Author: Dave

Dewey friend wheel

I’ve been meaning to have a stab at creating something similar to a friend wheel, but using library data, for a while now. Here’s a prototype which uses our “people who borrowed this, also borrowed…” data to try find strong borrowing relationships…
Dewey friends
I picked three random Dewey numbers and hacked together a quick PerlMagick script to draw the wheel:

  • 169 – Logic -> Analogy (orange)
  • 822 – English & Old English literatures -> Drama (purple)
  • 941 – General history of Europe -> British Isles (light blue)

The thickness and brightness of the line indicates the strength of the relationship between the two classifications. For example, for people who borrowed items from 941, we also see heavy borrowing in the 260’s (Christian social theology), 270’s (Christian church history), and the 320’s (Political science).
The next step will be to churn through all of the thousand Dewey numbers and draw a relationship wheel for our entire book stock. I’ve left my work PC on to crunch through the raw data overnight, so hopefully I’ll be able to post the image tomorrow.

If…

…they’d made “The Terminator” 33 years earlier, I’m guessing the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 might have looked like this:
capvid01 capvid02 capvid03 capvid04
One of the things I love about the web is that it delivers all sorts of weird straight to your desktop! In this case, it’s the 15 part serial “Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere“, from 1951, which appears to have had a budget of less than $1 per episode 🙂
The Internet Archive has an episode of the earlier “Captain Video” TV series, which seems to have been made on an even smaller budget 😀

Psycho collage

Following on from the book covers arranged by hue/lightness, I’ve been playing around with the 1000 Frames of Hitchcock thumbnails.
Here’s the result of 15 minutes of coding and 2 hours of rendering using a single frame from the famous shower scene in Psycho…
psycho1b
To see the individual frames, you really need to view the full sized image (9526 x 5475 pixels).
The code works by sampling a pixel and then randomly selecting a frame that has a similar hue and lightness value. As before, a little bit of randomess (position, rotation and size) is thrown in to make it visually more interesting.

Mashed Library ’08

Just another plug for the Mashed Library event, now that the registration page is available!

This informal event is a chance to meet others involved in Library Technology and related fields such as metadata, search, etc. Inspired by the Mashed Museums event, the day will give the opportunity for you to discuss ideas, share visions, and hopefully actually develop some stuff. All you need to take part is some enthusiasm for exploiting technology in the Library and Information world.

Our books, arranged by Hue and Lightness

Sunday afternoons were made for doing this kind of thing…
Book drop
(click here for the biggest version)
Several thousand of our books, arranged vertically by hue and horizontally by lightness. The value was calculated by finding the average colour of the book cover and then converting that to the relevant HSL value. There’s a little bit of randomness thrown in too, in terms of rotation and position. The image was created using Perl and ImageMagick.
If nothing else, it shows that we have more red and blue books than green or pink ones!

Bloomin’ global warming

Just in case anyone was in any doubt about the reality of global warming, the BBC Ceefax service is currently reporting (on page 402) that we’ll have a peak temperature of 54°C (129°F) tomorrow…
scorcher_002
So, for anyone heading to London for Internet Librarian International 2008, I’d recommend lots of sun cream and a big hat.

“only in America”

I’ve lost count of the number of times this year it’s felt like I’ve woken up in a parallel universe — it’s happened again this morning when I read about the US Lingerie Football League on the BBC News web site, which features “teams of models playing an American football game while dressed in lingerie”.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know very much about American Football, but I’m pretty sure when men play it, they seem to wear full body armour and the kind of shoulder pads that would make a 1980’s Joan Collins green with envy. Can a couple of millimetres of silk and lace really provide the same level of protection? Where can you buy babydoll negligees with reinforced shoulder pads?
This opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities for alternative versions of popular sports whilst wearing totally inappropriate clothing. How about…

  • long jump for people wearing lead weighted deep sea diver boots
  • 100m freestyle swimming for people wearing oversized chunky Aran sweaters
  • pole vault for people wearing Carmen Miranda style tropical fruit hats (points are deducted for dislodged fruit)
  • 110m hurdles for women wearing pencil skirts

So, it’s Friday and we’re all winding down for the weekend — what’s the best combination you can think of?

Horizon 7.4.2 – available “worldwide”

The press release for Horizon 7.4.2 has just gone online.
Both Talin Bingham (Chief Technology Officer) and Gary Rautenstrauch (Chief Executive Officer) use the word “worldwide” in the press release:

This new version adds functionality requested by our customers worldwide and offers great benefits to libraries and patrons alike…

Providing the features librarians need and delivering the best user experience worldwide are SirsiDynix’s highest priorities.

However, the reality is that Horizon 7.4.2 is a North American only release. Much as I would love to be able to roll out some of those new features here at Huddersfield, and much as I would love to have all those really nasty security holes in HIP fixed, the bottom line is that I can’t — SirsiDynix’s definition of “worldwide” is a curiously US-centric one.
Horizon customers in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, etc, are not “qualifying customers”, despite paying their yearly maintenance.
SirsiDynix International made a decision a year or two ago that they would no longer provide regional variations of Horizon, and I can fully understand why. As a non-American customer, I might not be happy about it, but I can understand why. What I can’t understand (and frankly, it’s starting to really piss me off) is why the company continues to pretend in public that they are.
If anyone senior from the SirsiDynix US office would like to contact me today, then please do — I’m sure you’ll find my direct telephone number in your UK customer contacts database. Maybe there’s a perfectly good reason why most of your Horizon customers in Europe are no longer classified as being part of your “worldwide” customer base and I’d really love to hear it.