III Linking Policy

I was recently going through Innovative’s web site and, out of curiosity, clicked on the small “Legal Notices” link at the bottom of their front page. It instructed me to “PLEASE READ THESE ‘TERMS OF USE’ CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THIS WEB SITE”. It occurred to me that, if they truly wanted all visitors to read the legal notices before using the site, they should probably either feature the link more prominently on the front page or force a redirect to make sure everyone has a chance to read it beforehand. Most of us aren’t accustomed to reading EULAs for websites.

What got my attention was their “Links Policy”. Apparently, you are not allowed to link to III’s site unless you follow specific rules, including:

• “(i) any link to the Web site must be a link clearly marked “Innovative Interfaces” OR “iii.com”;
• “(iii) the link must “point” to the URL (www.iii.com) and not to other pages within the Web site”;
• “(vi) Innovative Interfaces, Inc. reserves the right to revoke its consent to the link at any time and in its sole discretion.”

That means that if you want to point someone to a specific III product, such as Millenium or Encore, you are, according to III, not allowed to provide them with direct links. Evidently, Google doesn’t respect their policy either (of course, it might help if III provided a robots.txt file to help support their links policy).

It’s got a bit of a “Fight Club” ring to it: “The first rule of the Millenium web page is you don’t link to the Millenium web page. The second rule of the Millenium web pages is you don’t link to the Millenium web page.“

Export to RefWorks from Evergreen

At my place of work, we signed up for a site-wide license to RefWorks last fall. We’ve also recently moved to Evergreen for our new ILS (press release). Naturally, there was a request from library staff to add a function in Evergreen to export citations from the OPAC directly into RefWorks.

I was happy to discover that Evergreen makes this relatively easy, thanks to SuperCat (part of Evergreen’s backend). With SuperCat and a record id, a record can be fetched in many different formats, simply by changing the URL (e.g., OPAC view vs marcxml vs MODS). This comes in handy when dealing with RefWorks.

Sending citations to RefWorks can be done with a callback. Essentially, you add a link to RefWorks’ import function page and send it your credentials, as well as a callback URL that RefWorks uses to grab the record from your ILS…in a RefWorks-supported format. The problem is that RefWorks doesn’t accept MODS, MARC, or even MARCXML. They say they accept MARC, but it’s actually what I call “MARC text” (it is described very well by Bill Dueber).

So with Evergreen, all that was needed to support Export-to-RefWorks was:

1. a new transform for SuperCat that converts MARC to “MARC text”;
2. a new SuperCat feed for the new format;
3. a button in the OPAC that links to RefWorks and provides the credentials and callback URL.

Voilà! The new “marctxt” SuperCat feed (which uses the new transform) provides the callback URL for RefWorks to grab the record and import it. I submitted a patch yesterday to address #1 and #2, above. A patch to auto-generate the info needed for #3 is forthcoming (and pretty straightforward). So Evergreen should soon support Export-to-RefWorks right out of the box.

(”Fine. Now take it off.” [SuperCat] photo created by “Allergic to Work” on Flikr, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike license).

Net Neutrality Town Hall

Information about a Net Neutrality Town Hall just came my way through a CLA mailing list. It features some interesting speakers: Michael Geist needs no introduction, and Charlie Angus has recently tabled a Net Neutrality bill in Canadian Parliament for the second time (Bill C-398).

Here’s the info:

Speakers:

• Michael Geist, University of Ottawa
• Jacob Glick, Google
• Charlie Angus, NDP Heritage Critic
• Rocky Gaudrault, CEO of Teksavvy Solutions Inc.

When: Wednesday June 10, 2009, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Where:
Ottawa Public Library Auditorium
120 Metcalfe Street

Note that the hosts are looking for an RSVP on http://saveournet.ca/ottawa

RMS in Ottawa

On Tuesday, I visited the Treasury Board’s library to hear Richard Stallman give a talk. Although it was my first time seeing him in person, it was pretty much the same talk I’ve heard from him before, either in snippets of video or transcripts. In parts, it was very good. In parts, it was very awkward.

Stallman is just not for everyone, and certainly not for a general audience of civil servants. Some of his talking points were very well expressed, while others were perhaps poorly worded (even if I generally agreed with what he said). Afterward, while answering some of the questions, he acted a bit petulant and whiny (a polite query about the rate of adoption of free software in India was dismissed with a whiny “Well I don’t know! I don’t track that kind of stuff!”). And then there was the performance of his “alter ego” — the less said about that, the better.

I’m grateful for all of the work he’s done for the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project. However, the FSF should consider limiting Stallman to talks to more technical groups and those already involved with free and open source software. When talking about the history of the project and its importance, it is fantastic listening to him…but he’s definitely not the best person to convince potential new free software users (not to mention their managers). In some cases, he probably hurts his cause more than he helps.

Stallman in Ottawa Next Week

I’ll be going to hear Richard Stallman at the Treasury Board library next Tuesday. He’ll be talking about collaborative initiatives and (undoubtedly) their associated licenses (GFL, Creative Commons, etc). The primary focus will likely be wikis, as the Treasury Board is behind the Government of Canada’s GCPedia project.

Afterward, he’ll be speaking on the steps of Parliament Hill, at the following event:

Richard Stallman on Parliament Hill, Ottawa, 16:30 Tuesday 2 June 2009

Topic: The State’s Freedom, and the People’s Freedom, as Users of Software.

Date:  2 June 2009
Time: 16:30 – 18:00 pm on Parliament Hill (main steps)

Followed by informal discussion at the “Parliament Pub” Family Restaurant across the street, beginning at approximately 18:00.

Evergreen Z39.50 Server

It’s the end of Week 2 at the new job[1] and it has been productive. Part of that may be because I ingested a decent amount of coffee. (I can’t get enough Bridgehead coffee and tea after being away from Ottawa for so long – I hope they expand to other cities in the near future.)

Late last week, I got Evergreen set up to act as a Z39.50 server following the instructions on the project’s DokuWiki. SRU worked fine out of the box and Simple2Zoom was easy to install and get working. I was retrieving records with yaz-client in no time.

This week, while testing the server with other Z39.50 clients, I found and fixed a bug in Simple2Zoom that was causing us some minor trouble. The first bug fixed in a new job, however small, is always very satisfying.

[1]: Okay, it’s not really a “new” job – I worked here during my co-op term last fall.

The Michigan Evergreen Story in CL

Randy Dykhuis has an article in this month’s Collaborative Librarianship in which he discusses the history of the Michigan Library Consortium’s move to Evergreen (full text[PDF]). From the abstract:

“In 2008, seven Michigan public libraries migrated to Evergreen, an open source integrated library system developed by the Georgia Public Library Service. The Michigan Library Consortium and Grand Rapids Public Library provided the support, training, networking, and system administration for the system. This article examines the reasons for implementing an open source system and the challenges to running and sustaining it.”

An interesting read, particularly as I have just finished my first week working as a Systems Librarian at a library that recently migrated to Evergreen.

Back to Work – Day 1

Today is my first day of work since completing my MLIS. As much as I wanted to work on my professional development during my two-week “vacation” between the end of school and the start of my new career, I instead spent much of my time recharging my batteries and recuperating from my final term.

Now that I’m well rested, I’m very happy to be back in the working world. I’m back to working on Evergreen but I’ll be playing more of an internal support and maintenance role in the library now, which suits me just fine. Other, non-Evergreen tasks await, too. Should be fun!

Phony “Peer-Reviewed” Medical Journal

It is being reported in The Scientist and the BioEthics Blog that Merck created a phony, “peer-reviewed” journal called the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which was published by Elsevier.

Beyond the understandable anger from the medical research community, you could also forgive librarians for being a bit pissed, too. It’s bad enough having to deal with constantly increasing prices for real peer-reviewed serials…

Canadian Anti-Spam Bill

Michael Geist is reporting that the Canadian government will (finally!) table an anti-spam bill in the House of Commons tomorrow:

The bill carries the unwieldly name of “An Act to promote the efficiency and adaptability of the Canadian economy by regulating certain activities that discourage reliance on electronic means of carrying out commercial activities, and to amend the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Act, the Competition Act, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and the Telecommunications Act.“  The title obviously indicates that the anti-spam bill will feature a multi-pronged approach to fighting spam with a role for the CRTC, the Competition Bureau, and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

It will be interesting to see how this compares to the anti-spam bill tabled in the Senate, almost one year ago (apart from the 52-word title of the new bill).