NeoArch

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.

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.

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” ?

I am posting this just in case anyone has a similar problem. Here’s the deal. I’ve been running DSpace for my institution, and I set up script that would backup my database using pg_dump on a cron job. It was extremely inconsistent, mainly during the AM hours.

My command looked like this

pg_dump -f /PATH_TO_STORAGE/dspace_`date +%Y%m%d%k%M%S`.sql dspace

After troubleshooting it, I noticed that if I ran the command during the morning hours, I got the following error:


pg_dump: too many command-line arguments (first is "dspace")
Try "pg_dump --help" for more information.

So, I started tweaking the command. Basically, for some reason, pg_dump does not like the %k part of the command. When I changed it to the following, it seemed to work fine:

pg_dump -f /PATH_TO_STORAGE/dspace_`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`.sql dspace

I count it my great pleasure to work where I do. At the James P. Boyce Centennial Library, I have the distinct pleasure of being able to work with archives, various types of special collections, and technology. The job perfectly fits my personality type.

One of the additional pleasures of working at this particular library is the name itself, for its namesake was possibly the greatest bibliophile in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention, James P. Boyce. He left his library to the institution, and I have the distinct pleasure of working with many of these books on a daily basis. I cannot do justice in describing either the breadth of his collection or the the physical beauty of the volumes he possessed. They are beyond remarkable, so I will not even sully their worth with my worthless banter. To appreciate them, one has to see them, feel them, and smell them. If you would like to do so, I invite you to stop by during our working hours.

Since this coming year marks the 150th anniversary of the establishment of Southern Seminary, I thought I would share here a brief account of Boyce’s love for books of all types. This particular quote was written by his daughter and is drawn from the biography that his colleague and best friend wrote of him.

His library was a source of great pride and enjoyment At one time it bade fair to be a remarkably large collection for a private individual Most of his books were bought before the war in after years he could buy little beyond those necessary for his studies and could seldom afford to indulge any longer in lovely bindings and rare editions I consider this one of the greatest tiials that loss of fortune brought upon him He still indulged himself occasionally but then only for our benefit At New Year he always presented each member of the family with either the complete edition of some author’s works or single works well bound and illustrated I have seen him sit for hours with a book catalogue in his hand marking the books he would like to buy and really seeming to get great enjoyment out of merely seeing what was to be had if he could afford it He was charmed to show his books to friends He and Colonel Durrett were constantly in each other’s libraries and often exchanged books I have heard him say that it caused him positive pain to see beautifully bound or illustrated books and not be able to possess them He seldom went down town without going to a book store where he could indulge himself in glancing over the new works He bought his theological books with a view to giving this part of his collection to the Seminary He was devoted to children’s books would read them with interest and was greatly given to making presents of them to his little namesakes and other child friends The last gift he gave was a book bought at Pan and sent to a little grand niece He gave his oldest daughter when a child the prettiest and the best books suitable to her age In fact she was really possessed of quite a little library when only a baby The Nightcap Stories Kollo Books Grimm’s Fairy Tales the Arabian Nights and even some French books were provided for her long before she had learned the alphabet He took great pains to have only good illustrations in a book he purchased believing in this way he might cultivate the taste for good drawing and painting.
– Memoir of James Petigru Boyce, D.D., LL.D. Late President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louiseville, Ky By John Albert Broadus