Planet Code4Lib

del.icio.us: Project Shizuku ～次世代図書館情報システム～

eosuchian — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:04:03 +0000

del.icio.us: MaCaW (Metadata Collection and Workflow)

eosuchian — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:53:44 +0000

del.icio.us: Television and radio programmes — Statsbiblioteket - english

eosuchian — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:49:36 +0000

Equinox Software Incorporated: Get to know your friendly, neighborhood open source ILL better! This week in FulfILLment: Patron and Staff Use

slipscomb — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:43:08 +0000

Below is a brief overview of how patrons will be able to use FulfILLment:

• Patrons will access the NGDI (next generation discovery interface) through the “find elsewhere” (customizable) link in their home catalog. Clicking the link will allow them to browse the union catalog of libraries connected through FulfILLment. After choosing the material they want, the patron has to authenticate (if not already logged in) and complete the request.

• Patrons will be able to specify a “need by” date.

• Patrons will be able to opt-in for email notification when a request “need by” date is expiring and use the link to the request to change the date or cancel.

• Notifications of cancelations and items ready for pick-up can be made via email or print. Although FulfILLment will not be able to do print notices itself, it will be configurable to output PDFs or it can be integrated with a third party printer like Unique.

• Patrons will be able to select pick-up location.

• Patrons will be able to suspend requests that are unfilled and reactivate them at a later time.

• If a patron requests a serial, the interface will ask for volume and number information. Patrons may also include more specificity (example: article on page 30 by Smith) in the notes field.

Below is a brief overview of how Staff will be able to use FulfILLment:

• Staff will be able to access a “pull list” from the FulfILLment interface which will display and print a list of items that have been requested. This list can be run at any time.

• Staff will pull requested items from the shelf and scan the item barcodes in another FulfIllment interface screen. The system will print a receipt or wrapper upon barcode scan.

• With proper permissions, staff may use the interface to also edit, delay, or reject a request.

• If the request is rejected, the system will automatically try to find another copy to fill the request.

• Staff may search by request ID or any other field – title, patron name, barcode, etc.

• Staff has the option of targeting a specific copy at a specific library when placing a request for a patron. Patrons will not have this option.

Add to:

del.icio.us: rshanrath/zotero-sherparomeo - GitHub

nowviskie — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:24:12 +0000

del.icio.us: Amazon Technology Open House - February 2012

gms8994 — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:35:21 +0000

del.icio.us: cazzerson/Suma - GitHub

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:27:55 +0000

del.icio.us: code4lib jobs: Jobs

meikipp — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:26:34 +0000

del.icio.us: Web Archiving Service: California Digital Library

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:10:56 +0000

del.icio.us: NoSQL Bibliographic Records: Implementing a Native FRBR Datastore With Redis

nowviskie — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:26:15 +0000

del.icio.us: Cynthia Ng (therealarty) on Twitter

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:18:38 +0000

del.icio.us: CarmenDarlene (carmendarlene) on Twitter

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:14:06 +0000

del.icio.us: Code4Lib Day 2: Stack View: A Library Browsing Tool « Learning LibTech

ppival — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:06:31 +0000

del.icio.us: harvard-lil/stackview - GitHub

ppival — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:06:12 +0000

del.icio.us: Stack View

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:42:40 +0000

del.icio.us: daniel.lovins @ Mendeley

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:53:59 +0000

del.icio.us: gaevents.js

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:26:05 +0000

del.icio.us: Live-Blogging Code4Lib 2012

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:01:20 +0000

Open Knowledge Foundation: Announcing the School of Data

Laura Newman — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:13:04 +0000

The following post is by Rufus Pollock, Director and Co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Philip Schmidt, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Peer 2 Peer University.

Today, we’re announcing plans for a School of Data. The School will be a joint venture between the Open Knowledge Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). We also welcome other organizations who would like to participate — see below for more on this.

Why?

Data (open or otherwise) needs to be used, and to use data effectively requires certain skills.¹

The explosive growth in data, especially open data, in recent years has meant that the demand for data skills — for data “wranglers”² or “scientists” — has been growing rapidly. Moreover, these skills aren’t just important for banks, supermarkets or the next silicon valley start-up, they are also going to be cruicial in reserach, in journalism, and in civil society organizations (CSOs).

However, there is currently a significant shortfall of data “wranglers” to satisfy this growing demand, especially in civil society organisations — McKinsey expects a skills shortage in data expertise to reach 50-60% by 2018 in the US alone.³

Most formal training for data skills still takes place as part of formal statistics or mathematics programmes. It will be years before data specialist degree paths become broadly available and accepted, and even then, time-intensive degree courses may not be the right option for journalists, activists, or computer programmers who just need to add data skills to their existing expertise.

What is needed are flexible, on-demand, shorter learning options for people who are actively working in areas that benefit from data skills, particularly those who may have already left formal education programmes.

What?

To address this growing demand, the Open Knowledge Foundation and P2PU are collaborating to create the School of Data.

The School of Data will adopt the successful peer-to-peer learning model established by P2PU and Mozilla in their ‘School of Webcraft’ partnership. Learners will progress by taking part in ‘learning challenges’ – series of structured, achievable tasks, designed to promote collaborative and project-based learning.

As learners gain skills, their achievements will be rewarded through assessments which lead to badges. Community support and on-demand mentoring will also be available for those who need it.

So What Next?

In order to get the School of Data up and running, the next challenges are:

To create a series of learning challenges for a Data Wrangling 101 course. Developing Data wranglers will learn to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.
To recruit community leaders to act as ‘mentors’, providing community support and on-demand mentoring for those who need it.
To curate, update and extend the existing manuals and reference materials, e.g. the Open Data Handbook and the Data Patterns Handbook etc.
To design and implement assessments which evaluate achievements. Badges can then be issued which recognize the relevant skills and competencies.
To openly license all education content (challenges, manuals, references and materials) so that anyone can use, modify and re-use it, including instructors and learners in formal education.
Get the word out! Promote Data Wrangling 101 to potential participants.

Get Involved!

At this stage, we are seeking volunteers to help us develop the project. Whether you would like to design educational materials, construct learning challenges, donate money or mentor on the course, we’d love to hear from you! Equally, if you are part of an organisation which would like to join with the Open Knowledge Foundation and P2PU to collaborate on the School of Data, please do get in touch.

You can register your interest using the form below:

Loading…

For more on this topic, see these earlier posts: http://blog.okfn.org/2011/10/31/scaling-the-open-data-ecosystem/ and http://blog.okfn.org/2011/09/15/open-data-a-means-to-an-end-not-an-end-in-itself/ ↩
Because this field is so new, terminology is still evolving. A ‘data wrangler’ is to ‘data’ what a ‘coder’ is to ‘code’. It is someone with the ability to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different data. See http://blog.okfn.org/2011/02/11/as-coder-is-for-code-x-is-for-data/ for more on this topic. ↩
McKinsey Global Institute, 2011. Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, p.11. ↩

Schmidt, Aaron: Nice Bookends

Aaron Schmidt — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:47 +0000

From Jasper Morrison

unalog for code4lib: Designing Preservable Websites, Redux « The Signal: Digital Preservation

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:46:30 +0000

Ronallo, Jason: Code4Lib 2012 Lightning Talk That Wasn't

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:18:00 +0000

Digital Collections, Crawling, and Aggregating Content

Lightning talks filled up fast this year at Code4Lib before I had a chance to sign up, which is probably for the best since I had already had the opportunity to give a full length talk. Here is the lightning talk that I had prepared with each slide being followed by my draft speaker notes.

Hi.

Digital Libraries have aspired to create the one big pot of digital library stuff to hold everything. For the most part we’ve used niche protocols, dumbed-down metadata, cumbersome workflows, and lots of time massaging metadata in an effort to achieve these big aggregations.

I want to talk about what I think is better way to do aggregations. There’s a lot more you can build with what I’m talking about, but I want to set aggregations in my sights.

What if we start with the existing distributed collections on the open web? Instead of using niche protocols and metadata formats we used web pages as source materials. Collections are already producing Web pages, so why ask them to maintain something else too just for your aggregation?

Then we could crawl those pages. But we can’t crawl the whole web, so how do we figure out what to crawl?

We curate profiles for digital collections, like LinkedIn profiles. A minimal profile for a digital collection could be a name and a URL.

There’s a lot more you could do with collection profiles, and I’ve written about some of those with Tito Sierra. But right now let’s stick to how they enable crawling. Once you know what URLs exist you can constrain your crawling to just those trusted domains. A lot less work for the crawlers.

OK, now we’re able to crawl just part of the web and have the pages. We’ll want to do some processing on them to extract content and index. Some natural language processing can be done on the apge. You can also pull out structured data like RDFa, Microformats, or Microdata from the pages. Since all of the collections have profiles, we can trust the data on the page.

You could also fetch images and other linked assets for thumbnails.

On top of this data you can start to create any number of virtual aggregations.

Now even this architecture could be rather expensive to generate all this crawl data.

Common Crawl is a relatively new effort to crawl the quality web and make the crawl data available for free. It does cost a bit to access the Amazon buckets. But it is possible to run Hadoop Map/Reduce jobs over the corpus to extract what part you’re interested in. This could be significatly cheaper than crawling the web yourself. You could eventually use an API to process only those parts of the corpus which contain pages from the sites you’re interested in.

Web Data Commons is a new effort to use the Common Crawl corpus to extract structured data like RDFa, Microformats, and Microdata. They plan on making this web data available for free download.

So it is beginning to be possible to create digital library aggregations (and lots of other services) at scale at very low cost using a web-centric approach. Small startups and individuals will soon be able to create their own aggregations or services around this common infrastructure at very low cost.

What’s nice about this approach is that anything you ask a digital collections site to do could benefit the collection more generally on the open web. Sitemaps are good and the search engines use those too.

And once we’re to this point the need for a huge aggregation kind of drifts away. Small aggregations may have a place but otherwise discovery happens through search engines. With all of this digital collections data available it becomes possible to stop thinking in terms of aggregations and to think instead of value-added services for collections.

Here are some next steps to get us closer to this approach working.

Get Crawled. I’ve made contact with Common Crawl and have raised the issue about getting cultural heritage sites crawled.
Use Microdata. I’ve written about using Microdata and Schema.org. Let’s talk more about this.
Build a Collection Profiles System. I’ve got lots of ideas and some code started. I would like some help and support to get it going further.

Please get in touch with me if you’re interested in this approach. I’d be interested in a breakout session about aggregations, crawling, and big web data. Please let me know if you’re interested in talking more about this.

del.icio.us: Quick hack: re-rendering newspaper pages from OCR data | One Big Library.

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:14:33 +0000

del.icio.us: Just back from one of the #c4l12 newcomers' dinners -- a super-nice #code4lib tradition I am now determined to bring to the DH conf. #dh2012 – Bethany Nowviskie (nowviskie) http://twitter.com/nowviskie/status/167109229289811968

ranti — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:51:39 +0000

del.icio.us: open source design – Lisa Kurt

betsycoles — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:07:29 +0000

del.icio.us: Tom Douglas - Dinner

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:28:03 +0000

del.icio.us: saveMLAK

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:36:51 +0000

del.icio.us: Seattle Hotel in Downtown Seattle, Washington: The Renaissance Seattle Hotel

eosuchian — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:22:41 +0000

Ronallo, Jason: Slides from Code4lib Presentation on HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:32:00 +0000

Update: You can find the video on Livestream at 01:05:30.

Here are my slides from slides from my Code4Lib 2012 presentation on HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org. If you want the speaker notes, please dm me on Twitter @ronallo.

HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org

View more presentations from Jason Ronallo

Cohen, Dan: Reading and Believing

Dan Cohen — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:30:56 +0000

Rather than focusing on a new technology or website in our year-end review on the Digital Campus podcast, I chose reading as the big story of 2011. Surely 2011 was the year that digital reading came of age, with iPad and Kindle sales skyrocketing, apps for reading flourishing, and sites for finding high-quality long-form writing proliferating. It was apropos that Alan Jacobs‘s wonderful book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction was published in 2011.

Indeed, the relationship between reading and distraction was one of the things that caught my eye reading Daniel Kahneman‘s essential Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman speaks of two systems in the mind—he eschews “intuition” and “reason” for the more neutral “System 1″ and “System 2″—with the first making quick, unconscious assessments and the second engaging in much more studious, and laborious, calculations. Since our minds (like our bodies) are naturally lazy, we prefer to stick with System 1′s judgments as much as possible, unless jarred out of it into the grumpier System 2.

In the fifth chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman addresses the act of reading, and the impulse—even in what is normally thought of as the most cerebral of human acts—to fall back on System 1, to associate the ease of reading with the truth of what is read:

How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. The trouble is that there may be other causes for your feeling of ease—including the quality of the font and the appealing rhythm of the prose—and you have no simple way of tracing your feelings to their source.

Thus the context writing exists in and other aspects unrelated to the actual content are critical to the reception that writing receives. In addition to studies on the effects of different fonts on credibility, Kahneman also cites experiments that show the importance of the quality of paper (for printed materials), of the contrast between a font and its background, and of the presence of distractions that reduce the cognitive ease of reading. In short, environments that make it easy to read also make it easy to believe what is being read. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this mixture of context and content is that is it extremely difficult for you to separate the two.

So legibility and the absence of distractions are not just design niceties; when a reader chooses to move an article into an app like Instapaper, they are strongly increasing the odds that they will like what they read and agree with it. And since readers often make that relocation at the recommendation of a trusted source, the written work is additionally “framed” as worthy even before the act of reading has begun.

Commercial publishers may not like the use of Instapaper or Readability, which strip the distractions otherwise known as ads from a cluttered website to focus solely on the text at hand, but they are an unalloyed good for writers.

Ribaric, Tim: A Dead Simple New Books RSS feed

tim ribaric — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:18:14 +0000

Here is my dead simple new book RSS feed recipe that I'm currently using on a LibGuide.

unalog for code4lib: So You Need A Typeface « Inspiration Lab

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:21:44 +0000

JISC Information Environment Team: Putting the User at the Heart of Education

Ben Showers — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:39:00 +0000

This is an update on a recent Usability workshop held by Ben Showers and Torsten Reimer as part of their work on the Usability and Adaptability of User-Interfaces.

Background

As universities and academic institutions increase the focus and investment on improving the ‘student experience’, so the ‘user’ needs to find their way into the heart of everything the institution does, not just the teaching and learning.

Usability and user experience (UX) have become important considerations in the design and creation of new websites, software and systems for universities. With increasing investments in digital infrastructure and content, addressing the needs of the users is one of the best ways to ensure the uptake of these investments – be it in research, administration or learning.

UX should become a critical tool in the sector’s response to the challenges of rising student fees, the need to make every investment count in the light of reduced budgets and increasing expectations from students and staff who are used to new sleek gadgets and web 2.0 environments.

In light of this context, Torsten and I recently held a two day workshop exploring usability in higher education.

The first day focused on JISC funded projects that were exploring the Usability and Adaptability of User-Interfaces. The second day involved a broad range of delegates from both within and outside universities, including the library, institutional web managers, systems managers, usability consultants and academics.

The workshop resulted in some very rich discussions from the delegates, and we have attempted to capture some of the themes and main topics of conversation below.

Emerging themes

We have grouped the themes under some broad headings:

Affecting the project/development culture

Embedding Usability

It was clear that usability and considerations of the user are usually a ‘bolt-on’ to institutional developments and projects. The workshop reiterated the need for usability to be part of the project from the start – furthermore it should be the framework from within which you undertake your project. This point was echoed by a number of the projects that took part in the JISC usability programme (an example being the British History Online project).

Indeed during a ‘programme design’ session it was suggested that future usability project funding should aim to embed usability into the institution. This could be achieved by a kind of ‘pay it forward’ idea whereby the successful project then initiates its usability lessons into another of the institutions developments.

Strategic buy-in

Connected to the above poin is the need to make strong arguments to the senior managers who make the decisions about resources as there may not always be a strong appreciation of the benefits of a user-centred approach.

An appeal to the usability of the product is a first step, but more may be required. One suggestion was exposing senior managers to the user’s pain – let them watch the UX sessions you undertake. Let them see every grimace and hear all the expletives!

Training and Skills

It was clear that there are a number of significant skills gaps within the current training and teaching of developers and project managers for usability practice and methods. JISC programmes of work are often addressing the skills gaps in their area specifically, and this may be something that any future work in the UX environment should confront.

However, there was agreement that it’s important to be able to share best practice, and enable institutions to have conversations with each other and experts to ensure they’re able to get hold of the right skills externally if necessary (one of the projects: UsabilityUK, has exactly this remit).

Demonstrating Impact

One of the most interesting discussions at the event was the difficulties involved in demonstrating the impact of usability. Functional requirements are easy to quantify (it either does or doesn’t do as requested), non-functional requirements (like usability) are harder to measure.

What potential does including metrics in the National Student Survey, as an example, have to demonstrating the impact usability could have within HE? Maybe more fundamentally having a clearer idea of how you measure impact more generally could help clarify how the user experience is evidenced.

Communication

Usability by any other name…

I am guilty of it in this post, and I even started day two of the workshop with an admission of guilt: I would use the phrase usability without unpacking it. Worse, I used it as a synonym for a group of similar terms (user experience, user-centred design, human computer interaction).

However, this may well be one of the issues that contributes to a misunderstanding of usability, and confusion around the different terms. A number of the delegates felt it would be beneficial to ensure terms were well defined. If you’re communicating with non-experts, such as developers, you need to be sure they’re able to understand you and your requirements.

On reflection, I do wonder whether this is a reflection of usability as a research discipline. Is the real message that the user needs to go at the heart of everything the academy does; it needs to become truly user-centred. Does the concern for semantics get in the way of this goal?

Inter-communication

Connected to the above is the difficulty of communicating with the members of your team or project. While you might be able to capture the requirements of your users, it is essential you’re able to then communicate these directly and precisely to your developer.

One potential answer is a very agile approach to development that sees the developer coding with the user(s). This was an approach that the ALUIAR project took at Southampton, and it worked well for the project.

Not always talking to the converted

One of the interesting aspects of the workshop was that we had a pretty good mix of professional UXers, researchers, institutional system people, librarians and learning technologists. However, most had a very good appreciation of the benefits and importance of UX to their institutional mission.

Indeed, a number of delegates made the point that it was important that we addressed the un-converted.

Usability is dead, long live usability

Finally, two points seem to provide interesting conclusions to the workshops discussions:

In its practical application within an HE environment, usability is closely meshed with other similar issues: impact; accessibility; sustainability. The aim is simply to make software easier for users.

Usability should be the driving principle behind projects within HE (especially in JISC funded ones); but this doesn’t that the only way to address this is through a usability programme. Rather, usability should pervade projects without defining them.

What’s next…?

The workshop was incredibly useful as a way to start thinking about how JISC might continue to help support usability practice within HE.

Indeed, it gave us a clear message that usability/accessibility is one area of the HE picture that is in real need of some focused activity. Torsten and I already have a few concrete ideas we’d like to start developing – if all goes well nthrough JISC-funded activities later this year.

Watch this space for more news!

—–

Many thanks to the delegates and projects who made the workshop so successful and the discussions so rich. And to Addy Pope of Edina and the USED project for the use of his camera and pictures.

del.icio.us: irc.code4lib.org

eosuchian — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:00:48 +0000

del.icio.us: code4lib jobs: Jobs

eosuchian — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:58:19 +0000

unalog for code4lib: git ready » learn git one commit at a time

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:27:22 +0000

del.icio.us: The Code4Lib Journal – Issue 16

jeremybartczak — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:15:36 +0000

Schmidt, Aaron: An Analysis of National Geographic’s Design

Aaron Schmidt — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:00:56 +0000

Who isn’t familiar with that wonderful yellow frame?

It holds breathtaking images of exotic destination and mountains of nostalgia! It’s the flag of the editorial institution that National Geographic has established over the span of 120 years.

The eponymous yellow rectangle has seen virtually no change, much like the interior pages, since it first bordered the front covers of the 1888 launch issue.

I thought it could teach us a few things about timelessness in graphic design, so I randomly picked four issues to look at; March 1964, November 1988, April 2000 and a recent December 2009.

The Timeless Beauty of National Geographic

Rosenthal, David: Tide Pools and Terrorists

David. (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

There's an article in the current issue of Stanford's alumni magazine that discusses, in a very accessible way, many of the concepts people need to think about when designing systems for long-term digital preservation. Raphael D. Sagarin has evolved from studying how organisms in the Monterey tide pools adapt to climate change, to critiquing responses to terrorist incidents. He suggests we have a lot to learn from the way organisms respond and adapt to threats. For example:

STRATEGY 1: Embrace uncertainty. In the natural world, they argue, most species increase uncertainty for their enemies by deploying multiple strategies for attack or defense. Think of the octopus, says Sagarin: "It's got an ink cloud it can use; it's got a beak it can use; some of them have poison; they've got these suckers; it's got really good camouflage." If one strategy doesn't work, it can fall back on another.

Increasing uncertainty for the enemy is one major aspect of the defenses of the LOCKSS system. The more you increase your certainty about what your preservation system is doing, the easier you make it for an enemy or an error to affect large parts of the system. In the long term, randomization is your friend. So is:

STRATEGY 2: Decentralize. "Putting homeland security in the hands of a massive, plodding bureaucracy hardly represents evolutionary advancement," ... Sagarin's ideal defense would operate more like the human immune system—with units that react semiautonomously to threats, loosely governed by a central command. "Instead of relying on a centralized brain or controller for everything, you farm out the responsibility of searching for and responding to changes in the environment to many, many different agents," he says.

LOCKSS boxes are autonomous, only loosely coordinated, in exactly this manner. The more coordinated the behavior of the parts of your system, the more correlated are the failures.

The whole article is worth a careful read, as is Sagarin's Adapt or Die article in Foreign Policy.

Open Knowledge Foundation: OGDCamp + OKCon = Open Knowledge Festival 2012 in Helsinki, Finland!

Kat Braybrooke — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:15:51 +0000

The following post is by Kat Braybrooke, London-based Community Coordinator of the Open Knowledge Foundation (Regional Chapters and Groups) and a core organiser of OKFest.

On September 17-22 this year, global communities will be descending on the shores of Helsinki for a week-long celebration called the Open Knowledge Festival – and you’re the first to be invited!

For this festival – the first of its kind in the world – we are bringing Open Government Data Camp (OGDCamp) and Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) to the same place to provide new opportunities for collaboration. We’ll start the week by supporting practitioners working in the fields of open government and municipal data, and end it by exploring the diversity of open knowledge initiatives from a global perspective. The organising team, a talented gathering of Finns and leaders from around the world, are already hard at work planning a busy week of seminars, workshops, lectures, hackathons, keynotes, coding jams and interactive media sessions that will bring together participants from a wide variety of backgrounds in new ways.

Another important element of OKFest is its Nordic location. The host city of Helsinki is in the midst of an urban Finnish renaissance built on inclusive communities. It is home to one of our first incubating Local Chapters, and as the next World Design Capital for 2012, the city will also be hosting an inspiring cohort of open data practitioners who combine design, art, academia and technology to support innovation in new and interesting ways. Helsinki locals organised the city’s first Open Knowledge Meetup this October and have just opened the first FABlab in Finland at the Aalto University Media Factory. We look forward to highlighting even more Finnish projects in the field of open knowledge, and hope to see the participation of many representatives of Nordic nations.

Most importantly of all, we want your ideas to be highlighted at OKFest. We are currently looking for proposals regarding sessions, satellite events, research streams, hackathons, lecture topics and other forms of collaboration. Have a great project or idea that you want to share with the global community? This is the place to do it. Join our public discussion list and say hello here and start finding collaborators on Twitter using the hashtag #okfest.

We hope to see you in Helsinki, Finland this September for a week of new friends, open knowledge and global inspiration with a Nordic twist!

Photo from OGDCamp 2011 thanks to Volker Agüeras Gäng on Flickr.

del.icio.us: The Code4Lib Journal

janveenman — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:42:49 +0000

del.icio.us: Quickstart - GitHub

eosuchian — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:21:43 +0000

del.icio.us: join.me

eosuchian — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:19:52 +0000

del.icio.us: The Code4Lib Journal – Ref2RIS: Importing Word-Processed Bibliographies into Bibliographic Management Software

cegepdom — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:34:14 +0000

del.icio.us: The Code4Lib Journal – How To Build a Computer Availability Map

gilmour70 — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:19:01 +0000

del.icio.us: code4lib2012Seattle

eosuchian — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:37:35 +0000

Engard, Nicole: Merging Bib Records in Koha 3.2

Nicole — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:00:00 +0000

One of the neat new features in Koha 3.2 is the ability to merge bib records together. This tutorial will walk you through the steps to do this.

If you have an idea for a video, please just let me know and I’ll add it to my list of things to record.

Open Knowledge Foundation: The Data Journalism Handbook: Final call for contributions

Lucy Chambers — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:30:07 +0000

This post is by Liliana Bounegru, Project Coordinator at the European Journalism Centre, and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross posted on DataDrivenJournalism.net

Where can I find data and how can I request access to it? What tools are available to me? How can I find useful stories within datasets? And, most importantly, how can I make a living through the practise of data journalism?

Do these questions sound familiar? They should, because these are all questions that any data journalist who is just getting started should be asking.

Leading data journalists from the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, and other top media organisations from around the world, are working together to answer all of these questions (and more) in the Data Journalism Handbook. The handbook is the first comprehensive practical guide to data journalism.

As Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News at the New York Times, noted at the beginning of the project:

“A project like this is quite necessary. It’s kind of surprising that someone hasn’t tried to do this until now.”

Interested in contributing? We want YOU!

Work on the handbook was kick-started in November of last year at the Mozilla Festival in London. In just two days, 55 contributors drafted 60 pages (20,000 words) for six chapters. The handbook is a community project; therefore, anyone who has experience in data journalism can help draft the book. The work, in turn, goes back to the community as anyone is allowed to freely use, modify, adapt, and reuse the handbook.

Contributions have been flooding in and since Mozilla we have been editing, updating, filling in gaps, and restructuring. We are very close to a first complete draft of the book and we need your help to get there. We are looking for authors, editors and peer reviewers to draft chapters, review content, style and accuracy of the book.

In the table of contents below you can see the progress that has been made and where input is needed:

0. Preface (in progress)
- 0.1 The purpose of this book
- 0.2 Add to this book
- 0.3 Share this book
1. Introduction (done)
- 1.1 What is data journalism?
- 1.2 Why is it important?
2. Introducing data journalism in the newsroom
- 2.1 Changes in the newsroom (contributors needed)
- 2.2 How is it done: journo-developers vs. coders for hire (in progress)
3. Types of outcomes/projects and case studies
- 3.1 Data powered stories (in progress)
- 3.2 Data served with stories (in progress)
- 3.3 Data driven applications (contributors needed)
4. Working on the data story
- 4.1. Step 1: Getting your data
  - 4.1.1 Where does data live? (in progress)
  - 4.1.2 Asking for data (in progress)
  - 4.1.3 Getting your own data (in progress)
  - 4.1.4 Crowdsourcing data (contributors needed)
- 4.2 Step 2: Understanding your data
  - 4.2.1 Data literacy (done)
  - 4.2.2 Working with data tips (in progress)
  - 4.2.3 Tools and techniques for analysing data (contributors needed)
  - 4.2.4 Harnessing expert opinions: Annotating datasets (contributors needed)
- 4.3 Step 3: Finding a story in your data (in progress)
  - 4.3.1 From datasets to stories – approaches
- 4.4 Step 4: Delivering your data project (contributors needed)
  - 4.4.1 Serving data with stories
  - 4.4.2 Visualising data
  - 4.4.3 Data driven applications
5. Engagement, outreach and community (contributors needed)
6. How to make data journalism sustainable
- 6.1 Measuring impact (contributors needed)
- 6.2 Business models (contributors needed)
7. Appendix (in progress)
- 7.1 Further resources
- 7.2 Glossary

Whether you are a budding data journalist putting the manual through its paces or someone with years of experience, we’d love your help to fine-tune the book and get it ready for the press (no pun intended).

If you’re interested to contribute to the first Data Journalism Handbook please fill in this form as soon as possible indicating your level and area of expertise and the chapter that you would like to contribute to. We will get in touch with you as soon as we can once you’ve submitted the form.

Deadline

A first complete draft is planned to be ready by the end of February.

The official launch of the The Data Journalism Handbook will be at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia from 25-29 April. The book will be available online as an e-book. Participants at the festival will have the opportunity to buy a printed copy of the book and enjoy a meet and greet with the authors where they may exchange knowledge and learn helpful tips about how to successfully become data journalists.

Questions?

For questions get in touch with the Data Journalism Handbook coordinators: Liliana Bounegru (bounegru [at] ejc.net) or Lucy Chambers (lucy.chambers [at] okfn.org).

unalog for code4lib: Southampton ECS Web Team › The Modeller

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:12:36 +0000

Schmidt, Aaron: National Park Service Library Symbol

Aaron Schmidt — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:00:51 +0000

Speaking of library symbols, I didn’t realize that the National Park Service had its own. Similar in theme to the standard: a person reading. But hey, at least it depicts a person.

They also have a bookstore symbol. No people involved.

More info at Map Symbols & Patterns for NPS Maps.

Schmidt, Aaron: Academic Library Circ Extrapolated

Aaron Schmidt — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:21:18 +0000

This chart shows the upper/lower quartiles and median for circulation per FTE student. As you can see this data shows a much more dramatic drop in the circulation of library materials. Rising student populations hide this fact.

More from Will Kurt in his post The End of Academic Library Circulation?

Remind me again why we insist on grasping at straws with eBook outrage, holding on to an old model of librarianship?

Bigwood, David: LCGFT for Moving Images: Best Practices

David (noreply@blogger.com) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:05:00 +0000

The OLAC Cataloging Policy Committee (CAPC) has approved the document Library of Congress Genre-Form Thesaurus (LCGFT) for Moving Images: Best Practices. It provides guidelines, with examples, for the usage of LCGFT for moving image materials, and complement existing official guidelines.

The purpose of this document is to provide guidelines, with examples, for the usage of Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT) for moving image materials. These guidelines are intended to complement existing official guidelines. As genre/form practice in general is currently being reviewed by several other committees, these guidelines will need to be revisited in the future; however, these best practices fulfill the need for short-term guidance.

In controversial areas, where existing rules have been questioned as to their usefulness, suggestions are offered for a consistent local practice that libraries might adopt for their own catalogs while still staying compliant with rules for record creation and editing in shared bibliographic databases.

JISC Access Management Focus: WAYRN: Where are You Right Now?

nicole — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:08:54 +0000

Anyone who has worked with federations will be familiar with the term WAYF – Where are You From? This is the question you are asked so a service provider can identity which institution you are affiliated with. As a term it’s not so accurate – am I really ‘from’ King’s College? – but as a concept it has helped explain the process in relatively simple terms to non-technical people. The keen eyed among you will have seen a generally tendency to refer to the WAYF as the ‘Discovery Service’ these days, a refinement of terms that always happens as services mature.

However, what happens if I *really* want to know where you are, not where you are from, but where you actually are at this minute? We’ve tended to rely on IP address checking to make this possible, but it has many problems. It means that Service Providers have to maintain and update a list of IP addresses for organisations – JSTOR recently told me that they have up to 3 change requests for IP ranges per day for their services (globally, not from the UK). It’s something that you have to remember to do if your IP range changes, and that depends on the right people being told that changes are occurring. We know it is prone to inaccuracies and human error – a certain provider was for a period of time convinced that the JISC IP range belonged to Bournemouth University. Finally, IP address doesn’t actually give you any interaction with an individual as it applies access indiscriminately to the machine and not to the user, so personalisation, customisation and other identity management features are not possible.

These problems are magnified in the schools sector, where any Service Provider may be dealing with literally thousands of schools customers. There are also even more reasons within the school sector as to why it’s important to know that a logged in student is actually within a specific IP range in terms of serving content to children.

A short while ago, the schools representatives on the UK federation Technical Advisory Group approached the federation staff and asked if it would be possible to include a location assertion in the assertions made by an IdP to support the use cases where geographical location was important. The technical team and EDINA got to work and I’m pleased to say that the UK federation will be commissioning development of a location assertion to meet these use cases. As well as supporting many use-cases within the schools sector we can see places where this could be more broadly used, such as to support walk-in access.

For those interested in learning more, Ian Young recently presented his findings to the TAG and the slides from this talk are below or from slideshare directly. Development work will start shortly, so keep an eye out for further information and updates. If you would like further information on the work, drop a line to the UK federation helpdesk.

*Updated:*

…and here are some useful slides from Owen Stephens on this topic from way back at #FAM09.

Open Knowledge Foundation: Join us on Monday 27th February for #OpenDataCBG!

Laura Newman — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:30:08 +0000

The following post is by Laura Newman, a Cambridge based Community Co-ordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Interested in Open Data? Live in the Cambridge area? Join us for #OpenDataCBG!

On Monday 27th February, the open data community will be gathering in the Panton Arms in Cambridge for the second #OpenDataCBG meet-up. The evening is an opportunity for people from around Cambridge to meet and chat in a friendly and informal environment.

Submit a Lightning Talk!

The evening will kick-off with some lightning talks. Lightning talks are informal 2-3 minute presentations on any topic. Been working on an exciting project? Want to ask the community for advice on an idea you have in the pipeline? Lightning talks are a great opportunity to share your achievements and spark discussion. If you would like to give a lightning talk, contact laura.newman [@] okfn.org

Talk about it

Sign up on our meet-up page.
On Twitter? Talk to other attendees using the #OpenDataCBG hashtag.
Questions? Email laura.newman [@] okfn.org

Come along!

The first #OpenDataCBG meet-up in December was a great sucess. Whatever your interests – whether government, science, cultural heritage, hardware, design, transport, or something else entirely! – there are sure to be like-minded people eager to discuss your ideas and share their own.

Join us at 7pm on Monday 27th February in the Panton Arms to meet new friends, share experiences, and catch-up on all the open data news from in and around Cambridge!

Hellman, Eric: Libraries Happen

Eric Hellman (noreply@blogger.com) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:49:00 +0000

Michael Scotto's Just Flash is a children's book about a strange animal trying to figure out its identity.

Flash is the only animal of his kind, but he wishes he could just belong to a pack like everyone else at the zoo. He first tries to become another animal, in order to fit in. He tries to be a giraffe; he tries to be a gazelle; he even tries to be a zebra. Along the way, though, Flash realizes that it's more rewarding to be himself – no more, no less.

Libraries and librarians crossing over from print to digital must feel a lot like Flash. Even newly born entities like the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are finding themselves in an awkward period of not knowing what they should be.

I was a guest at a recent DPLA "Audience and Participation Work Stream" meeting that brought together participants with a variety of perspectives and experience, but joined by a deep concern for the future of libraries. We met at the Dallas Public Library, just after the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting at the nearby Convention Center. Our charge was to help articulate "why we need a public library when it's all on the web" and suggest how to attract involvement from all types of libraries.

The DPLA has the incredibly difficult task ahead. It must weave together many distinctive strands of activity emerging from a strong but inchoate desire for the missions of libraries to continue in new more powerful ways. It's encouraging to me that the DPLA leadership is spending a lot of time learning about the needs and desires of diverse communities. But I think that sometimes our understanding of what libraries are today holds us back from seeing what the library movement could be tomorrow. Separating the essential from the institutional manifestation is not always easy to do.

During my time in Dallas, I had the fortune to witness a "library" happening in its purest, most human form.

YALSA is one of the American Library Association's many incomprehensible abbreviations. YALSA stands for the Young Adult Library Services Association. I don't really know much about what YALSA does, but on the Sunday exhibit floor of the ALA meeting, I saw more than one group of teenagers roaming the exhibits wearing YALSA T-shirts. On the way back to my Dallas hotel, I shared a subway train car with one of these groups. I started chatting with two of the teens. It seems that the librarian at their suburban Dallas high school had organized their expedition. The teens had made off with huge bags full of books courtesy of the exhibit vendors.

Sitting on the other side of the train car was a Hispanic family- a young mother, her daughter of perhaps 6 years, and an older man who was probably the girl's grandfather. The little girl was reading what appeared to be a fast food restaurant placemat, but it didn't seem to interest her much. The YALSA teen next to me noticed. She asked the mother, "Are you going a long way on the train? I have some books here she might like." And out of the bag appeared a copy of Just Flash. The girl's eyes lit up. For the next 20 minutes I watched the girl enchanted by an illustrated story that had appeared as if by miracle, chosen specifically for her. As I got off the train, a second book was emerging from the teen's bag.

I don't know what sort of animal libraries will evolve into. Maybe librarians will ride trains with mega-book digital libraries on memory sticks for kids who need them. Maybe restaurant placemats be ultra-cheap reading devices. Whatever stripes it wears or what name it answers to, the simple act of letting a book bring joy and wonderment to a little girl will define what a library must be, no more, no less.

del.icio.us: Presenting results as dynamically generated co-authorship subgraphs in semantic digital library collections

eannieb — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:28:49 +0000

del.icio.us: Love to everyone going to #c4l12. This world needs saving, and you have a job to do. Thanks (PS. i wish i was there with 'ya) #code4lib – Mace Ojala (xmacex) http://twitter.com/xmacex/status/166304030342135808

ranti — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:39:34 +0000