Posted in General Thoughts on Jun 18th, 2008 4 Comments »
For the last three weeks I’ve been working on creating a prototype of a Wordpress widget which retrieves search results from the WorldCat API and mashes that data up with information from other sources including (LibraryThing, Google Books, Amazon and Open Library). The idea is to create a sidebar listing of books with enhanced information [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Jun 11th, 2008 No Comments »
I originally planned for this summer to be a quiet one without any travel after early June. I wanted to have some time to recover and also not be stressed out the way I was last summer with too many commitments (professional and personal) and a web redesign I was trying to push to get [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Jun 7th, 2008 1 Comment »
I don’t know if it is my luck or just because I like to use Drupal modules that aren’t quite right yet. I’ve been trying to get the TinyMCE or FCKEditor modules for version 6 of Drupal to work right this week with little success. Thus far the TinyMCE modules is the closest to working, [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Jun 3rd, 2008 1 Comment »
When I started here at UH (three years ago this coming August) my primary mandate was to give librarians and staff the ability to create and maintain their own content on the library website in a scalable, easy to use way. I’m starting to feel like we are very close to achieving that goal. While [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on May 21st, 2008 No Comments »
You may or may not know that I’ve spent the better part of the last year working on a book entitled Library Blogging with Jason Griffey from University of Tennessee Chattanooga. Last week we got the page proofs to review. Looking at them reminded me that like most technology books though, the darn thing is [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on May 19th, 2008 No Comments »
Last week I was working to put together a survey/vote in Drupal for the YourBIGWIG site in order to allow people to vote on topics for this year’s Social Software Showcase. As always, this sort of endeavor is one big experiment. First I had to find a module that would do the job. Then install [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on May 5th, 2008 3 Comments »
After spending the better part of the last couple weeks working with the WorldCat API to get at my library’s holdings, I realized that I’d made an incorrect assumption in my plans. I was describing what I was doing to our Head of Cataloging and Metadata Services over lunch when she interrupted me to say [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on May 2nd, 2008 7 Comments »
I’m doing some work with the early release of WorldCat API to incorporate some new functionality into our content management system. Part of this involves searching WorldCat and manipulating the records retrieved in MARCXML. While the service will also return Dublin Core records, I decided that I preferred to work with the full information. This [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on May 2nd, 2008 3 Comments »
Sometimes you just don’t know about a new technology until you see it in action. In February, Google announced a new feature in Google Spreadsheet which allowed you share a spreadsheet by creating a form into which data could be entered into the spreadsheet. This didn’t hit my radar until very recently when a conference [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on May 1st, 2008 No Comments »
In my last post, I mentioned that I had been working on a Drupal project that was related to one of my ALA groups but that I couldn’t talk about it yet. Today I’m really thrilled to announce the debut of that project: YourBIGWIG, which is part of the crusade effort to implement more modern [...]
