The Synthetic Librarian

This is a screencast to go with my last post. It shows some of the screens from the “get it!” service include some of the problem screens.

Unfortunately I could not reproduce all of the problems we talked about last week… so you just get to hear me talk about them. If you have a “get it!” bug that you can reproduce, please post a comment here and describe it. I’d be happy to track it down and post screenshots (and an explanation if its helpful).

Please note that this screencast file is extremely large and may take a while to load (80MB!).

• Windows Movie File Version (smaller fast download: 10MB)
• Internet Explorer Version
• Firefox Version

If you have looked for articles in the library’s online databases, you have probably seen some green and white “Get It!” icons. If you have actually clicked one of those buttons you might be left with some questions about how they (may or may not) work. Those buttons are one part of the library’s “citation linking” service and in this article I will explain what that service is, what the “Get It!” buttons do, and how you can use the citation linker ways you might not have known about.

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In further preparation for my talk at Netspeed 2007 titled, “Widets, Gadgets, and Badges”, I have created another web badge. This one counts down the days until the Alberta Library Conference (ALC 2008). The ALC mini-badge will display the conference date (April 24) until it is 99 days away. When it is just 99 days away from the conference, it will begin to display a countdown. When it is just one day away, it will display the word “tomorrow” and when the conference is actually on, it will display “ON NOW”.

If you are attending ALC 2008 and have a blog, why not promote the event with this badge?


<a href="http://albertalibraryconference.com/2008/">
<img src="http://winterstorm.ca/alcminibadge.png" title="Countdown to ALC 2008" />
</a>


Netspeed 2007 is just 40 days away. Netspeed is a library technology conference hosted by The Alberta Library. This year it will be held at the Carriage House Inn in Calgary, Alberta. I will be giving a presentation titled, “Web Widgets, Gadgets, and Badges.”

For the occaision, I have created a special badge to countdown the days until the conference. You can add the following HTML to any webpage to display this badge. The image will update itself automatically. Today it displays that there are 40 days left. Tomorrow it will say, “39″ days left.

If you are attending Netspeed 2007 and have a blog, why not promote the event with this badge?


<a href="http://paranoidagnostic.net/category/netspeed2007">
<img src="http://winterstorm.ca/netspeedbadge.png" title="Countdown to Netspeed 2007" />
</a>


I am currently having a surreal system administration experience: I am the sysadmin for a Wiki project in Chinese. I do not read, write, or speak Chinese and the Wiki is intended for use by the local Chinese community and is thus localized in Chinese. This has been the strangest thing for me. When I login to the software, I cannot even read the menus, and there are so many decisions that would normally be trivial that are now strange and difficult.

The project is to catalogue my local public library’s collection of Chinese books in a wiki. The library doesn’t catalogue the foreign language books (probably because it cannot). I am using MediaWiki (same software used for Wikipedia) which already has localization for many languages including at least 5 Chinese options.

One significant problem is trying to choose the right localization. So far, no one I know who actually speaks Mandarin Chinese can tell me what pros and cons there might be to picking one over the other. As a sysadmin, normally it would be my job to tell people what the pros and cons of one technical choice over another are. In this case I feel like I’m in an alternate reality. I am the right person for this job, but also completely unqualified!

MediaWiki seems to be the right choice for this project, not only because of its open editing, version tracking, and simple-but-effective content markup system, but also because it natively understands what an ISBN is. MediaWiki scans any text entered for strings that start with “ISBN” and end with a number and some dashes. If it sees such a string, it turns that into a link to its own internal system for linking to places that can give you more information about an ISBN. This is really good for a book-based library project.

I intend to write another component to magically identify book’s barcodes in the same way it does ISBN numbers, so that we can automatically link to the library’s catalogue. Thus someone can have one click access to putting a hold on an item.

Stranger than all of these other things, is that is a project I created. Normally, I would be writing up all kinds of “about” pages and help for the users. I suppose I will do that in English, but I always hesitate because it is, after all, supposed to be in Chinese. I just hope my translator is good!