Posted in IA/UX, Library Tech on Mar 30th, 2007 No Comments »
… is the library’s website.
So why is there only one person running it?
A certain large local public library system has that one poor systems librarian doing the work of 8 people:
managing the online public access catalog,
handling the integrated library system,
managing the web server,
managing the database vendors and databases,
developing web applications that interface with those databases,
coordinating [...]
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Posted in IA/UX, Library Tech on Feb 26th, 2007 No Comments »
I throw my opinions in with five other fellow mid-30s Seattleites on the Confab podcast about the terrible customer experience of credit reporting companies, business plans that thrive off of bad usability, Vista, the Wii, dying businesses, and downloadable video.
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Posted in IA/UX, Library Tech on Apr 4th, 2005 No Comments »
[Yes, it's been almost 2 months. Yes, I know, I'm a terrible blogger. Work gets in the way.]
Pursuant to my previous post “On Systems Librarianship“, I will be moderating a session at the annual meeting of the ASIS&T PNC on the role of Systems Librarians and Information Architects in getting people to work together. You [...]
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Posted in Library Tech on Feb 15th, 2005 No Comments »
My new task is to find something that does RSS feed generation. For the lazy, there’s stuff like ListGarden, which has a desktop client and a Perl CGI. Unfortunately, it has no real good way of controlling who can edit what. So a content management system may be in order.
Thankfully, there’s a couple good CMS [...]
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Posted in Library Tech on Jan 24th, 2005 No Comments »
I guess this is really part of that whole groupware thread, but I got tired of keeping track of how many parts there were. It’s apparent to me that this thing may go on indefinitely.
Moodle is a open source course management system that works pretty much the same as any other groupware system. It’s PHP-based, [...]
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Posted in Library Tech on Jan 10th, 2005 No Comments »
It’s been nearly 3 months since I started this blog, and I haven’t really talked about Systems Librarianship — or anything librarian-ish, for that matter — nearly enough. This is mostly due to the nature of the work I’ve been doing recently, which has involved installing and testing and debugging web applications. It’s time to [...]
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Posted in Library Tech on Jan 5th, 2005 No Comments »
I’ve now had the opportunity to install and attempt to integrate two open source PHP-based groupware systems (PHProjekt and phpGroupWare), and the verdict is not good. Although they mostly work as advertised within a limited operating environment, both systems have serious problems with stability, reliability, support, and documentation.
It’s looking more likely that we will go [...]
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Posted in Library Tech on Dec 21st, 2004 No Comments »
[Yes, I know it's been more than 2 weeks since my last post...]
Due to the needs of the groupware project I’m working on, I’ve been exploring the world of LDAP.
Unfortunately, I’m trying to query our Windows Active Directory to discover the LDAP attribute names for use in a PHP script — and the Microsoft documentation [...]
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Posted in Library Tech on Dec 3rd, 2004 No Comments »
Like any good systems librarian, I should probably figure out a few things before suggesting a groupware system. You know, little stuff like…
Why do we need groupware anyway?
Who are the stakeholders?
Who are the end users?
What do those users need?
How are they meeting those needs now?
What constraints (technological, budgetary, etc.) are we working with?
I should also [...]
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Posted in Library Tech on Dec 2nd, 2004 No Comments »
I know, this is probably old news by now, but I can’t resist commenting on a meme that I think has a lot of potential for a real impact on the way people find information. StumbleUpon is a toolbar that, with the click of a button, appears to send you to a random page. But [...]
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