight on. The only way the connection can be easily broken is to crack the jack at an angle—like breaking a twig—and even that operation requires a tiny bit of effort. When I ran the cable under my guitar strap, a series of aggressive moves—including stepping on the cable and jerking my guitar skyward—couldn’t induce the SnapJack to unsnap. - Tom Keays

The “Getting a Job in a Tough Economy” toolkit is an interactive website with tips, narrative and suggested links and readings, a blog, podcasts, timelines and activities/checklists for new librarians and support staff, those looking to change position, people who have been laid off, and others who are having difficulty finding the right position. The site will be a one-stop resource including and/or linking to information prepared for members from units within ALA, as well as linking to information about best practices in job searching from any field. The toolkit will shine a spotlight on the resources that ALA already offers, highlighting why they are especially valuable in the current economy. - Tom Keays

It's arrived. Members can organize their books into "collections." The Motive. From the beginning, LibraryThing members have used the site for different things. Some used it to list only the books they own, others what they've read and a few even just the books they wanted. Meanwhile, people like me used it for everything—owned, read, lost, destroyed, wanted—using tagging as our sole way of keeping everything straight. But even tag-zealots like me had to admit there were times you wanted sharper distinctions—"buckets" or "sub-libraries"—and ways to tie those to how you connected with other members and with book recommendations. New members, whether familiar with tags or not, were regularly asking for some way to do wishlists and currently-reading lists. - Tom Keays

RDFa is a thin layer of markup you can add to your web pages that makes them understandable for machines as well as people. You could describe it as a CSS for meaning. By adding it, browsers, search engines, and other software can understand more about the pages, and in so doing offer more services or better results for the user. For instance, if a browser knows that a page is about an event such as a conference, it can offer to add it to your calendar, show it on a map, locate hotels or flights, or any number of other things. This document introduces RDFa and gives examples of its use. - Tom Keays

The library described in this document was developed with the goal of facilitating the development of 'smart' web applications that take advantage of the information most user agents provide with each HTTP request to serve the most appropriate resource to the user agent (language, compression, character-set and mime-type). The content_negotiation class contains a set of 8 public functions. Two each for the four header fields it can parse (Accept, Accept-Charset, Accept-Encoding & Accept-Language); One that returns the preferred type for it and another that returns the array with the q_value elements completed. - Tom Keays

This note is a practical guide to publish and consume linked data based on URIs, specified in [RFC3986], and RDFa (see [RDFA-SYNTAX]). It is in a sense an advanced tutorial as it requires some basic understanding regarding URIs, HTML, linked data, and RDFa. Guidelines what to do when are provided with this note. - Tom Keays

As if the textbook industry didn't have an image problem already... Elsevier officials said Monday that it was a mistake for the publishing giant's marketing division to offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. While those popular Web sites' customer reviews have long been known to be something less than scientific, and prone to manipulation if an author has friends write on behalf of a new work, the idea that a major academic publisher would attempt to pay for good reviews angered some professors who received the e-mail pitch. - Tom Keays

The Open Database License (ODbL) is an open license for data and databases which gives users freedom to use, reuse and redistribute subject only to the requirement of attribution and share-alike. This license, the first of its kind, is a major step forward for open data. There are currently very few licenses available suited to data and databases and none which provide for share-alike (existing share-alike licenses such as the GPL, GFDL and CC By-SA are all unsuitable for data). - Tom Keays

The Open Provenance Model is designed to meet the following requirements: (1) To allow provenance information to be exchanged between systems, by means of a compatibility layer based on a shared provenance model. (2) To allow developers to build and share tools that operate on such a provenance - Tom Keays

Has there been work on this model since July 2008, the date of the latest version? - Bill Anderson from twhirl

This paper discusses the analysis of Apache web server logs from a faceted catalog interface (OPAC) at North Carolina State University. By grouping individual HTTP requests into user sessions and analyzing in that context, requests can be understood as particular user actions, with more specificity as to purpose and effect of an action. Client IP address and time are used as a sufficient proxy for determining user sessions from logs. Some initial exploratory findings of user behavior in the NCSU OPAC are provided, including that users make use of facets less than of text searching, and that some facet groups are used significantly more than others. Links are provided to the scripts used to make this session-based analysis, which could be modified for use with other facetted OPACs which use an Apache front-end. - Tom Keays

This article describes the workflow used by the University of Iowa Libraries to populate their institutional repository and their catalog with the data collected by ProQuest UMI Dissertation Publishing during the submission of students’ theses and dissertations. Re-purposing the metadata from ProQuest allowed the University of Iowa Libraries to streamline the process for ingesting theses and dissertations into their institutional repository The article includes a discussion of the benefits and limitations of the workflow described. - Tom Keays

This article presents the application of part-of-speech (POS) based statistical text analysis to the task of bibliographic metadata extraction from electronic dissertations. By using the approach described here it is possible to detect the title of a Ph.D. paper with an accuracy of about 80%. The accuracy measurements are done using a conceptually simple approach and implementation. - Tom Keays

In 2000 a small public library system in New Zealand developed and released Koha, the world’s first open source library management system. This is the story of how that came to pass and why, and of the lessons learnt in their first foray into developing in open source. - Tom Keays

The UW-Madison Libraries Library Course Page system is used to deliver electronic reserves materials and course-focused library instruction webpages to students. As part of a rewrite of our system we broke the application into three component pieces: a file repository, a course timetable data service, and an interface application for building and viewing individual course pages. The new three-piece system was written with an inward facing service-oriented architecture that allowed us to choose the best technologies to solve each of the tasks the entire system needs to accomplish. - Tom Keays

The Code4Lib Journal mirrors the diversity and depth of interests and expertise of its readership. Our successes, indeed, are yours. - Tom Keays

JAbbr is an online tool developed at Cornell University to help users decipher journal title abbreviations. This article discusses why these abbreviations are so problematic, and how traditional tools are often insufficient, and then describes the novel approach used by JAbbr. Given an abbreviation, JAbbr creates a regular expression for fuzzy matching, tests it against a list of serial titles extracted from the library catalog, and returns a list of possible matches to the user. JAbbr is available as a web site and as a web service. - Tom Keays

A coalition of national and regional college student associations today issued a "Student Statement on the Right to Research," calling on universities, research funders, and researchers to take action in support of Open Access to research. The American Medical Student Association, the Student PIRGs, Students for Free Culture, and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, as well as the Trinity University Association of Student Representatives and the California Institute of Technology Graduate Student Council have signed the statement. The "Student Statement on the Right to Research" closes with a call to action -- urging universities, governments and other research funders, researchers, and additional student organizations to support Open Access -- and a commitment to back Open Access in their activities. - Tom Keays

Serials Solutions is releasing a meta-search killer in the form of its open access tool, SUMMON. Dartmouth College Library is the first public beta of the product. It is indexing 170,508,797(!) records at the moment, much of it full-text articles from aggregator databases, online journals and the like. It is pretty awesome! Jane Burke says the release of SUMMON will be at this year's ALA. - Tom Keays

This thread over on NGC4LIB has transmongrified from UoR's eXtensible Catalog (XC) to praise of Serials Solutions SUMMON product. - Tom Keays

This site presents you with the top 10 results for your search from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's new tool, Bing in columns. Only after you identify which you like best does it tell you which tool produced those results. - Tom Keays

Scholars and students who once had to travel to museums or libraries to view collections of historic images can now do so by clicking on their mobile device instead. With the launch of DukeMobile 1.1, the Duke University Libraries now offers the most comprehensive university digital image collection specifically formatted for an iPhone or iTouch device. It includes thousands of photos and other artifacts that range from early beer advertisements to materials on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene in the 1960s. - Tom Keays

Content providers must implement SUSHI by the end of August 2009 in order to remain compliant with Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases. This is a simple command-line client used to connect to multiple SUSHI servers and convert COUNTER XML data into COUNTER Release 2 csv files. It currently only supports JR1, DB1, and DB3 for Release 2 and 3. - Tom Keays

Godmar Back wrote a JSON web service in python for ticTOC with an eye to incorporating links into III's Millennium catalog. - Tom Keays

There are currently at least two areas in which publishers can take advantage of the semantic triple methodology. First there is the actual publishing of triples. The material that is being published, in journals, books, and databases, can be turned into triples, as long as it is available in electronic form, of course. Such triple collections can be valuable complementary formats to enable the research community to potentially get more out of the published knowledge. - Tom Keays

The advent of the Internet has been the impetus for the Open Access movement, a movement focused on expanding access to information principally by reducing the costs of journals. I argue here that the Open Access movement has had little impact on the chemistry community and has taken our attention away from the real opportunity to revolutionize scientific communication. I propose a plan that both reduces the total cost of publishing chemistry and enriches the literature through incorporation of Open Data. By publishing lots of data, available for ready re-use by all scientists, we can radically change the way science is communicated and ultimately performed. - Tom Keays