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I'd like to gauge interest for people to help add code to Archivists' Toolkit to automate the deposit of digital objects into digital repositories. At first glance, the biggest issue is having to deal with differing deposit APIs for each repository, but using something like SWORD would make sense to bridge this gap. Any and all feedback is welcome!

In preparation for the upcoming WorldCat Hackathon starting this Friday, I've made a few changes to worldcat, my Python module for interacting with OCLC's APIs. Most notably, I've added iterators for SRU and OpenSearch requests, which (like the rest of the module) painfully need documentation. It's available either via download from my site or via PyPI; please submit bug reports to the issue tracker as they arise. EDIT: I've bumped up the version number another micro number to 0.1.1 as I've just added the improvements mentioned by Xiaoming Liu on the WorldCat DevNet Blog (LCCN query support, support for tab-delimited and CSV responses for xISSNRequests, and support for PHP object responses for all xIDRequests). EDIT: Thanks to Thomas Dukleth, I was told that code for the Hackathon was to be licensed under the BSD License. Accordingly, I've now dual licensed the module under both GPL and BSD.

Previously posted on http://labs.nypl.org/.

A week ago today, a few of my DEG colleagues and I went to see Liz Lawley from RIT's Lab for Social Computing give a talk entitled "Libraries as Happiness Engines." It was a modified version of a talk she gave at this year's CiL conference. The gist of the talk was that gaming in libraries means not just using established games to draw the public into the library, but also to begin implementing game mechanics into libraries that allow them to flourish as social spaces. In particular, these game mechanics include things like collecting, points, feedback, exchanges, and customization.

I've been ruminating on this for the last week or so in a couple different ways. First of all, I've been trying to figure out how we could implement game mechanics within NYPL.

I apologize for using my blog to soapbox, but I felt like this was a significant concern that I should share with my readers. If you wish to support my position, please consider sending an e-mail to SAA Council and the 2009 Program Committee Chairs. Dear 2009 Program Committee Members and SAA Council Members, I understand that we are nearing the deadlines for submission of proposals for sessions at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists. I also understand the reasons behind having an earlier deadline than past years. However, I am deeply concerned with the decision to have the deadline set to be October 8, 2008, which is Yom Kippur and the day which the Jewish High Holidays end. As is often the case, conference proposals often coalesce at the last minute, and this is further complicated by the fact that the beginning of Rosh Hashana fell on September 29, 2008. I recognize that the deadline is most likely immutable at this point, but I am asking that SAA Council and future Program Committees pay attention to when the High Holidays fall in future years.

Via Language Log: The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria has, in an effort to draw more attention to TEI, chosen to prepare an encoded version of the lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and overlaid the resulting XML over the song's video. The resulting video is available, naturally, on YouTube. ETCL's Ray Siemens writes about the reasoning behind this on the TEI Video Widgets blog: At the last gathering of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, in Maryland, a few of us were discussing the ways in which TEI has eluded some specific types of social-cultural representation that are especially current today . . . things like an avatar, or something that could manifest itself as a youtube posting. A quick search of youtube did reveal a significant and strong presence of sorts, but it was that of Tei the Korean pop singer (pronounced, we're told, "˜tay'); so, our quest began there, setting out modestly to create a video widget that would balance T-E-I and Tei in the youtube world.

djabberdjaw is an alpha-quality Jabber bot written in Python that uses Django as an administrative interface to manage bot and user profiles. I've included a couple of plugins out of the box that will allow you to perform queries against Z39.50 targets and OCLC's xISBN API (assuming you have the requisite modules). djabberdjaw requires Django 1.0 or later, jabberbot, and xmpppy. It's available either from PyPI (including using easy_install) or via Subversion. You can browse the Subversion repository, too.

Thanks to Jeanne from Spellbound Blog, I was made aware of the fact that ArchivesBlogs hadn't really been doing its job. So, I ripped out its guts and put it back together. It's running the latest, shiniest versions of WordPress, FeedWordPress, and Auto Delete Posts, and now it has added Feedburner and WP Stats goodness. Let me know if you discover any peculiarities in the updated set up.

Previously posted on http://labs.nypl.org/.

Getting up to speed is hard anywhere, and it's especially difficult in a large, complex institution like NYPL. Other than just understanding the projects that you're given, you also are thrown headfirst into making sense of the culture, the organization, and all the unspoken and occasionally unseen things that allow you to do your job. There's no clear place to start this, so a good portion of the time you have to keep on top of that while you start thrashing away at your work. The question remains, though, how do you organize this stuff? How do you enable sensemaking in yourself and your peers?

Goodbye, WordPress - I've been drinking more of the KoolAid. I rebuilt my personal/professional site (not this blog) in Drupal. Migrating the content was pretty easy (about 15 static pages, no posts). The functionality is astounding - I only started working on redoing it yesterday and I've already got a great infrastructure. Expect a detailed post before too long, or at least a link to a colophon on said site.

I'm packing up and heading out to SFO this evening for SAA2008. Right now I'm frantically backing up my Zotero repository, making sure I have a bunch of sources to peruse on the plane as I hack away on my slides for EAD@10. You might be surprised that my idea of me jumping out of a cake in the shape of an <archdesc> tag wearing a bathing suit was not even considered, so it looks like I'll actually have to put some coherent thoughts together. I've got to make a grand entrance somehow. I'll be chairing the Description Section meeting as well, so behave yourselves, kids.