I upgraded the WordPress software from version 2.07 to version 2.1 last night. There should be no significant change in functionality. The upgrade is largely focused on optimizing performance. I’ll be monitoring the system more closely and appreciate feedback about unexpected behavior…

This name change does help to clarify the nature of the product, but it doesn’t eliminate the legal issues.

Official Google Blog: Judging Book Search by its cover

What’s in a name? Quite a bit, actually; what you call yourself says a lot about what you think you are. And we’ve been thinking lately that Google Print should really be called Google Book Search.

A brief discussion of the Semantic Web, Ontologies, and tooks to manage them…

ACM Queue – Order from Chaos – How can ontologies and the Semantic Web help us structure the world’s semi-structured information?

There is probably little argument that the past decade has brought the “big bang� in the amount of online information available for processing by humans and machines. Two of the trends that it spurred (among many others) are: first, there has been a move to more flexible and fluid (semi-structured) models than the traditional centralized relational databases that stored most of the electronic data before; second, today there is simply too much information available to be processed by humans, and we really need help from machines. On today’s Web, however, most of the information is still for human consumption in one way or another.

Ken Varnum points to a posting by Wally Grotophorst, Associate University Librarian at George Mason University’s library, who posted “a small Perl application that searches his Voyager online catalog for a specific Library of Congress call number and returns the results as an RSS feed.”

RSS4Lib:: On-The-Fly RSS by LC Number for Voyager

I’ve been thinking about doing something similar for awhile. This prompted me to give it a try. I created an expect script that creates a list of new books catalogued on our Innovative system and saves it to a text file. A perl script then converts the output to RSS and saves it in a folder on teh web site.

The OCKHAM Initiative

Crunching the metadata – The Boston Globe

Alexandria Manifesto on Libraries, the Information Society in Action

For a couple years I’ve been producing a weekly list of new books and another list of journals that have been received during the past week. Using an expect script, I scheduled a CREATE LIST on our Innovative Interfaces system to run on Sunday nights. The output of that list was sent to me by E-mail. I saved the contents of the message as a text file and used a perl script to convert the list to html. I mailed the html file to myself and pasted it into the web page. This all worked fine except when I wasn’t in the office, as in this semester, I’m teaching a course on Monday mornings.

The past couple days I’ve modified the process. I wrote a shell script that calls the expect script and saves the output to a text file on the server. It then calls a perl script to convert the text file to an RSS file. I inserted a java script developed by Alan Levine (of Maricopa Community Colleges) that reads the RSS file and inserts it into the New Books and Recent Journals web pages. Now the whole process runs daily without my intervention.

YBP Library Services — provider of books and supporting collection management and technical services

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