The technical services world has been in an uproar lately, between LC's decision to stop creating series authority records (particularly since they didn't consult PCC members beforehand) and the fallout after Calhoun report. We might as well have another drink, because as librarian.net reports (along with several others), OCLC and RLG are about to merge. It's mindblowing to think that RLG employees did not find out any sooner than the rest of us, and that either organization has yet to consult its members. However, RLG plans to do so, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out. In particular, some folks worried about the merging of data and the future of RedLightGreen. I know it's not considerably better, but they seem to be overlooking Open WorldCat.
Nearly a year ago I switched from Wordpress to Drupal. I chose to switch back, partially because it was capable of doing way more than I needed it to! I thought I didn't want to be limited by blog software, but apparently that's not a terribly huge concern anymore. The old site had frightfully little content (three posts in Dalliance, a few personal posts, and links to papers). I'm redoing my non-blog site with PURLs since I don't have access to an e-prints server to which I can upload my varied previous academic work. Anyhow, the important stuff is soon to come, with Dalliance possibly moving to another host (probably Wordpress.com). Anything linking to one of the papers or my code snippets will be edited as needed.
A little over a month ago, Nick Gerakines posted a Perl script to be called from a Procmail configuration file. It seemed to work pretty well, but the anal-retentive cataloger/standards geek in me decided to pass the results through a feed validator. It failed in a few key areas: missing version attribute in the rss tag, improper guid and link tags, and a pubDate with a non-RFC822 date. These all seemed pretty easy to fix, so I went ahead and made some changes. My fixes are a bit inelegant, but they create valid RSS 2.0.
It was pretty trivial to add an RSS version number and to fix the guid error; the latter just required adding the isPermaLink="false" attribute to that tag. However, Nick's original code required parsing the pubDate tags to determine when to kill data that was over 6 hours old. I didn't want to be bothered parsing an RFC822 date with this, so I moved that information into a category tag.
I've finally gotten around to doing some serious work on the site. I've completed the first post for my defunct blog, and it's about one of my favorite songwriters ever, Dr. Franklin Bruno. I've also figured out some of the odd intricacies of Drupal and am finally getting this site to have a look and feel of which I can be proud.
I've settled in nicely to Washington, DC, and I'm living in a decent area of town within a reasonable interest of a decent watering hole, groceries, and the Metro. Halloween has come and gone; I dressed up as everyone's favorite St. Vitus dancer, Ian Curtis, complete with requisite noose. My friend Corey took similar cues as far as the era and scope of his costume, and chose to dress up as Henry Rollins.
The weather has stayed mostly warm, so I've been spoiled on that front too. More changes are coming soon, so stay alert.
I'm pleased to announce that I will be joining the staff of the National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives of the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Anthropology as a project archivist. I will have two initial primary responsibilities:
cataloging Plains Indian ledger art for the non-profit ARTstor Project, and original cataloging and bibliographic enhancement of audio, film and video collections in support of the NAA's new Endangered Languages Program. This program also collaborates with the University of Utah's Center for American Indian Languages and is also part of the Documenting Endangered Languages project, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I will be starting work for the NAA/HSFA on September 6, 2005, and will be working on a 12 month term contract.
