Like a number of people, I found the following piece (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i24/24a01101.htm) from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the Open Library fairly interesting — in part, because of the topics that the author chose to highlight.  I tend to categorizes pieces such as this as fluff, in that one rarely gets any content of substance […]

I’ve had a few folks ask about the the procedure would be for a user wanting to harvest the UMich OAI records using MarcEdit.  Well, there are two workflows that can be followed depending on what you want to do.  You can harvest the OAI data and translate it directly to MARC or you can […]

I was playing with MarcEdit’s OAI harvester, making a few changes to fix a problem that had been discovered, as well as add some fall-over code that allows the harvester to continue processing (or at least, attempt to continue processing) when the OAI server breaks the connection (generally through timeout).  To test, I decided to […]

(Note, I started this post last night, but had to put it away so I could get some rest before a 6 am flight.  I finished the remainder of this while waiting for my flight). 
So, after getting up way to early this morning, I staggered my way down to the LITA Top Tech Trends […]

I’ve been thinking a little bit about some of the things that I use MarcEdit for and have been pushing some of this work off my desk to some of the staff in our technical services department.  We actually use MarcEdit quite a bit when it comes to sharing metadata from our Dspace instance with […]

One of the things I was really impressed with while attending DLF was the presentation on the lightweight web platform being built at NCSU.  Leveraging their endeca catalog, the folks at NCSU have been able to produce a set of REST-based api for querying the catalog.  With those services, they’ve designed a mobile interface and […]

So OCLC and the UW finally pulled off the cover and unveiled WorldCat Local to the world. A number of folks will write about the things that this does very well. The faceting is nice and clean, as is the layout. Some of the ajaxy features (like holdings retrieval) is a little […]

Ah, what fun.  Working in Technical Services, I tend to lurk on the AutoCat list to keep up and get an idea of what folks are chatting about there.  Normally the conversation is on traditional cataloging issues, but Roy’s latest musings in Library Journal (“Will RDA Be DOA”, url: http://libraryjournal.com/article/CA6422278.html) seems to have raised peoples […]

I’ve become more and more convened over the past year talking to directors that for OSS development to be accepted as a part of the library community, it’s going to have to become a mainstream service.  Too much R&D in libraries is done as part of an individual, student or demo project.  To a large […]

So, let’s start out with a preface to my comments here.  First, it’s a little on the long side.  Sorry.  I got a bit wordy and occasionally wonder a little bit here and there :).  Second — these reflect my opinions and observations.  So with that out of the way… 
This question comes from two experiences recently.  […]