iNODE

It has taken about a week off and on to get all the pieces in place: installation of the scanner, software installation, camera calibration, three days lost while we waited for a replacement lighting housing, RTFM’ing and what not but I finished generating my first e-book with the ATIZ Bookdrive DIY scanner late this afternoon (the title is one I picked up in a used bookshop in Boston a few years back).

It took roughly 20 minutes to scan the 240+ page book (the scanning software indicated I was working thru the book at a 632 pages-per-hour clip) and then another 30 minutes or so for post-processing (deskewing the jpg images, applying automatic crops, despeckling the page backgrounds, improving contrast and ultimately producing a PDF). While scanning is a hands-on endeavor, for the most part post-processing runs unattended (after you interactively test and then set processing parameters).

The “optimized” version of the PDF weighed in at 18 megabytes—a major improvement over the “raw” version (500Mb). I suspect I can get that down but will have to experiment with what lower resolutions scans will do (I was working at 300dpi). I still need to work through various post-processing options (e.g., although the pages were faded the sample could use some brightening and I think I needed to use a higher aperture for better focus), but I can tell this is going to work well once I figure out the optimal settings and workflow.

Here’s a link to a sample PDF with a few pages from the book. The schematics of older ballparks are kind of interesting.

Sample (800K)

If you have sysadmin duties in a library like Mason’s (where our core technologies actually reside in the library and not the computer center), backing up is one big part of what you do. Though heretical at the time, we abandoned tape for disk-to-disk backup in the early ’90’s so while it doesn’t take a lot of any one person’s time it’s still something that has to be scripted, tested, monitored and regularly thought about. When it comes to the actual work of getting the backups done, well, it’s pretty much just one machine talking to another at cron-induced intervals.
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BookDrive

Our ATIZ BookDrive DIY scanner arrived on campus today (hope to have it delivered to our building tomorrow some time). Despite other distractions, we should have it set up and running early next week (still a bit of work to do on preparing the room where this and other digital production tools will be located).

Once operational, I’ll scan a older (pre 1927) book from Mason’s collection and make it available for inspection. If you have a suggestion for a text you’d like to have digitized, leave your idea in the comments. It might take a few weeks to master this machine and the scan-to-ebook workflow but we’ll go as fast as possible.

Gartner

Seems we’ve been trying off-and-on for six months or more to make access to gartner.com available for Mason affiliates. When you consider we typically spend about five (5) minutes setting up authenticated-access to other restricted sources, you get some sense of how frustrating this experience has been. I could make some snarky observation about the trouble we’ve had talking technology with an organization that “delivers the technology-related insight necessary for their clients to make the right decisions, every day” but I’ll resist the impluse.

Thankfully, I recently stumbled across an interesting tidbit deep in the release notes for the EZproxy 5.0:

15. Enable access to Gartner reports using Gartner’s proprietary encryption method.

I nearly knocked my coffee over getting my mouse on the download link.

Followed the remarkably clear instructions posted on OCLC’s site (actually link-backs to the older usefulutilities.com site), made my necessary local configuration changes, ran my keygen file through a cgi process on the usefulutilities.com site, sent the resulting public key to Gartner and eagerly awaited their response. It came about three hours later: “Go ahead and test it.”

“…Invalid sign-on or password”

Didn’t work. I got back in touch with Chris Zagar, creator of EZproxy. In no time at all he sent me a link to a freshly-coded beta rewrite of EZproxy’s Gartner routines. Took a few back-and-forth tests to get things working (hint: make sure your EZproxy server’s time/date values are close to UTC time) but we now have smooth and simple access to Gartner. The 5.0d release isn’t yet on the OCLC site but if you’re interested in using EZproxy for Gartner, here’s the message you’ll receive when trying to generate the key that Gartner used to require:

This process is no longer used for Gartner authentication. If you are trying to set up Gartner authetnication, please contact zagar@usefulutilities.com for assistance

I find myself bashing OCLC regularly but in this instance I couldn’t be more pleased with the level of support I received. Exactly the same great support from the same person as before the OCLC absorbtion of Useful Utilities. I’m sure Chris will be a good influence.

If you’re a Mason student, faculty or staff member, this link will take you to Gartner once you’re authenticated:

http://mutex.gmu.edu:2048/gartner

VuFind redux

Had a bit of time last week to bring our local VuFind installation up to date. I noticed that Oracle has finally released an intel-native version of their OS X InstantClient package. Grabbed a copy but in the amount of time I had to spend, I wasn’t able to get an OS X-based VuFind machine up and running. Switched over to a new Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server install on a DELL PowerEdge SC1430.

Took about a day to get the OS installed and the VuFind infrastructure in place (basically about an hour on 99% of it then 4 or 5 more hours to get a PDO_OCI -> Voyager link up and running). Note to self, stay away from x86_64 when putting together a system that requires more than 3 separate enabling pieces (e.g., Apache, PHP, Oracle, PEAR, PECL, MySQL, LDAP, etc.)…somewhere you’ll hit a 32-bit only version that will break rpm/deb dependencies.

Still have a few things to fix but the new version is fast. I especially like the way clicking on certain author’s name (for example Alfred Hitchcock or Philip K Dick) takes you to their entry on WIkipedia. Nice touch, don’t you think?  Have to fix the problem with the “next” page on that author listing but that should be simple. Next area for serious work is LDAP authentication and the back-end MySQL database that stores tags, favorites, and so on.

I was particularly pleased to see it took only 54 minutes to import and index just over 1.2 million MARC records. With indexing speed like that, an overnite rebuild of the database is certainly something that could be done.

http://zoombox.gmu.edu/vufind