Friday, January 28, 2005

Lloyd's revealing question #

Lloyd asks in how much do you reveal from this window?: How much of yourself do you think you have revealed in your weblog, over the years? And is it an accurate (as opposed to idealized) version of yourself that your reading audience sees? Finally, do you feel that you can continue sharing your life in this way, for the foreseeable future, and what consequences might you face down the line, if you continue to do so? I won't be able to do justice right away to the multiple threads in Lloyd's question, but let me give it a shot. I think that I've revealed a significant amount of myself in my weblogs and my wikis, much of which I intentionally reveal but much I suspect is revealed even without my knowledge or intention. I have strived to be honest in my writing, which leads to some level of accuracy. But we also know that no matter how honest we are, we are limited in our wisdom and understanding and ability to self-disclose. I plan to write openly for the forseeable future. Indeed, my wiki and blogs are more active than they have ever been. I write openly as a calculated risk that what I write about will hold up over time and that what I'm doing here is worth doing. I write thinking that there is no real way to take back what I write and that folks down the road, even decades later, might pull up what I write today. It's a scary thought at times. I feel exposed, as though I am planning to run for president one day and have to worry about every dirty piece of laundry confronting me just when I am about to make that crucial campaign speech. Only time will tell how good of a call I am making to open myself in this way. Let me leave off with a quote from Jakob Nielsen in Durability of Usability Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox): The lure of the present is especially strong when writing for the Web. In writing a book, I'm highly conscious of people who will be reading my text ten or more years into the future. But when posting to my website, I tend to write for today's readers, even though 80% of the pageviews will occur after an article has passed into the archives. Luckily, most of my old analyses hold up pretty well, and ten-year-old articles continue to be 78% relevant. However seductive the present might be, writing for the Web is writing for the ages, not just for the moment. (People who post stream-of-consciousness entries in their weblogs, for example, might want to consider that they're also writing for managers who might hire them in twenty years.) A noteworthy caution for us all.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/28/05; 7:15:29 PM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss

End of the week progress report: MARC and OpenURL crosswalk #

As part of integrating the Scholar's Box with MetaLib and part of understanding the interrelationships among bibliographic metadata, we are trying to figure out how to construct an OpenURL from the MARC XML coming from the MetaLib X-Server. Here's a query I sent out to a MetaLib X-Server development list: How have folks created OpenURLs from the metalib X-server search results? [....] Did folks create the OpenURL from the OAI MARC (or original MARC) output from X-Server? Is there a call to SFX that one can make to do that work? David Walker's suggestions David Walker from CSU San Marcos has done some work in this area. He has kindly shared some info, which I quote here with his permission: The trick is that not all of the information in the MARC record is sufficiently parsed to make a direct OpenURL request to SFX. You can pretty easily get at the ISSN/ISBN, book or article title, journal title, and year, since those reside in separate, distinct fields. Some of the most pertinent information for constructing a full-text link, however -- including the volume, issue, and start page of a journal article -- are usually included in a single field by most databases, and these then need to be parsed out to construct an OpenURL. Trying out the OpenURL Referrer extension I need to remind myself of the intricacies of OpenURLs(s) and the MARC XML spec, so some of what I write here is geared to bringing myself up to speed again. To that end, I have tried installing the Openly's OpenURL Referrer FireFoxBrowser extension: Perhaps your local library subscribes to an electronic database that carries the article you are interested in. OpenURL Referrer, a new extension for the Firefox web browser, adds a link to GoogleScholar's results page that points to your library's full-text copy of the article. This extension is interesting to me because of its implementation of both the 0.1 and 1.0 versions of OpenURL -- and because it does so in the context of Google Scholar, the intriguing new kid on the block when it comes to metasearch. Alas, I've been running into problems with the extension. I sent a bug report in and am working with the developer to track down the problem. There may be issues in how the extension is interacting with another extension; we don't know yet. (This behavior does bring up the matter of how Firefox extensions interact with each other, a topic little discussed in my limited view of things.) Reading about OpenURL In the meantime, I did download the extension and printed out some code to study it. I've also printed out Ex Libris - OpenURL Syntax to formally study the OpenURL 0.1 syntax. Searches for good, simple info on OpenURL 0.1 and the putatively much more complicated 1.0 led me to Walt Crawford, his OpenURL - Brief Bibliography, which, in turn, points to a 2-page description of OpenUrl. To help me understand OpenURL version 1.0, I plan to read Z39.88-2004: The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services The Key/Encoded-Value (KEV) Format Implementation Guidelines Current Next Steps track down the issues with the OpenURL extension finish reading and distilling the documentation around OpenURLs ask some colleagues about what they know about MARC to OpenURL crosswalks   Posted by Raymond Yee on 1/28/05; 6:56:25 PM from the Libraries dept. Discuss