Yearly Archives: 2010

Thursday Threads: Google Scholar Coverage, Effective Meetings, Librarians as Obstacles, Cable TV

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No, I am not composing this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads on the Thanksgiving holiday. This was written the day before and scheduled for posting on Thursday. With a significant run of weekly Thursday Threads postings, it seemed a shame to break the trend because of a holiday. So if it is Thanksgiving Thursday (in the U.S.) and you are looking for something to read, how about an article questioning the need for index and abstract databases in light of Google Scholar? Or tips for post-holiday effective meetings? Or how librarians are viewed as obstacles to effective open educational resources? Or simply be thankful that you are not in the cable TV operator business.

This is a preview of Thursday Threads: Google Scholar Coverage, Effective Meetings, Librarians as Obstacles, Cable TV. Read the full post (1007 words, 1 image, 4:02 minutes estimated reading time)

Thursday Threads: Gobs of Video, Memento Submitted, Everybody’s Digital, and Cell Phone as Credit Card

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Another slow Thursday Threads week due to higher priority work duties taking precedent over scanning for trends. This week has a look at the explosion of video content uploaded to YouTube (which dovetails nicely with the Thursday Threads report two weeks ago about the record amount of internet traffic attributed to Google’s services), why the distinction between ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ should be dropped, how telecomm companies want a piece of the credit card business, and the movement of Momento to an Internet Draft. If you find these interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

This is a preview of Thursday Threads: Gobs of Video, Memento Submitted, Everybody’s Digital, and Cell Phone as Credit Card. Read the full post (891 words, 1 image, 3:34 minutes estimated reading time)

Defining Metadata and Making Metadata Accessible

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In preparation for the last webinar of the three-part series “Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future“, I’m reading again Karen Coyle‘s “Library Data in a Modern Context” — the first chapter of Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata. Right at the start she has a clear and useful definition of this thing we call “metadata.”

This is a preview of Defining Metadata and Making Metadata Accessible. Read the full post (725 words, 2:54 minutes estimated reading time)

Thursday Threads: Refining Data, Ebook Costs, Open Bibliographic Data, Copyright Infringement

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It has been a long week, so for many of you this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads will actually be read on Friday. The spirit was willing, the topics were certainly out there in the past seven days, but the necessary distractions were numerous. Please enjoy this edition whenever you read it. As always, there is lots more on my FriendFeed aggregation page.

Google Refine 2.0, a power tool for data wranglers

This is a preview of Thursday Threads: Refining Data, Ebook Costs, Open Bibliographic Data, Copyright Infringement. Read the full post (608 words, 2:26 minutes estimated reading time)

Thursday Threads: RDA Revolt, Google Book Search Algorithm, Google Helps Improve Web Servers, Google’s Internet Traffic Hugeness

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This week is a mostly Google edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads. Below is a high-level overview of Google’s Book Search algorithm, how Google is helping web servers improve the speed at which content loads, and how Google’s internet traffic is growing as a percentage of all internet traffic. But first, there is an uprising on the RDA test records in the WorldCat database.

This is a preview of Thursday Threads: RDA Revolt, Google Book Search Algorithm, Google Helps Improve Web Servers, Google’s Internet Traffic Hugeness. Read the full post (867 words, 1 image, 3:28 minutes estimated reading time)

MARC isn’t Dead, but it is a Dead End

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This week I sat in on the first of the three “Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future” webinars being hosted by ALA. This one was hosted by Karen Coyle with the title New Models of Metadata where she talked about library-specific efforts such asRDA and FRBR as well as the linked data effort in the wider world of information. There was a great deal of concern expressed in the chat window by participants about the future of cataloging, of cataloguers, and of MARC. The latter brought up memories of Roy Tennant‘s “MARC Must Die” declaration. My take away, though, isn’t that MARC is dead as much as MARC is a dead end.

This is a preview of MARC isn’t Dead, but it is a Dead End. Read the full post (409 words, 1 image, 1:38 minutes estimated reading time)

Thursday Threads: Unprotected Social Media Sites, Value of Free, and Real Life Net Neutrality

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This week’s Thursday Threads looks at a big hole in the security model of most internet sites that require you to log into them with a username and password plus a pair of stories about “big media” battles. If you find these interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments, as always, are welcome.

This is a preview of Thursday Threads: Unprotected Social Media Sites, Value of Free, and Real Life Net Neutrality. Read the full post (1019 words, 1 image, 4:05 minutes estimated reading time)

Slight Tweak to WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin

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In a futile effort to fight link rot on DLTJ, I installed the Broken Link Checker plugin by “White Shadow”. I like the way it scans the entire content of this blog — posts, pages, comments, etc. — looking for pages linked from here that don’t respond with an HTTP 200 “Ok” status code. The dashboard of problem links has a nice interface for updating or deleting these links, including the ability to add a CSS style deleted links to note that they were formerly there. One of the things I wished it did, though, was to add a message to posts/pages that noted a link was changed or deleted. You know — just to document that something changed since the page was first published. Tonight I hacked into the code to add this function. And with apologies to the original author of this beautifully structured object-oriented PHP code, it is a gruesome hack.

This is a preview of Slight Tweak to WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin. Read the full post (466 words, 1:52 minutes estimated reading time)

Thursday Threads: RDF, Digital Document Tampering, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

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This is definitely becoming a habit…welcome to the fourth edition of DLTJ‘s Thursday Threads. If you find these interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the left. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments, as always, are welcome.

This is a preview of Thursday Threads: RDF, Digital Document Tampering, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Read the full post (742 words, 2:58 minutes estimated reading time)

The PERL Way to Add OmniFocus Inbox Entries from Twitter

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Over the weekend I got the bright idea of asking OmniGroup to ask an iPhone voice recognition application (like Dragon Dictation) to add a link to the OmniFocus iPhone application. That way I could simply dictate new inbox items on the iPhone rather than laboriously typing them with the on-screen keyboard. Before making the suggestion, I searched the OmniFocus User Forum for “voice recognition” to see if anyone else had suggested the same thing. As it turns out, there were a few posts that had instructions from people using Twitter as an intermediary. Unfortunately, they either required a desktop Twitter client to be running all of the time or used the now deprecated BasicAuth-based Twitter authentication scheme. So I created my own.

This is a preview of The PERL Way to Add OmniFocus Inbox Entries from Twitter. Read the full post (670 words, 4 images, 2:41 minutes estimated reading time)