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The Code4Lib Journal - How Hard Can It Be? : Developing in Open Source - 0 views

  • We experienced freedom to explore alternate avenues, to innovate, to take risks in ways that would have been difficult under the direct control of a district council.
  • patrons made it clear that while they appreciated that computers were a necessary part of a modern library, they did not consider them the most important part.
  • Our overall objective was to source a library system which: could be installed before Y2K complications immobilised us, was economical, in terms of both initial purchase and future license and maintenance support fees, ran effectively and fast by dial-up modem on an ordinary telephone line, used up-to-the minute technologies, looked good, and was easy for both staff and public to use, took advantage of new technology to permit members to access our catalogue and their own records from home, and let us link easily to other sources of information – other databases and the Internet. If we could achieve all of these objectives, we’d be well on the way to an excellent service.
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  • "How hard can it be" Katipo staff wondered, "to write a library system that uses Internet technology?" Well, not very, as it turned out.
  • Koha would thus be available to anyone who wanted to try it and had the technical expertise to implement it.
  • fairly confident that we already had a high level of IT competence right through the staff, a high level of understanding of what our current system did and did not do.
  • ensure the software writers did not miss any key points in their fundamental understanding of the way libraries work.
  • The programming we commissioned cost us about 40% of the purchase price of an average turn-key solution.
  • no requirement to purchase a maintenance contract, and no annual licence fees.
  • An open source project is never finished.
  • Open source projects only survive if a community builds up around the product to ensure its continual improvement. Koha is stronger than ever now, supported by active developers (programmers) and users (librarians)
  • There are a range of support options available for Koha, both free and paid, and this has contributed to the overall strength of the Koha project.
  • Vendors like Anant, Biblibre, ByWater, Calyx, Catalyst, inLibro, IndServe, Katipo, KohaAloha, LibLime, LibSoul, NCHC, OSSLabs, PakLAG, PTFS, Sabinet, Strategic Data, Tamil and Turo Technology take the code and sell support around the product, develop add-ons and enhancements for their clients and then contribute these back to the project under the terms of the GPL license.
  • FRBR [5] arrangement, although of course it wasn’t called that 10 years ago, it was just a logical way for us to arrange the catalogue. A single bibliographic record essentially described the intellectual content, then a bunch of group records were attached, each one representing a specific imprint or publication.
  • The release of Koha 3.0 in late 2008 brought Koha completely into the web 2.0 age and all that entails. We are reconciled to taking a small step back for now, but the FRBR logic is around and RDA should see us back where want to be in a year or so – but with all the very exciting features and opportunities that Koha 3 has now.
  • In the early days, the Koha list appeared to have been dominated by programmers but I have noticed a lot more librarians participating now
  • "Adopt technology that keeps data open and free, abandon[ing] technology that does not." The time is right for OSS.
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    For more information about Koha and how it was developed, see: Ransom, J., Cormack, C., & Blake, R. (2009). How Hard Can It Be? : Developing in Open Source. Code4Lib Journal, (7). Retrieved from http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/1638
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Topic 3 Supplementary "Reading" How it All Works YouTube Videos - 0 views

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    The Internet of Things. (2010).  Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfEbMV295Kk&feature=youtube_gdata_player How the Internet Works in 5 Minutes. (2009). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_LPdttKXPc&feature=youtube_gdata_player How Bittorrent works. (2007). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66BV2pIjfBM&feature=youtube_gdata_player
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Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar's Resilience Against it - 0 views

  • Web-based academic search engines such as CiteSeer(X), Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search and SciPlore have introduced a new era of search for academic articles.
  • With classic digital libraries, researchers have no influence on getting their articles indexed. They either have published in a publication indexed by a digital library, and then their article is available in that digital library, or they have not
  • citation counts obtained from Google Scholar are sometimes used to evaluate the impact of articles and their authors.
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  • ‘Academic Search Engine Optimization’ (ASEO)
  • Citation counts are commonly used to evaluate the impact and performance of researchers and their articles.
  • Nowadays, citation counts from Web-based academic search engines are also used for impact evaluations.
  • Most academic search engines offer features such as showing articles cited by an article, or showing related articles to a given article. Citation spam could bring more articles from manipulating researchers onto more of these lists.
  • It is apparent that a citation from a PowerPoint presentation or thesis proposal has less value than a citation in a peer reviewed academic article. However, Google does not distinguish on its website between these different origins of citations[8].
  • Google Scholar indexes Wikipedia articles when the article is available as PDF on a third party website.
  • That means, again, that not all citations on Google Scholar are what we call ‘full-value’ citations.
  • As long as Google Scholar applies only very rudimentary or no mechanisms to detect and prevent spam, citation counts should be used with care to evaluate articles’ and researchers’ impact.
  • However, Google Scholar is a Web-based academic search engine and as with all Web-based search engines, the linked content should not be trusted blindly.
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What is a Database, really? Data Storage for Librarians « The Other Librarian - 0 views

  • A Text File Good old text is still not a bad way to store data. 
  • If you want to retrieve that information, you can use a script to tell the computer to organize the information in a particular way.   This is called parsing
  • Structured Text As you climb the data food chain, complex systems get developed to organize information. 
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  • Mark-up:   Marked information is data that has marks or signals to let a computer distinguish one type of data from the other.  
  • A variable:   A variable happens when you give some data a name. 
  • A string:   A string is a kind of variable that has text.
  • An array:   An array is a type of variable that includes a list used by computer programs for later manipulation.    
  • An object:   Explaining objects in full requires that someone read up on object-oriented programming.  
  • Tree-based  Structures Tree-based structures, or cluster models are a subset of “structured text” data storage models.  
  • XML is probably the best example.
  • data is organized in “parents”, “siblings” and “children”.
  • The Relational Model The relational model is better than a tree-model when your dataset is large and complicated.    The way it works is, instead of thinking in terms of “parents, siblings and children,” you think in term of relationships.
  • the “Primary Key.”   This means that every data object (such as a library) has a way of identifying itself in a unique way
  • a “Foreign Key.”    The Foreign key is a way to associate one dataset (eg. libraries) with another dataset (eg. library branches, hospitals or businesses).
  • This association is called a relationship.
  • In more complicated relationships (called the Many-to-Many relationship), you might have to create a third table to associate two entities.      
  • TEXT/XML Based Text files can be organized in such a way as to accommodate some of the benefits of the relational model.
  • Two examples of XML-based databases include Xindice and Sedna.
  • SQL/Binary-based Databases The more common relational database type is a piece of software running on a server, rather than a set of text files.   They are generally accessed using a standard language called SQL (Structure Query Language), or more specifically SQL as supported by a popular scripting language like PHP, Python or Java.
  • Almost any major web application will have a combination of all these types of data storage methods!  
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    How databases are used in libraries
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