Monthly Archives: April 2010

So I am in an ongoing war with RefWorks (the software, and a little bit the people) to get non-ascii chars (in this case, simply latin alphabet with diacritics) imported succesfully into Refworks. I am using the RefWorks import filters, … Continue reading →

In a conversation that no doubt continues to be frustrating for all involved, because we all think we’ve had the exact same conversation a dozen times before, Bernhard Eversberg wrote: No, to learn MARC does not consist of learning all … Continue reading →

A post on the excellent Catalogablog makes me realize that thread on NGC4Lib is part of a veritable epidemic, an epidemic of what in my opinion is irresponsible trend-hopping hand-waving. This business of “An entity-relational model is the wrong thing, … Continue reading →

A topic I’ve ranted about before, and was inspired to rant about again in an NGC4Lib thread, where Cory Rockliff wrote: MARC, as is often pointed out, was conceived of as a data exchange format; and while our library systems, … Continue reading →

So in Solr, normally we’re used to stopwords just kind of magically working. If you enter a stop word in a query, it’ll just be silently ignored and stripped out (unlike my legacy OPAC, which will give you zero results … Continue reading →

So a lot of libraries are on the bandwagon of developing “mobile applications” or “mobile interfaces” for their services. My impression — and I would love to be shown I’m wrong here — is that the thought process is generally … Continue reading →

Okay, stupid ruby trick time, who can figure out why this works in Rails? (I honestly don’t know myself, can’t quite figure it out).(It will only work in Rails, since it uses the Symbol#to_proc method. You can get an interactive … Continue reading →

Here is a draft (in progress) spec for a better Marc exporter from Horizon. We’ve had some problems with the out of the box SirsiDynix “marcout” functionality, and are considering either writing in-house or contracting out work to write a … Continue reading →