I Wuv Wiki

Just realised I’ve not blogged about my ongoing wuv affair with the MediaWiki software!
Earlier on in the year, I started moving my existing Hitchcock web site into a wiki, and I’ve been having fun writing extensions to add extra features to the wiki — for example, on the page for “Vertigo“, Hitch is keeping track of the film rating and a custom extension is providing links through to the Image Gallery images for the film…

We’ve also recently launched two other wikis — the DUG Wiki (for the Dynix UK User Group) and our new Electronic Resources Wiki.
The latter is an attempt to bring together all of the information we have about our resources into a single location, and also to support collaboration from the Library staff.  It’s still early days for the wiki, but the feedback from both staff (including Academic staff) and students has been very positive so far.

At present, only Library staff are able to edit the main articles, but anyone can edit the discussion pages.  Hopefully it will grow into a useful resource for our students!

Converting Between ISBN-10 and ISBN-13

There’s been a lot of chatter on the web4lib list about converting from 10 digit to 13 digit ISBNs.
Casey Bisson has contributed an API to do the job which makes use of John Blyberg’s PHP script.
Here’s my contribution, which is deliberately different from Casey’s:

Rather than being an API, the idea is that you can either paste a list of ISBNs into the box or upload a file of ISBNs, and then receive a file which has the ISBN-10s converted to ISBN-13s.
By default, only valid ISBN-10s (i.e. ones with valid checksums) will be converted and the rest will be untouched. If you want to convert anything that remotely resembles a 10 digit ISBN (regardless of checksum), then you’ll need to tick the “don’t validate” checkbox before you submit.
If all goes well, then whatever formatting you’ve used will be retained in the output.
The file upload will attempt to process whatever you upload (inc. binary files), but you’re probably better off uploading plain text files. If you really really want to, you can try converting your favourite images to ISBN-13!
The script uses the following modules, so you can blame them if anything gets misconverted:

If you spot any problems or have any suggestions, please leave a comment!

Dang — almost got the full set…

Typical — just when I’m having fun messing about with Amazon Web Services, almost every Amazon site in the world breaks down…
USA
UK
Canada
Yorkshire
Germany
France
…I almost got the full set, but Amazon Japan is still going strong…
Japan
Given Amazon’s dominance, I wonder how much it’s costing them in lost sales per minute to have their entire Western World web presence offline? By my reckoning, they’ve been offline for at least 30 minutes now.
Continue reading “Dang — almost got the full set…”

“There was enough left for this cowbell… Damn you, eBay!!!”

Okay, I’ve never seen any episodes of Saturday Night Live, so the recent spate of “more cowbell” posts went straight over my head (leaving a very unflattering centre parting).  Thank God for Wikipedia 😉
Anyway, never one to willingly miss a passing bandwagon, here’s my contribution…

Superpatron’s Library Camp!

This is such a great idea — Ann Arbor, and their resident Superpatron Ed Vielmetti, have organised a Library 2.0 unconference:
http://wiki.library2.net/index.php/Main_Page
As Ed notes on his blog:

An unconference or “camp” is a way of organizing a conference so that you focus on bringing the right people to the room and don’t stress about who is going to be a speaker or what’s going to be on the agenda.

The sign up page for the event is here.
I’ve love to know how much interest there would be in having a similar Library 2.0 event in the UK?
Although there’s always scope for more formal L2 events and presentations at the upcoming UK conferences, it would be great to know if there’s already a sizeable number of UK Librarians and Library Techies out there who’d like to get together for an informal day of Library 2.0 discussion, idea swapping, and brainstorming?

Been way too busy!

No posts for ages because I’ve been too busy at work getting things ready for the start of term – we’re launching out new MetaLib service on Monday. Hopefully things will start to calm down after that!
Anyway, just found this on my hard drive – unfortunately I don’t know who created it, but I’m 99% sure it came from b3ta.com

🙂