WorldCat’s meme requests

Posted on by jessamyn

The funny thing about memes is you can’t force them. I mentioned this particular issue on Twitter a little bit ago but I find WorldCat’s Meme Request [update: link suddenly broken, see comments for text. another update: the post is now back. Huh.] post to be a little sketchy-seeming.

Maybe this is because of my particular perspective of not feeling that I get a lot of value for me or my library from WorldCat. Here’s the thing with this request. If this is a legitimate and okay use of Wikipedia — to add links to WC identities to applicable pages — Wikipedia has an open API, just go build a bot and do it, on the level. If it’s not okay, and my reading of the Wikipedia guidelines seems to indicate that it may not be, trying to end-run this by faking a grassroots movement seems to not be in the best interests of either Wikipedia or WorldCat. I don’t think WorldCat is trying to be shifty or sneaky here, I just don’t think their approach is as helpful as they may think it would be.

Also, let me state for the record, that I think the WorldCat identities project is really smoking hot. However there is still a huge difference between “all libraries” and “OCLC member libraries” and I’ll continue to raise these polite objections to the willful blurring of the line between the two until the point at which WorldCat can direct me to the actual nearest copy of Jane Eyre to my house.

why I’d try an API

Posted on by jessamyn

A few neat announcements in libraryland concerning data or connectors being made more open and available. These two examples may not seem as linked as they are.

  • LibraryThing releases (sort of) (almost) a million book covers, free for your use, under most circumstances. You can also cache the covers locally as long as you don’t do it in such a way that you support LT competitors. While I understand why this isn’t linked with the Open Library project, I’d love to see it get there in the future sometime. update: John Miedema reminds me in the comments that I’d meant to also link to the openbook WordPress plugin for people using WordPress.
  • WorldCat released their search API over the weekend. As with many OCLC things, this is great news for their member libraries and not that great for anyone else, but it’s a real step towards letting (their) people get at their data, not just their web pages. You can get some details, in slightly dense format, on this page.

EPA Libraries coming back… sort of

Posted on by jessamyn

Via resourceshelf, this account of the Memorandum of Agreement that was the result of arbitration between the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238 and the EPA. Please see the linked documents for information from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on why the EPAs compliance — which they termed “grudging” — was not acceptable to EPA library workers.

“Even as many collections remain in crates, EPA has decided to micromanage what is left,” [PEER Director Carol] Goldberg added, noting that the agency has still not accounted for many of the library holdings it had removed. “Professional librarians should be making these management decisions, not political appointees.”

W00T! Nothing exploded! Another Evergreen migration.

Posted on by jessamyn

Congrats to Evette Atkin and the other superstars from the Michigan Library Consortium for getting the Branch District Library up and running on Evergreen without mishap. They give their own shoutout to Equinox for being great to work with. Yays all around.

The Michigan Library Consortium (MLC) is thrilled to announce that Branch District Library is our first Michigan Evergreen library to migrate to the open-source Evergreen software. Their new catalog is part of Michigan Evergreen, Michigan’s open-source ILS project. Migrations for the remaining Michigan Evergreen pilot libraries are scheduled for this fall.

[maintainIT]

is your library’s browser safe?

Posted on by jessamyn

FreeGovInfo — whose guest blogger this month is none other than Ric Davis, acting Superintendent of Documents and Director of Library Services & Content Management at the U.S. GPO — points to a well-researchd report about vulnerable web browsers and the problems they pose. The article concludes that only 60% of web surfers use current versions of whatever browsing software they choose to use. This isn’t one of those “Hey, get Firefox!” articles, though it does point out that users of the Firefox browser are the most likely to be using a current version of the operating system — IE users are least likely — and part of the reason for this is that browser and plug-in version updating is built in to the system itself and turned ON by default. Read this article and then go make sure your library’s browsers are updated to the latest version. It’s important.

Understanding the nature of the threats against Web browser and their plug-in technologies is important for continued Internet usage. As more users and organizations depend upon these browser technologies to access ever more complex and distributed business applications, any threats to the underlying platform equate to a direct risk to business continuity and integrity.