Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Finally! Pointing to the Library of Congress bibliographic records #

Last year, I complained that since I couldn't figure out a way to generate a persistent URL to a Library of Congress card record, I was forced to point to sources like Amazon.com instead.  At the DLF meeting last week, I learned how to generate a persistent URL from David Williamson of the Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team -- the trick is to use the Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) as the identifier. Here's a URL that works (and which doesn't have any session-dependent ids): http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v3=1&DB=local&CMD=010a+2002021634&CNT=10+records+per+page I also realized that instead of feeding LCCN to the script, I can feed an ISBN.  For example: http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v3=1&DB=local&CMD=020a+0684869799&CNT=10+records+per+page We should be use this knowledge to generate LC URLs now.... [Later, David Carter-Tod rewrites the libarylookup bookmarklet to make use of this information -- that's the great thing about blogging what I learn...]   Posted by Raymond Yee on 5/20/03; 11:05:17 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Lou Marinoff's reading at Cody's Books tomorrow night #

I might be interested in attending a reading by Lou Marinoff tomorrow night at Cody's Books.  He'll be talking about The Big Questions : How Philosophy Can Change Your Life.  I have a long-term interest in getting people to think deeply about their own lives through contemplating how worldviews are expressed in texts and in their own assumptions.   In the courses I've taught in ATDP, however, I put the emphasis on reading texts and, secondarily, on applying to one's own inner life.  How much emphasis does Marionff put on reading texts carefully -- if any? While I'm talking about a book I have yet to read, let me mention a book about close readings of text that I admire:  Engaging Ideas:  The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Thinking in the Classroom.  [amazon, LC] I learned much about how to engage a class in the challenges and joys of reading texts deeply and searchingly.  I had little understanding before reading this book of how much I took for granted the skills I had that I still had to cultivate in my students.  Somehow, I saw my students as just like me save that they lacked knowledge of particular facts.  No -- my students weren't just like me in that way.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 5/20/03; 10:52:39 PM from the Personal Notes dept. Discuss

Tim Bray on his work at OCLC #

It's truly exciting to see someone of Tim Bray's calibre bring his knowledge and experience of XML to OCLC.  Bray describes some of his perspectives on the problem: In recent months, I've been having serious fun on the job working with OCLC WorldCat data. WorldCat is big - about as big as the Web, and in some respects richer. It is also amazingly under-utilized (what was the last time you did a large-scale search on anything but Google?), and we'd like to fix that. Herewith some notes on who OCLC is, what WorldCat is, and some of the fun we're having. (Warning: long, and with some pitching for Antarctica; but some juicy screenies, and infojunkies must read.) Many of us are looking forward to seeing what he comes up with. [CurrentCites, SiT, Shifted Librarian]   Posted by Raymond Yee on 5/20/03; 4:12:34 PM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss