iNODE

Just a short note to alert Mason affiliates that we’ve changed our database gateway service (aka our proxy server) in ways that should open up service for those of you behind network firewalls in your office, hospital or military installation.

If you use an older URL that contains the 2048 port, you have two options:

a) have your local network administrator open up port 2048 to our server (mutex.gmu.edu). Only that port and port 443 (which handles the secure signon). In all but the most unusual circumstance, you’ll find that port 443 is already opened (all secure web traffic moves on that port so network admins keep it open).

b) copy the URL, then paste it back in your browser and cut out the “:2048″ portion of the URL.

At the moment, even though we’re changing our local URLs to move the initial login from port 2048 to port 80, you may well find URLs on a library site that begins like this:

http://mutex.gmu.edu:2048/login?URL=http://www.2facts.com

If so (and you’re behind a firewall that doesn’t have port 2048 open), make a copy of the URL and then remove the :2048 so it looks like this:

http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?URL=http://www.2facts.com

After we’ve run on this new configuration for a while (and verify that it causes no other spin-off issues), we’ll mount a full-scale hunt to track down and change any URL on a library server that points to port 2048 on our proxy server. We will continue to support URLs that contain the 2048 port syntax for many, many months so the transition to our new arrangement should be a non-event.

Saw a recent post on the DSpace list, asking about the use of the Dewey Decimal system to help organize a DSpace installation. The writer wondered if there were plans to support the DDC within DSpace. I double-checked my calendar, saw it wasn’t April 1st and forgot about it…

Then today I noticed that Dorothea was calling attention to a response from an OCLC employee that is so absurd I feel I have to help publicize it as a public service:

I’m from OCLC and I’ve asked the folks who are supposed to know.

There are absolutely no restrictions on using the Dewey numbers. You can assign those numbers to your works and then use them to organize your works. It would be nice if you said something on your site about Dewey being copyrighted. But otherwise, numbers are numbers and you can use them to your heart’s content.

The problem comes when you try to assign meaning to those numbers; then you’re using the work of the Dewey Editors. The text associated with those numbers IS copyright. But, if you can restrict the usage to just browsing up and down the numbers, you’re good.

Ralph LeVan

Ralph Levan is a Senior Research Scientist at OCLC and appears to have a solid background in computer science and information retrieval.  Hard to say whether working at OCLC for the past twenty years is what’s given him such flair for the absurd.

Now I think I know what Kramer meant when he said…”The Dewey Decimal System.  What a scam that was!”  – Seinfeld, “The Library” (episode 22).

This is worth a serious examination (and I realize it may have been all the pills on the interface that led me to that medical metaphor).

ticTOCs is a newly-reworked scholarly table of contents (TOCs) service that covers 11,416 (as of today) journals from 420 publishers.  And if your personal/institutional subscriptions allow it, direct links to 295K articles.   The ticTOCs consortium is: the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.

Have to search around when I have a bit more time to see if they’ve added an API.  This could be a big help on our research portals project…

http://www.tictocs.ac.uk

NYPL has joined the Flickr commons with 1300 images that  tease us with the suggestion of what else might be coming.

Unlike the earlier contributions from the Library of Congress, these images come with lots of metadata (contributed over the years by NYPL staffers). How this changes the tags and comments the interweb will offer should be interesting.   Let me recommend this set of images to other librarians: a series of photos from the history of the Research Library.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nypl/

p.s., seems reading was a bigger deal in 1913 if this was the sort of room they dedicated to that activity.

It fell to me to both create the slides and handle the equipment for the presentation a group of us did off-campus on Monday. The “handle the equipment” part meant lugging around a MacBook, a clicker, a wireless mouse, an ethernet cable (just in case), a vga extension cable (just in case), a flashdrive with all files (again, just in case) and the laptop’s powerbrick.   Altogether probably seven or eight pounds and bulky.

Actually toyed with the idea of also taking a little Panasonic projector along but didn’t want to add 3 more pounds and juggle yet another bag—although in retrospect I should have since the projector provided by the hotel was a bit of dim bulb (leaving several of my more complex backgrounds in the dark). With nowhere to check equipment at the conference, I was lugging the stuff around all day.

As you might suspect, I’ve been thinking about a better way to handle this sort of thing in the future and think I have a new workflow and equipment strategy.

Read more »

Yesterday, I was part of a group presenting Mason’s Research Portal project at CNI’s Fall 2008 meeting. Another member of my group counted 65 people in the audience which seemed a nice turnout and the Q&A that followed suggested that we hadn’t bored them to death by any means. I think more than a few in the audience felt empowered when they saw a demonstration of how easy it might be to combine a couple of open-source packages with a dusting of CSS magic and end up with an easy-to-implement but useful platform for advancing the e-work of libraries.

Trying to green things up a bit, instead of creating a paper handout, I put together a simple website to serve as documentation of our briefing—thanks to Keynote’s QuickTime export I was able to post a copy of our slides as well.

At today’s CNI opening plenary, Vint Cerf presented Tom Scheinfeldt of the Center for History and New Media an award check for $50,000, citing the work they’re doing with Omeka.   Congratulations to Tom and the other 9 MATC (Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration) winners…including, by the way, another really nice piece of software: VuFind.

I captured the audio of the presentation on my netbook (you may have to boost the volume to hear it):