I have taken some tiny facebook steps.
I have created a simple Facebook application, but it probably doesn’t work for you. The code is here. The idea is to read information from a person’s profile, use some textual analysis, and recommend one or more information resources for the user to… use. I might be able to […]
When you want to provide search against your MyLibrary content use and indexer.
MyLibrary is great for storing and manipulating the information of digital libraries. This is because it uses a database underneath. Ironcially, databases are weak when it comes to search because queries always need to be mapped to fields. Moreover databases, unless they exploit […]
We sometimes wonder whether or not the facet/term combinations should be infinitely deep.
As of right now the facet/term combinations are simple two-dimensional hierarchies. Examples include:
Audience/Freshman
Audience/Sophomore
Audience/Junior
Tools/Dictionaries
Tools/Catalogs
Tools/Indexes
Formats/Books
Formats/Journals
Formats/Movies
These two-dimensional hierarchies work, most of the time, but what do you do when it comes to subjects? This works just fine, as far as it goes:
Subjects/Astronomy
Subjects/Mathematics
Subjects/Literature
Subjects/Music
To make a subjects hierarchy […]
I have heard people say, “MyLibrary is cool, but I can’t stuff all my data into its Dublin Core-based database structure.” When I hear I feel people don’t get the point; MyLibrary is not intended to contain all of your metadata, just the metadata primarily useful for initial discovery.
Once again, the framework of MyLibrary supports […]
It may sound cheesy, but I have always thought it would be fun to have MyLibrary tee-shirts. How about “MyLibrary is your library!” as the slogan? The next thing that would be needed would be a logo. Hmmm… Are there any graphic design/marketing types out there?
Dates are a pain.
A number of months ago I created a demonstration library catalog using MyLibrary. The implementation was certainly not perfect. One of the glaring omissions were dates. None of the records had them.
Yesterday I took another look at the application. Using MARC::Record I extracted the values of field 260 subfield c from each […]
Maybe the name of MyLibrary should change.
The name “MyLibrary” was coined in 1998 by Keith Morgan while he, Doris Sigl, and I were working at the NCSU Libraries. It was a take-off of MyNetscape, MyDeja News, etc. It worked, and at the time described pretty well the functionality of the system.
A few months ago, when […]
Facebook is an opportunity for MyLibrary.
Again, the MyLibrary framework is made up of four components: 1) information resources, 2) librarians, 3) patrons, and 4) facet/term combinations. Any MyLibrary implementation does not have to have all for components. They can include any or all of them. In the context of MyLibrary, Facebook contains bunches of information […]
Like many things in life, our latest version of the MyLibrary modules are an example of two steps forward and one step back.
Rob spent good time refactoring some of the underlying database code in Facets.pm, Terms.pm, etc. Through this good work he was able to significantly speed up the creation and display of MyLibrary resource […]
Some of the complaints that we hear about MyLibrary is that it is too slow. This has been true because the core modules for the API were too old school OOP, and incorporated “attribute” values which were in reality bulky arrays of data representing the relationship between the object and other objects in the database. […]