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<< Thursday, May 22, 2003 >> |
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Koha and the Library of Congress
I've added a tenth OPAC vendor to the LibraryLookup generator, and this one is kind of special. It's an open source product called Koha, commissioned by the HLT Library in New Zealand. Pat Eyler, the Kaitiaki (Guardian) of the project, told me about it way back in November, and the email got buried in a folder which I didn't revisit until this week. Sorry Pat, but better late than never. Very cool to see an open source OPAC in use.
What got me to revisit my LibraryLookup email folder was a message from David Carter-Tod. It seems that Raymond Yee has been pondering for some time how to write an URL that would address a Library of Congress record. He finally cracked it, and David connected the dots to make a LibraryLookup bookmarklet for the Library of Congress. (Note: the bookmarklet which is the address of the previous link adds three backslashes that Manila evidently swallowed when David posted his item.) Excellent!
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The new old man
the old old man
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the new old man
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My rule is never to post anything here that doesn't have a technical hook, but maybe by the time I get to the end of this item, I'll have thought of one. I live in New Hampshire, and we had a tough winter. Some winters are extra cold, some extra long, and some extra snowy. This year we got the trifecta. And to cap it off, New Hampshire's state symbol, a granite formation known as the Old Man, came crashing down earlier this month. He's on every license plate, and on every state highway sign, so this was quite an odd thing to have happen -- though not unexpected, he'd been on life support for years.
Last week, hiking with a friend in the woods near our homes, I spotted a small formation that looked eerily like the Old Man. Yesterday, my friend mentioned it to our local newspaper, and today they ran a photo with this caption:
An area of cliff along the Washington Street extension in Keene resembles the late Old Man of the Mountain in Franconia. This formation is located on the gated road that leads to Beaver Brook Falls. The natural rock formation resembling an old man's face - perhaps New Hampshire's best-known symbol - fell from Cannon Mountain earlier this month. (Sentinel photo by MICHAEL MOORE)
So what's the technical hook? Damned if I know. I guess I'll have to think of something else to write today to push this item off InfoWorld's home page.
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Googling for social security numbers
Now and again, I google for my social security number, hoping that the number of hits will be zero but fearing that it won't be. So far, so good. In case you've never tried it, here's an interesting experiment. Search for the first digit, then the first two digits, and so on until you build up the string of all nine digits. Here's the pattern for me:
digits Google
of SS# hits
1 952,000,000
2 182,000,000
3 5,900,000
4 14,700,000 (Because it spells a year in the last century.)
5 13,300
6 683
7 22
8 3
9 0
There is, of course, a class of 10-digit numbers -- namely phone numbers -- that produce Google results that usually shock people who haven't seen them before. How shocked would you be to find your social security number effective as a Google search term? Does this in fact already happen sometimes?
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