MyLibrary

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 […]

Tags: Facets & Terms, General Information by Eric Lease Morgan
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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 […]

Tags: General Information by Eric Lease Morgan
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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?

Tags: General Information by Eric Lease Morgan
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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 […]

Tags: General Information by Eric Lease Morgan
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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 […]

Tags: General Information by Eric Lease Morgan
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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 […]

Tags: General Information by Eric Lease Morgan
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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 […]

Tags: General Information by Eric Lease Morgan
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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. […]

Tags: General Information by rfox2@ND.EDU
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We will probably use MyLibray to implement an image database, specifically against sets of images on Puerto Rico. Here’s how:

Scan images and save them to the the hard disk.
Create a MyLibrary database.
Assign things like title, creator, description, etc. to each image.
Stuff the file name of the image into the resource object’s FKey value.
Create facets and […]

Tags: General Information by Eric Lease Morgan
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Why not marry MyLibrary with a blog, specifically WordPress?
Again, MyLibrary is a digital library framework & toolbox; it is not an application. Instead it is a “blueprint” for collecting, organizing, and reporting on data and information. As such MyLibrary expects the librarian/programmer combination to syndicate content from the underlying database to an interface. This […]

Tags: General Information by Eric Lease Morgan
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