Monthly Archives: March 2011

So yet another in the long list of cases where actually-existing MARC data makes certain elements not really usable by software, because of encoding it in ambiguous ways.  This one is particularly mysterious and frustrating to me, because it’s a … Continue reading →

I started out trying to write an essay explaining a bit more about how relevance ranking works, trying to be both accurate (if incomplete) and accessible to non-technical readers.  The motivation was librarians who wanted to know more about how … Continue reading →

I had an app displaying all wrong in IE7. Turns out it was a syntax error in the CSS, that other browsers (including IE8) were forgiving, but IE7 was not. left: 10px;’ Yep, that’s an isolated single-quote on the end … Continue reading →

I had an app which displays fine in IE8, but IE7 is messing up the CSS for some reason. To debug this, at first I thought i had to use a copy of IE7, which is kind of pain. However, … Continue reading →

Finally got around to reading  (I’ve had it open in a browser tab for weeks) Kelley’s presentation on “Will RDA Kill MARC?”, which from my point of view isn’t really about its title exactly,  so much as it is a … Continue reading →

We’ve gone ‘live’ (sort of) with our Blacklight-based (which means it’s Solr-based) ‘next generation’ public catalog. I say ‘sort of’ because it’s a phase we’re calling ‘public beta’ or ‘OPAC alternative’ — the legacy OPAC is still the primary catalog … Continue reading →

I have a plug-in in Umlaut which tries to look up available full text on Internet Archive. It’s just an author/title search, so does result in false positives sometimes, but not too too often in my experience. Most of my … Continue reading →

This URL appears in a bib record, reporting to be an FBI report on the Grateful Dead, which sounds kind of interesting, no? http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS97796 It doens’t work. Isn’t the ‘p’ supposed to stand for ‘persistent’? At least it does result … Continue reading →

tinyurl is a simple one-purpose service.  And it correspondingly has a delightfully simple “api”.  If you ever want to automatically create tinyurls from within an application, you can just request “http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=$URL”, and you get back a text/plain document which contains … Continue reading →

When you make an $.ajax request in JQuery, you can have a ‘success’ and ‘error’ callback. Except if the remote URL is completely unreachable (for instance, because the app it points at is down), for some reason that still counts … Continue reading →