Of Libraries and Librarians

I’ve been behind on my blog reading (and posting) lately. School and family crises  will do that. I just read John Blyberg’s post on the Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians. I found the whole post thought provoking, but I especially enjoyed the bullet points of things librarians must do under the Preservation of the Library section. My favorite was “Endorse procedures only if they guide librarians or users to excellence.”

This is the list of things they fill compelled to do at Darien. Are there things that you, personally, would add or eliminate from the list?

The Gorgon

Today’s mythological monday creature is the Gorgon. You may read Topsell’s description of this fearsome creature here.

of Lice, and how to kill them

This new series of posts will take simply quote peculiar sections of Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-Footed Beasts. Some of the work deals with mythological creatures, such as Satyrs, and most of my posts will do likewise. However, today’s post deals with an ever pertinent and interesting topic, ridding your horse of lice.

They be like Geese Lice, but somewhat bigger, they will breed most about the ears, neck, and tail, and over all the body. THe comve of poverty, and the Horse will be alwayes rubbing, and scratching, and will eat his meat, and not prosper withal, and with rubbing he will break all his mane and tail. The cure, according to Martin, is thus; Anoint the place with Sope and Quicksilver, well mingled together, and to a pound of Sope, put half an ounce of Quicksilver.

That’s right folks. There’s no cure for lice like a mixture of soap and mercury.

DSpace needs 2.0

I’ve been working with DSpace recently, and I am amazed with the power of this wonderful repository system. It is an incredible platform for long term preservation, access, and dissemination of content. It has incredible OAI and indexing abilities. It is well developed, well funded, and well … well, let’s just say I can’t heap enough praise on it. I think it’s the best repository system available, bar none.

The version of DSpace with which I’ve been working is 1.5. Version 2.0 is currently in development. I don’t know what chanes are in order for this next major release, but I know that it needs a good dose of web 2.0 in version 2.0. What do I mean? I mean that DSpace should become more user-centric. So, here’s my top 10 list of things that I think DSpace developers need to do in version 2.

1. Make the easy stuff easy. – It’s easier to explain this by example. A few days ago, I was working on making a minor change to the user interface that would allow for streaming media. To make it work, I needed to be able to generate the URL for the primary bitstream. In short, there was no way to do this. Even though the URL is present in the default interface, there is no method for calling the URL on its own. At times, DSpace is SO object oriented, that it prevents system administrators from making minor tweaks such as this one. Giant blocks of code may be easier to maintain (I really don’t think they are), but they circumvent customization. Take a page from the scripting language developers: make the easy stuff easy.
2. Make the media stuff seamless. — It is a YouTube/Flickr/Amazoogle world. Embed or you’re dead. ‘Nuff said.
3. Make the waiting stuff apparent. — No one enjoys load screens and status bars, but everyone hates the alternative: not knowing whether the application is doing anything. A nice little status bar would ease users’ minds.
4. Make the U the basis for the UI. — This goes along with the previous two points, and the next point. Some aspects of the UIs for DSpace are just clunky and ugly. Whether I’m using the administrative interfaces, or the regular user interfaces, I find my eyes jumping all over the place to find stuff. The interface may be well-ordered, but it doesn’t feel like it is. Tasks could often be bundled in a way that would reduce the number of clicks for users (especially in the approval process under JSPUI). In some ways, the XMLUI setup is better with some themes, but there’s still much to be desired (like having a common administrative interface for XMLUI, instead of the Drupal-like changing of administrative UIs). Perhaps developers could take a page from Automattic’s recent development of the WordPress Administrative UI. They used Ball State’s Center for Media Design to drastically change the interface, and, well…it just works. UIUC’s Archon is another project that recently saw a beautiful interface redesign (public, not administrative).
5. Make the UI AJAXy. — Not for the cool effects, but to increase speed and usability for the short head of users that wrestle with the DSpace UIs on a daily basis. Yes, make provisions to increase accessibility for all. Yes, have alternatives for users who cannot use javascript effects. But please, please, please give users the same type of experience that they are used to with nearly every other website now. There are tons of javascript frameworks that make this sort of thing easy to implement. Might I suggest Scriptaculous?
6. Make the themes more available. — Someone should establish an XMLUI theme library. Perhaps there is one, but if so, I am not aware of it. Anyone could establish such a library, but I really think it would help those less fortunate potential adopters that don’t have entire teams of web designers and Java gurus.
7. Make the XML-based stuff database driven. — A couple examples are in order. First, the controlled vocabulary functionality should be in a database. IMO, there should be a way within DSpace to edit and add to controlled vocabularies. There’s not. One has to maintain a controlled vocabulary within a separate system, and then store the CV as XML.Second, the welcome message (I’m thinking of XMLUI here, but it may also be the case in JSPUI) should be in a database. In my opinion, if it’s content that can be changed by the user and is not binary data, it should be stored in a database. Items like welcome messages, sidebar content, and controlled vocabularies are all good candidates for treating in this way. I long for the day when XML will be treated merely as a transport format or medium for structural layout, rather than a storage format.
8. Make the batch process streamlined. — Anyone who has used the batch process knows what I’m talking about. It’s easier to rope goats than it is to use the DSpace batch uploader. The software should have a utility that allows a user to select a whole bunch of files which are automatically uploaded. The utility could also extract metadata from the files (Exif, IPTC, or whatever) to write to the database as the file’s descriptive or structural metadata. At present, one either has to manually package the files appropriately and write Dublin Core for each file to be batch uploaded, or create some sort of program that will package the files and write the Dublin Core. I know, it’s  a difficult thing to do. Still, if Flickr can do it  for Exif data, then it can be done.
9. Make the documentation readable. — I’ve seen worse, but I’ve seen much, much better as well. It would be nice if the documentation had a “How to do simple stuff” section that covered a lot of the really simple things one finds in the DSpace wiki — things like making adjustments to headers and footers. I believe that a lot of the questions that get asked repeatedly on the listserv would stop being asked if the official documentation addressed them clearly.
10. Make the mental switch to Rails. — DSpace has a certain musty, 1.0 kind of odor about it. As soon as you unzip it, this smell, tantamount to descending into your grandmother’s basement, wafts up from your computer. As you look around at it, you realize that it’s been around for a while. It’s reliable — like the old pedal driven Singer sewing machine in the corner of your grandmother’s basement — but it also feels a little antiquated. More and more, users are accustomed to web apps that have a 2.0 feel. We’re used to sites developed in things like PHP and Rails. We’re used to sites that give us a good user experience. DSpace needs to become that. It needs to transition. It needs to be more “Rails-ish.” I realize that the developers are probably not going to scrap the whole codebase and start over with a new framework and language. But Java can look like Rails, feel like Rails, and have a certain Rails kind of quality to it. However, it takes developers thinking like Rails guys (and gals). I hope this happens. If so, version 2.0 of DSpace could very well look and feel 2.0.

Firefox 3.0 and the Endnote Firefox Add-on

I use Firefox. It’s at version 3.x. I had an add-on that worked with previous versions of Firefox that would save information about a webpage into my Endnote library. Well, it broke. So, I hacked it.

Here’s a link to the Endnote add-on download page.

Here’s the hack instructions that I used.

Happy hacking. And researching. And writing.

Google Books Meets Yahoo Pipes

I was playing around with Yahoo Pipes today, and I decided to make a pipe that would let you search Google Books. It’s simple, but effective. With a little work, one could probably use it to embed a Google Book search in a website or Facepage. If you’re really creative, you can tweak one to embed in your OPAC. Enjoy. If you find any nifty uses for it, let me know in a comment. I would be interested to hear about it.

Using Basecamp instead of Assembla

Well, I successfully distanced myself from Assembla today and moved my stuff to Basecamp. I had two projects that I closed out. Neither used very much space. One used about 2MB, and the other used about 25. It was a brief headache for me. All of my workers were used to Assembla and will now have to get used to Basecamp. I will still have to find hosting for my SVN repo. In the end, though, it’s worth it to me. Basecamp costs more, but it has a solid reputation. You know what you’re getting from them up front. They don’t say one thing, then switch directions. They don’t lure you in with a really great offer, and then take that away when you are used to using them. Assembla does, and I would rather not give money to a company that makes such rash decisions without considering the consequences to users.

Assembla No Longer Free

I’ve been using Assembla for some time, and it looks like that day has now come to an end. On Friday, Assembla announced that the feature that attracted me to it in the first place is now coming to an end. Assembla will no longer be offering free, private accounts to its users. One of the really nice benefits of Assembla was the ability to have free SVN repositories. I have two Assembla accounts, and I will probably close them both. While I realize that for them this decision may simply be a matter of cutting the dead weight, for me it eliminates them as a possible candidate as a vendor in the future because I believe that I cannot determine reliably whether or not they will make additional unfavorable changes while I am paying.  I realize that their rates are fairly reasonable, but in a sense, I feel betrayed by the changes in their terms of service. They have offered a product for free. People have used the product and are somewhat dependent upon it. Now Assembla holds these users over a barrell for the sake of exacting a measly $2 a month. I really wish they would have simply grandfathered in those who currently have free, private accounts with them.

I am sympathetic to Andy’s pleas that he has a family to feed and people to pay. I can understand that. These are difficult financial times, and people need to make money. Still, the reason that I decided to use Assembla at work and personally was because it was free. I didn’t abuse the system. I didn’t fill up a subversion repository with tons of data. And I was fully committed to buying a commercial space from them if I ever got to the point where I needed one. That has changed, now. I do not feel like I can trust their bait-and-switch style of business plan, and if I can’t trust a company’s business plan, I don’t feel like I can trust them with my data.

The Googlized Future of Libraries?

For a couple of years, speculation has been rampant about the future of Google’s plans for it’s Google Books service. Due to Google’s involvement in litigation over the issue of copyright infringement, all bets have been off as to how the service would actually develop to ensure that authors and publishers get compensated for their work. Today, the New York Times reported that the lawsuits concerning Google have now been settled. The article includes some vague details about a service that Google intends to offer to libraries, that should be of particular interest to readers of this blog.

ETDs or ETD?

I’ve noticed lately that librarians and archivists commonly use the abbreviation ETD to refer to electronic theses and dissertations. It is an abbreviation for plural words. The abbreviation often appears with an ’s’ at the end to denote its plurality. For example, Virginia Tech’s stellar ETD site is called “ETDs at VT.” Since the words represented by the abbreviation are plural, is the ’s’ really necessary. Should it not be “ETD at VT” ?