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Tag Archives: libraries

thank you wikipedia

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

I just donated to Wikipedia because I use it everyday. I work as a software developer at the Library of Congress. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve spent the last 10 years filling in gaps in my computer science, math and philosophy knowledge. Working in libraries makes this sort of self-education process easier because [...]

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LibraryThing Ubuntu Screen Saver

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

I read about the LibraryThing Mac Screensaver and of course wanted the same thing for my Ubuntu workstation at $work. Naturally, I’m supposed to be working on some high-priority tickets on a tight deadline…so I started to work right away on how to do this. Your tax dollars at work, etc…
I’m sure that there’s a [...]

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crawling bibliographic data

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Today’s Guardian article Why you can’t find a library book in your search engine prompted me to look at Worldcat’s robots.txt file for the first time. Part of the beauty of the web is that it’s an open information space where anyone (people and robots) can start with a single URL and follow their nose [...]

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q & a

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Q: What do 100 year old knitting patterns and a lost Robert Louis-Stevenson story have in common?
A: A digitally preserved newspaper page.
Q: What about if you add:

URIs for knitting materials
William Blake’s Engravings
The similarities/differences between XMPP, HTTP and NNTP
Web crawling as data integration
Project coordination with rooms on FriendFeed
brewing Kombucha

A: Just a typical lunch time conversation at [...]

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Martin Malmsten and linked library data

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

I’m currently listening to Richard Wallis’ interview w/ Martin Malmsten of the Royal Library of Sweden. It’s a really fascinating view inside a library, and the mind of a developer that are publishing bibliographic resources as linked data.
Partly as a dare from Roy Tennant to do something useful with linked-data, I spent 30 minutes w/ [...]

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mmalmsten++

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Holy crap … now I need to listen to this. It’s so nice to know you’re not alone, and off on another planet.

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lingvoj

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

I’m just now running across lingvoj.org, a linked-data application for languages created by Bernard Vatant. lingvoj basically mints URIs for languages (using the ISO-639-1 code) and when resolved (yay HTTP) nice human and machine readable descriptions about the language are returned. So for example the URI for Chinese is:

http://www.lingvoj.org/lang/zh

If you click on that link, your [...]

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BagIt

Friday, June 6, 2008

One little bit of goodness that has percolated out from my group at $work in collaboration with the California Digital Library is the BagIt spec (more readable version). BagIt is an IETF RFC for bundling up files for transfer over the network, or for shipping on physical media. Just yesterday a little article about BagIt [...]

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SKOS in the Context of Semantic Web Deployment

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

If you happen to be in the DC area on May 8th and are interested in linked data and the practical application of semantic web technologies like RDF and OWL please join us at the Library of Congress for a presentation by Alistair Miles, key developer of SKOS, and semantic web practitioner at the University [...]

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literals and resources

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

There’s a fascinating modeling discussion going on over on the DC-RDA list about whether RDA properties should reference literals or resources in descriptions. For example when describing an author you could use a literal:

Twain, Mark, 1835-1910

or a resource:

http://lccn.loc.gov/n79021164

There are some shades of gray in between (using blank nodes, auto-generated URIs, typed literals) but that’s the [...]

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