Author: Dave

International Survey of Library Automation

Marshall Breeding has published the results of the “Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of Library Automation” and I doubt they’ll make comfortable reading at SirsiDynix HQ (unless Scribe has got it right!)…

The products of SirsiDynix, Unicorn and Horizon, received low satisfaction scores from libraries responding to the survey. Unicorn, the company’s flagship ILS performed somewhat better than Horizon. 14% of libraries running Unicorn and about half of those with Horizon indicate interest in migrating to another system — not surprising considering SirsiDynix’s position not to develop that system into the future. Horizon libraries scored high interest in open source ILS alternatives. The comments provided by libraries running Horizon voiced an extremely high level of frustration with SirsiDynix as a company and its decision to discontinue Horizon. Many indicated distrust toward the company. The comments from libraries running Unicorn, the system which SirsiDynix selected as the basis for its flagship Symphony ILS, also ran strongly negative — some because of issues with the software some because of concerns with the company.

Voyager, Horizon, and Aleph 500 sites are the most likely to consider moving to Open Source (such as Koha or Evergreen).
If Open Source isn’t of interest, then the satisfaction levels amongst Polaris customers makes that a very attractive system to move to.

“Spin, spin, spin the Wheel of Justice…”

Kudos if you automatically sang to yourself “…see how fast the bastard turns” 😉
If you’ve no idea what I’m on about, then YouTube is your friend.
Anyway, I got to playing around with the OPAC keyword cloud data and ImageMagick and came up with this (reload that web page to get a new image)…
wheel4 wheel3 wheel5 wheel10 wheel8 wheel11 wheel13 wheel12
I was struggling to remember how to find the points on the circumference of a circle until I remembered that one of the chapters in the original ZX Spectrum manual covered the topic.
The word in the middle is chosen at random from the top 200 most popular keywords used on our OPAC and the surrounding words at those most commonly used with that word.

Tasty mash-up

I must admit that when I think of a “mash-up“, food rarely enters my head (even though most people in the UK associate the word “mash” with mashed potato).
Anyway, what do you get if you mash-up the following: a picture, an RSS feed, Helene Blowers, a cake?

Just in case no-one said this on the day, Helene — you look good enough to eat! 😉
I’m kinda curious how the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence attached to the image applies to all this… The licence allows you to make derivative works (e.g. a cake) but I guess you are not allowed to sell the cake. You have to share it (yay, I like cake!) and “distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one”.
So, does that mean the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County has broken new ground by creating the very first Creative Commons cake?
All the very best with the new job, Helene!

Move over Bernard Herrmann!

One of the sections in Brendan Dawes’ book is about generating images from music.
Whilst messing about with the “North by Northwest” images (see previous blog post), I began to wonder if you could create music from images?
Anyway, here’s the first 90 seconds of my replacement soundtrack for “North by Northwest” 🙂
It was created by grabbing a frame from the movie every half a second and working out the average colour of the frame. That colour is then split into its red, green and blue (RGB) components, and their values are used to generate a guitar tablature file which is pumped into the MIDI::Tab Perl module. The first chunk of the tab looks like this…

    D6: --1-5---3-4-4-4-4---4-4---3-4---3-3-3-
    A3: 0---1-2-3-4-4-----4-----4-----4-----4-
    E2: 0-----0-1---1-----1-----1-----1-----1-

Going for a 3/4 timing seemed to give the most pleasing output. That seemed appropriate, as Hitchcock often used waltzes in his films 🙂
I wasn’t too sure just how it would sound, but it’s actually not too bad!

“North by Northwest” squished

After reading Brendan Dawes’ “Analog In, Digital Out“, I’ve revisited the colours of “North by Northwest” (see earlier blog post).
Rather than squish every frame to a single horizontal line, this time each frame is squished vertically — see if you can spot the “crop duster” sequence:

( full sized version on Flickr )

Dear Facebook, Huddersfield is not in Northern Ireland

I was really tempted to create a protest group in Facebook but, for some reason best known only to themselves, the people at Facebook are insisting that Huddersfield is really somewhere in Northern Ireland…
stupidfacebook
Even though the correct option is there (“Kirklees, United Kingdom”), it always changes it to “Huddersfield, Northern Ireland” when you click on the save button.
I wouldn’t mind, but there isn’t even a Huddersfield in Northern Ireland!
To get to Northern Ireland from Huddersfield, I’d have to drive for about 8 hours, catch a ferry to travel 50 miles to another country, change all my money into a different currency, and I’d have to remember to take my passport with me.
So, please Facebook — Huddersfield is in England, which isn’t the same thing as Northern Ireland!!!

Baroque Star Wars

Just relaxing at home with a small glass of Disaronno Amaretto**, having spent a big chunk of the day down in Milton Keynes at the End of PROWE Project Dissemination Event (Facebook group). Just in case anyone is looking for them, my slides are available on slideshare…
mk_010
(more photos here)
Anyway, whilst doing a bit of random browsing, I came across the work of Swedish illustrator Mattias Adolfsson (Flickr). Anyone who can cross Star Wars with Baroque is a certified genius in my book!

** One of the reasons why I bought the bottle (apart from that fact that it’s nice to drink!) is that it’s specifically mentioned in one of the narrative segments of the 1989 album “When in Rome, Kill Me” by Leeds based band CuD (official site). How’s that for uber obscure, eh?

spam in the hot topics

Apologies for the spam words that are currently appearing in the hot topics cloud at the moment.
It looks like the BlogJunction blog has been hacked — if you view the page source for the blog, you’ll find multiple hidden links to gambling sites (the links are currently being hosted by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya UOC).
I’ve removed BlogJunction from the list of sites used for the cloud, so the spam should disappear in the next 48 hours.