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Data munging

Recently I’ve been importing the ancient Librarian Avengers archives to live within WordPress. Because the site goes back to…hrm… 1997, there’s some data munging to do.

Right now I’m concerning myself with the period after Graduate School, when I moved to Ithaca, NY for an ostensibly-cool digital library fellowship. I couldn’t talk about how much I hated it at the time so the entries are mostly tangential to the work I was doing, but there’s still some fun stuff.

Importing ancient blog posts involves a bunch of tagging, titling, category-setting, and general modernization. I’ve been progressively making my way through the old posts, adding images, fixing spelling mistakes, and generally adding a bit of polish.

Part of the reason I’m taking on data scrubbing as my One Designated Personal Thing to Do this evening, is that today has been a study in helplessness. My daughter has a (small) fever. It’s the first time she’s been sick, and I’m trying to direct my need to control something (anything!) in a positive direction.

Also, cleaning data is pretty therapeutic after some of the body fluids I’ve encountered recently.

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Site troubles…

You may notice a slew of broken links on the site today. I’m hunting down a bug that happened when I upgraded WordPress yesterday. Thanks for your patience. If you know anything about this error, please let me know:
“Fatal error: Call to undefined function: bloginfo()” … etc.

**UPDATE** Problem solved. Ugh. Line endings.

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Site down for a bit tonight…

Hi everyone – Happy Halloween! I bought myself new web hosting today, so the site might be funky for a bit whilst I drag everything over. Fear not, I’m not going anywhere.

I will be in Ann Arbor until Monday to ogle the Royal Shakespeare Company.

I got a flu shot this afternoon, and I now have the fake flu. I’m going home to pass out candy and upload files. I’ll update you live from beautiful and flat state of Michigan starting tomorrow morning.

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New Site!

It all started at the South x Southwest conference this spring. I sat behind a fellow who had written a piece of weblog software called WordPress. The very mention of WordPress made the open-source and webstandards geeks at the conference go all gushy, so I figured it had to be pretty good software. Well. I installed it for a project at work and my heart went pitterpat. Great interface, tons of plugins, complete control over templates, open source, and a slick layout converted me.

Blogger has been good to me, but I’d like to experiment with this software. I’ll keep my old weblog up so your links will work (you will always be able to click on archives 2003-2005 in the right column to get to the ancient stuff), but this change of venue means you’ll have to update your RSS and bookmarks. I’m going to start writing about the books and media I’m consuming, in addition to the usual collection of rants, antecdotes, gloating about my cool job, and library related things.

Soon, I’m going to start writing about some of the nifty things we’re coming out with at my workplace, The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I’ve been able to watch and help build an insanely complex audio-video digital library over the last year, and I think there might be some stuff of interest to you guys from what we’ve learned in the process. We’re doing a big launch at the end of the summer, so I can show you the payoff then.

Thanks again to everyone who has posted and helped this site out along the way. Grouchy librarian kisses to all of you.

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Hi Wired News readers, Publib.

Jeepers. A recent link in Wired News (thanks Katykins!) has led to lots of unexpected traffic, which means I should probably get off my e-butt and do some updates.

If you’re new to this site, welcome, librarians are great, don’t be afraid of the reference desk, and by the way, our webforums got hacked awhile ago and I haven’t pieced them back together yet.

Librarian Avengers visitors usually fall into the following categories:

  • Frazzled librarians looking for fellowship
  • Hipster librarians looking to put the “hepcat” in cataloging
  • Library students looking for evidence that their future can be cardigan-free
  • Disenfranchised humanities majors tossing around the idea of becoming a librarian
  • Journalists trolling for material for the next “ohmygod librarians have a sense of humor and are kinda sexy” article.

With that said, I’ll try to provide some appropriate resources. ‘Cause that’s what librarians do.

Compulsively.

  • Librarian.net – Jessamyn’s librarian news site. Check out her naked librarians page. Updated daily, and chock full of goodness.
  • Well Dressed Librarian – A librarian with style. I just love this fellow. I’d have him over, but I’d have to polish my silver first.
  • The ALA’s guide to accredited U.S. library schools. You’ll be wanting an accredited one if you want to work in the States.
  • Gin, search and retrieval, the weblog I kept while I was in library school. All of the dirt. Well, 5% of the dirt, anyway.
  • A list of frikkin’ funny librarian websites.
  • Unshelved, the comic strip about librarians. No kidding. It’s funny.

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Blogging for the library crowd

Sorry I haven’t updated in a few weeks. I’ve been busy downloading music from this quasi-legal Russian mp3 site. But not at work (hi library colleagues). And there was some vacation involved. And dog-sitting. And basement wall dry-locking.

Speaking of the theft of intellectual property, at work recently I’ve been looking at online digital collections and identifying nifty interface elements we can borrow for the cataloging/digital library software we’ve been making. There’s some pretty rad stuff out there.

I’ve been liking the NYPL’s Picture Collection Online, in spite of it’s bass-akwards name. (Adjective Adjective NOUN, people. We don’t call you the Public Library New York, do we?) Plus, it’s the only library search interface I’ve seen to contain the word “bollicky” in the source code.

You all might know about this already, but coolperson Marguerita clued me in to the new TNT movie “The Librarian“. Unless April fools came early this year. Or USA Today isn’t a legitimate news source…

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