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<< Monday, April 07, 2003 >> |
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Two more LibraryLookup-compatible OPACS
I've added two new OPAC systems to the LibraryLookup bookmarklet generator. Thanks to Chris Tovell, at the Beaverton City Library in Beaverton, OR, for the key that unlocks a number of Polaris libraries. And thanks to Jonathan Rentzsch for the key to Sirsi's WebCat systems.
When I ask on the bookmarklet generator page for new patterns, these are what I have in mind. I'm not looking for bookmarklets that can already be generated for one of the OPACs listed on that page. I'm looking for other OPACs, not already covered there, which meet the following criteria:
Can do a lookup by means of an URL with an embedded ISBN, using a standard syntax that can be appended to a base URL, without requiring the user to log in or establish a session ID, and are implemented by a number of libraries.
If you've identified one of these, it's helpful to head on over to Libdex, find the vendor of that OPAC, and test your pattern on a few specimens. It almost certainly won't work in every case. Some implementations of an OPAC require login, for example, and others don't. But if your pattern works more often than not, I think it's worth including in the bookmarklet generator.
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The public record
The Wayback Machine
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Last week Dave Winer reported [1, 2] that the New York Times' Web archive had disappeared behind a "for-pay firewall." Today, he reports that it's back:
Bravo. In a world where such victories are few and far between, this one is truly worth savoring. Thanks to the Times for supporting the Web. [DaveNet]
My thanks as well, to Dave for making the call and to the Times for responding. Like Dave, I believe that stewardship of Web namespace is an almost sacred responsibility. Every hyperlink is an act of faith; the two-way Web is just a consensual hallucination made of many such acts. Like other illusions, for example the economy, this one can take a licking and keep on ticking -- up to a point. But consumer confidence in the link economy is tied to the expectation that a URL offered today will be a URL honored tomorrow, next year, or next decade. We thwart that expectation at our peril -- though I wonder for how much longer we will have the option to do so.
In a column from 2001 entitled Digital Archives I quoted an email from Mark Mitchell who wrote:
One of the nice things about a good old-fashioned library is that the librarians tend not to throw out the books. In another 20 years it may be easier to find math journal papers from 1973 than computer science articles from 2003, if we're not careful.
Maybe so. But maybe, whether we intend to or not, we'll wind up with just what Ted Nelson imagined. The vision for Xanadu was (and is) to create a distributed and non-erasable storage system that remembers and versions everything, and can enforce attribution and copyright. Is a permanent record possible? The Internet Archive suggests that it is. In 1995 I didn't believe that search engines would be able to keep up with the Web. Today I can't imagine that the Internet Archive -- or its successor -- won't.
A while back I noticed that Meerkat had captured two versions of an item posted by Dave Winer in response to an item of mine about SOAP toolkits. Dave responded:
Jon discovers an important feature of Internet 3.0. Real-time edits preserved for perpetuity. [Scripting News]
My own weblog is a palimpsest too, a fact which RSS readers plainly reveal when they redisplay edited items. In the case of a substantial update, I'll mark it as such. If I only correct a typo or misspelling, I won't -- but the infrastructure (RSS, Internet Archive) is increasingly likely to notice and version the change. The public record, as written on the Web, is less ephemeral than it seems. Nothing compels you to contribute to it. Once you do, nothing compels you to maintain your contribution. But even if you don't, the Web probably will.
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Tim Bray's ongoing conversation with the world
If you haven't yet tuned into Tim Bray's weblog, you're missing a rare treat. For those of us whose bedtime reading does not run to the likes of Herodotus' Histories ("in the Aubrey de Sélincourt translation"), have never photographed an odometer, and do not casually toss off tutorials on binary search and Unicode, it can be a bit intimidating. But it is also a pure delight. "I propose that we define a weblog as a conversation between a person and the world," Tim wrote last month. Speaking for the world, it's going to be a challenge to hold up our end of that conversation!
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A conversation with Brian Behlendorf
The world's full of smart people who have, collectively, a lot of the intellectual bandwidth needed to absorb and master open-source infrastructure. It's the scarcity of expertise with the software that has made open source uneconomical in a lot of cases. As people in India and Russia and elsewhere dig into open source technologies, they can broker that expertise and help bridge the gap between the theory and the practice of reuse. [Full story at InfoWorld.com].
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