Monthly Archives: January 2011

So Google Scholar lets institutions register their OpenURL link resolver details. And this lets those institutions show up in the Google Scholar preferences. And if a user chooses that institution from the preferences, then they’ll get links to that institutions … Continue reading →

…on a web applicaiton, for non-technical people. There is some skill to filing a good bug report. But not really that much, just a few tricks and tips. If you can give your developers or IT staff a good bug/problem … Continue reading →

So in a comment on another post, Mr. Gunn mentioned that Mendeley distributes it’s citation database under a CC-BY license.  That’s pretty awesome of them, to allow for re-use of their data, instead of trying to monopolize and monetize it. … Continue reading →

I saw a great point made recently in this recorded lecture,  comparing rdbms (SQL)  to NoSQL data stores. Solr is NOT a “NoSQL data store”, it’s best not to think of Solr as a ‘store’ at all, but instead as … Continue reading →

In a post on the Pegasus Librarian blog about the EBSCO land grabs, a very interesting discussion ensued on, among other things, what libraries could/should be doing to serve our users while maintaining control of what we’re doing and it’s … Continue reading →

We’ve all been seeing for a while EBSCO increasingly getting ‘exclusive’ rights to aggregate content, so you’ve got to buy indexes from EBSCO if you want it. In another step in this strategy to monopolize content, EBSCO has withdrawn their … Continue reading →

In my ERB files in Rails apps, I’m in the habit of entering comments not meant to be rendered to output like this: <% # localized to put “showing X through Y of Z” in this block %> That was … Continue reading →

As a sort of hobby (although it’ll turn into code I’ll use if I ever succeed) I try to write a parser for a google-like query language, even though I know little about writing parsers. It’s surprising but there doesn’t … Continue reading →

I was interested in how many users of our existing interfaces used a ‘saved records’ or ‘bookmark’  feature, to inform how much development time should be put into such for our Blacklight application. In particular, I was interested in how … Continue reading →

I’m trying to really polish off the edges and provide a slick interface in our Blacklight implementation, to contrast with the very hacky legacy OPAC. Applied to the display of your items out with due dates… In a display of … Continue reading →