Month: October 2003

hatemonger

Satan … er … Fred Phelps is at it again.

Satan … er … Fred Phelps is at it again. This time he wants to put a religious gay-bashing monument in Casper, Wyoming. Casper is the hometown of Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was brutally murdered because he was gay. Phelps and his crew of devils church members crudely protested at Shepard’s funeral, among other vicious and un-Christian acts of hate. [thanks aw]

“Nothing has so occupied and mysteriously seized the imagination of the world media to compare with Matt Shepard,” Phelps said. “It is a phenomenon. It all comes back to Casper, Wyoming. That is his home, that is where he was born, where that church is, where those institutions … conspired in a confluence of evil resulting in a Zeitgeist that is extraordinarily evil.

“He (Shepard) was not a hero,” Phelps added. “This is a great monster sin against God. It is not an innocent alternate lifestyle. And all that has come down in that one little evil town called Casper, Wyoming. And we can’t ignore that.”

homegrown OpenURL

If you are developing (or plan to develop) your own OpenURL link resolver, there is a listserv for you.

If you are developing (or plan to develop) your own OpenURL link resolver, John Weible of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created a listserv for you.

A small but growing number of libraries have already or are now developing non commercial link resolving solutions with OpenURL at the core. These libraries need a peer support group for the exchange of ideas and solutions. Specific information about how to construct deep linking URLs for a particular target site is likely to be a frequent topic. I expect that the exchange of open source software tools related to link resolution will also be a frequent topic.

So, if you are involved in the development or maintenance of an open source or “homegrown” OpenURL link resolver at your library or institution or interested in doing so, this list is available for you.

To subscribe, send a message to listserv@listserv.uiuc.edu The body of the message should be:

subscribe lib-openurl-dev-l Your Name

mt-blacklist

I now have mt-blacklist running for both of my blogs. It really wasn’t necessary for my other blog, since I don’t allow comments on that one, but I might one of these days and I figured it wouldn’t hurt. I hope it works!

I now have mt-blacklist running for both of my blogs. It really wasn’t necessary for my other blog, since I don’t allow comments on that one, but I might one of these days and I figured it wouldn’t hurt. I hope it works!

open-source scientific journals

Michael Eisen on open-source scientific journals.

I heard an interesting story/commentary [RealAudio] on open-source scientific journals on Marketplace yesterday. I’m glad that they are willing to report on business models that are not focused only on monetary gain. I liked Eisen’s midwife analogy, too.

Scientific and medical research is funded through taxes, and print and online subscriptions to scientific journals are very expensive. Commentator Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science, explains the reasoning behind the launch of two new online biomedical journals and the unusual decision to make the sites available at no charge. “We’re upending the business model,” says Eisen. “Let the publishers become what they should be naturally: midwives to our research publications.” That way, he says, a thriving scientific publishing industry is maintained, but it has a free system of access that benefits all.

comment spam

Ugh. My blog comments were spammed while I was out of town this past week. The only way I’ve found to really prevent this from happening is to block all comments, which I do not want to do. Any other suggestions besides IP banning (which I’ve already done) will be very welcome.

Ugh. My blog comments were spammed while I was out of town this past week. The only way I’ve found to really prevent this from happening is to block all comments, which I do not want to do. Any other suggestions besides IP banning (which I’ve already done) will be very welcome.

library jobs

Job ads from the Chronicle are available through RSS feeds by category.

I have a keyword search set up that crawls Feedster every day, looking for blog entries using the keywords. Then, those entries get fed into my RSS feed reader for me to browse and view. This morning, I discovered that the job ads for The Chronicle of Higher Education are available through career-specific RSS feeds. If you browse to a particular catetory, you will find the XML button for that category at the top of the list next to the email notification option. Here is the librarian feed.

IM reference

My response to The Shifted Librarian‘s question, “Does your library understand the growing significance of instant messaging and real-time chat? Are you prepared to provide services to these kids?”

The Shifted Librarian asks, “Does your library understand the growing significance of instant messaging and real-time chat? Are you prepared to provide services to these kids?”

My library has had to crack down on what is or is not on our public PCs, so our users are not able to download crap and fill up the machines. Instant messaging programs were not included on the desktop computers, but the laptop computers we allow users to check out do have several flavors installed (that’s mainly because ITDS owns and maintains those machines, as opposed to our in-house desktops). I regularly see students sitting in comfy chairs with the laptops, IMing to their hearts content.

We’ve toyed with the idea of doing live digital reference with IM, but since so few people have made use of our email Ask-A-Librarian service, we aren’t sure that it would be worthwhile. Maybe in the future.

digital Christie

80 of Agatha Christie’s books are being released in digital format this year

I just read in the Powell’s newsletter that 80 of Agatha Christie’s books are being released in digital format this year. They will all be available for download in the Palm Reader, Adobe Reader, and Microsoft Reader formats, and the first five are available now for under $5 each (not bad considering paperback prices these days). Here are the titles currently available:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles – haven’t read it yet
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – read it
The Murder at the Vicarage – read it
The Body in the Library – read it
They Came to Baghdad – haven’t read it yet

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