MaisonBisson

Citing Library Collections On The Web

The example below uses a JavaScript to display bibliographic details about an item in Plymouth State University’s library catalog.

Now imagine this link included information on the availability of the item, and a button to request or reserve it….

This post is intended to demonstrate how library catalog data can be used in places far from the catalog, perhaps in Blackboard/WebCT, blogs, or elsewhere. I’m at the Innovative Users Group 2005 Conference, where I’ll use this post in my presentation on XML Server, session L5.

IUG2005: LDAP Is Not Single Sign-On

At Innovative Users Group 2005 Conference now. The most exciting thing today was Using LDAP Authentication by John Culshaw of University of Colorado at Boulder, and Richard Paladino of Innovative Interfaces. Despite the title, the raison d’etre of the presentation was single sign-on, and the unstated hurdle was identity management. Academic IT departments are struggling […] » about 200 words

Prisoners Of Age at Alcatraz

Found Ron Levine’s Prisoners of Age exhibit at Alcatraz today. Sadly, the website doesn’t appear give the prisoner’s stories, and, though the photos are well done, it’s the stories that hold our attention. » about 100 words

Leaving Las Vegas

Morning’s cold light shines harshly even on the strip, but this Saturday morning on Fremont Street looks especially forlorn. I’ll be on a plane to San Francisco for my conference in a few hours. » about 100 words

Golden Gate Hotel and Casino

According to the history printed on their diner placemats, the Golden Gate has been standing at the corner of Fremont and Main streets for 100 years. kris247 had some good fun eating unhealthy quantities of 99 cent shrimp cocktail at the Gate. [update:] The stay wasn’t bad, in fact, I enjoyed the best sleep I’ve […] » about 100 words

Fatburger and Henderson, NV

My trip to Henderson was a bust. I’ll eventually make a story about what I’d planned to do, but the only thing that worked out was a visit to Fatburger in the Sunset Station Casino. Along the way I snapped this bad panorama of the Vegas strip. The point here was to show the sprawl […] » about 200 words

Nevada Test Site Tour

Toured the Nevada Test Site today. No cameras allowed, but I did take along a GPS and marked points of interest along the way. I’ll have to upload the track and landmarks when I get home, but Google Sightseeing has some interesting Nevada destinations, including one for the test site area. But satellite photos can […] » about 100 words

Waiting In Long Beach

Long Beach airport is a small affair, seemingly more fitting for Dubuque Iowa than the south Los Angeles sprawl. Gates one through three are in a pre-manufactured temporary structure that’s obviously been in use for some time, but the food from the one vendor is better than in Boston and the Queen Mary Spa offers […] » about 300 words

beatnikside’s Vegas Photo Gallery

I can’t help but like beatnickside‘s Las Vegas Flickr photo set. It’s one of the most photographed of cities, but these photos are fresher than that. Sometimes enteraining, sometimes informing, the shots of Vegas’s glitz and glamour show special attention to detail. This week is Vegas week at MaisonBisson, since I’m out here before heading […] » about 200 words

SMART High Efficiency Car Coming To US

I got excited a while ago when I learned that Daimler Chrysler was bringing their little SMART car to Canada, and I’m even more excited now that I learn that it’s coming to the US via ZAP, a company originally formed to make and sell electric cars (ZAP stands for zero air pollution). Though powered […] » about 100 words

The Long Tail Of Violence

It’s been a few days of “long tail” talk here at MaisonBisson. Stories about popularity vs. the long tail and aesthetics of the short head are just below. Here’s one on the violence of the long tail. John Robb at Global Guerrillas wrote about the “dark side” of the long tail in a March 18 […] » about 300 words

National Weather Service Adds XML And RSS Feeds

The US National Weather Service just updated the SOAP/XML interface to their National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) and RSS feeds from their Storm Prediction Center. I feel a little happier about paying my taxes when I see government organizations like the Weather Service posting answers like this: The National Weather Service is striving to serve […] » about 300 words

Tetris Shelves

Gizmodo posted a picture and a little text about BraveSpaceDesign‘s Tetris Shelves. More from BraveSpaceDesign can be seen in this post at Land+Living. They’re all the standard Tetris shapes constructed of walnut and ash. My previous attempts at cabinet making were miserable failures, but considering these shelves cost seven large — yes, $7,000 — it’s […] » about 100 words

LibLime/Koha ILS

A comment to a post on The Shifted Librarian pointed me to the LibLime collection of open source library applications including the Koha ILS. They’ve got demos for the whole collection, including the OPAC. It’s the first I’d heard of LibLime or Koha ILS, but it’s good stuff and I certainly hope to see more […] » about 100 words

The Dark Side Of Networked Information

According to the website, MITRE is:

a not-for-profit company that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia.

All of this is interesting because BlogsOfWar points out that they’ve been presenting information on a project titled BlogINT: Weblogs as a Source of Intelligence (with slides in PDF format):

We will collect high volumes of information from weblogs and traditional television and Web-based news media. To characterize content, we will compare weblogs and traditional media using the method developed in MITRE’s Retrospective Source Analysis project. We will build spatio-temporal models of events from weblogs and compare these to ground truth for another assessment of accuracy, level of detail, and value.

The presentation is part of MITRE’s 2005 Annual Technology Symposium held at their campuses in Massachusetts and Virginia. The McLean event was April 13th, but the Bedford event isn’t until May 5th.

I wonder if I can still get tickets?

“Short Head” Vulgarity and Prurience

Chris Anderson at the Long Tail Blog quotes a passage from David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar […] » about 200 words

What Is Networked Information?

There’s data, then there’s information. Information is meaningful and self explanatory, data need to be aggregated and analyzed before they become information. Networks — Ethernet and the internet — transmit data, but our web browsers and the back-end applications they connect to turn it into useful information. “Networked information” is what results from building connections […] » about 400 words

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Jenny Levine’s mention of my work with Innovative’s XML Server Wednesday drew a lot of attention, but there’s little online public discussion of Innovative to give some of my comments context. Innovative started started development on their XML Server product quite a while ago (five years, yes?), before later standards like MARC XML had any […] » about 300 words

Stanford Library’s Tech History Collection

I just discovered Standford Library’s collection of documents relating to the technology and culture in Silicon Valley and the development of the Mac thanks to a link from Gizmodo. Gizmodo was excited about the mice “wine tastings” that Apple did in its efforts to develop the first consumer mouse. Elsewhere, however, I found this interesting […] » about 900 words

XML Isn’t Enough

A lot of this is in my XML Server presentation at the Innovative Users Group conference in a couple weeks… Jenny Levine is an outspoken advocate for the use of RSS in libraries. One example she cites is posting lists of new acquisitions to library websites. She estimates that folks in the 77 libraries of […] » about 700 words

New Catagory: Libraries & Networked Information

Thank or blame Jenny Levine of TheShiftedLibrarian for this: I’ve just created a “Libraries and Networked Information” category here. More to come.

The Long Tail At MaisonBisson

Content here at MaisonBisson isn’t well focused, but a few stories have come out winners in the Google sweepstakes of passing popular fancy. My story about a giant bear in Alaska was one such winner, but I’m happy to see a few others are also getting read. My stories about stainless steel, the heat output […] » about 300 words

Safari 1.3 supports for contentEditable WYSIWYG

Melvin Rivera reports on <a href=“http://allforces.com/2005/04/19/wysiwyg-comes-to-safari-13/" title=“Safari 1.3’s support for contentEditable“>Safari 1.3’s support for contentEditable.

When Decorum Is Entirely Innapropriate

It’s hard to find the words to introduce Eric Berndt‘s open letter to his NYU Law School classmates. The Nation said the following:

Justice Antonin Scalia got more than he bargained for when he accepted the NYU Annual Survey of American Law’s invitation to engage students in a Q&A session. Randomly selected to attend the limited-seating and closed-to-the-press event, NYU law school student Eric Berndt asked Scalia to explain his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned Bowers v. Hardwick and struck down the nation’s sodomy laws. Not satisfied with Scalia’s answer, Berndt asked the Justice, “Do you sodomize your wife?” Scalia demurred and law school administrators promptly turned off Berndt’s microphone. As Berndt explains in his post to fellow law school students, it was an entirely fair question to pose to a Justice whose opinion–had it been in the majority — would have allowed the state to ask that same question to thousands of gays and lesbians, and to punish them if the answer is yes.

Read.

Copyright And The Internet

David Rothman at TeleRead linked to Franklin Pierce Law Center professor Thomas G. Field’s guide to copyright on the internet.

Field gives a clear overview of of the limits to copyright, the ways copyright applies to web sites and email, and the limited law on linking and framing web content. In his section on risks, he notes:

Copyright law precludes most uses of others’ works without explicit or implied permission. Because some uses are okay, people often ask which uses are okay. Such questions often miss the point. The most important risk is not of liability, it is of suit.

Litigation is expensive. People concerned about, say, the nuances of fair use must not become so entangled in legal details that they forget that anything generating income or interfering with another’s potential income dramatically increases the chance of suit.

This is about as much as we’ll get from Field about recent attacks on fair use by big media companies who are increasingly suit happy. Still, the guide is useful.

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a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about