A summary of what I am thinking about and reading today

• 00:49 trying out twitterbar #
• 01:24 Please Snark This tinyurl.com/yhs8fzt #
• 12:28 testing the facebook connection #
• 12:57 Ironic that the bastion of the Canadian free market can’t manage it’s own finances. tinyurl.com/yf452px #

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Backup. Backup. Backup. Backup. Backup. Backup. Backup. Backup.

Did I repeate that enough?

Backup.

I just got the details on how our ILS server is backed up. I’ve been making a backup every time I make changes to the OPAC. And that’s saving my butt.

I’ve been making extensive changes to our online catalog, most of which are cosmetic. Cosmetic changes in the world of ILS software can have consequences far beyond what you think of  when you think ‘I’m changing the look and feel of the interface’.

I moved an inline set of searches to the sidebar and moved the small, embedded search boxes into the body of the page. I commented out a section of the sidebar that displayed the contents of the cart, intending to move this to another section of the website.

It broke the whole freakin’ use of the cart.

I, of course, had no idea that’s what I’d done, so to get a white screen of death (Cannot Open Error Screen) every time I tried to use the cart was pretty scary.

Furthermore, as I’ve been working on these changes since August, I didnt’ have a good idea as to when I’d done this.

Remember though, I’d backed up before every change I made. I restored each section of the website from the initial backups I’d taken, then copied over the backup of changes I’d made, rebuilding and testing the website each time. This allowed me to narrow the changes down to one template file. I restored this file from a backup and re-did the changes I’d made, testing and confirming that commenting out this cart display broke the whole cart.

The whole story is something straight out of The Daily WTF.

Breaking a display breaks the whole cart?

The whole library profession really needs those vaunted next generation ILS’s the cool kids keep talking about…

Systems Basics – The Password List

In the initial days of my job, I ran into a serious snag that took several weeks of work to resolve. Almost all databases have an admin section where you can get usage data, create links to other databases and OpenURL resolvers and update the look and feel of the databases.

You guessed the problem…. I had no passwords.

Many of these passwords were stashed in files, in purchase orders and in other librarians offices. I was able to assemble some passwords and a basic outline of our databases over a few weeks before the staff went on vacation. The rest, I had to send sheepish emails to our vendors to get those passwords reset.

That was an unpleasant experience, one that I would prefer to avoid in the future.

My first solution to this problem was a basic list. I created 3 major lists, ILS passwords, Service passwords, and Vendor passwords. This allowed me to consolidate the many little pieces of paper scrawled with passwords that lay cast upon my desk. This list remained my ’scribble list’ as we canceled databases, added new users and discovered (many, many) expired logins.

The second, and more permanent solution is KeePass.

KeePass is a password manager, a password generator and a safe, permanent way to control all the passwords a systems librarian has to keep track of.

For personal use, KeePass is an excellent program to use if you need to control a large number of complex passwords. For librarians… well, let’s just say a half-way competent hacker could make a total hash of any ILS currently on the market, especially with the way most of them remain illconfigured and unupdated. KeePass is secure, but it also allows one to export the data in a number of different ways, back up the database, and it’s portable. I keep two backups of my password database, one encrypted in my work email and two paper copies in separate locations. This may be paranoid, but it’s saved my data on three separate occasions. Paper copies don’t get corrupted.

You can carry around all your passwords on your memory key, or keep them on the remote drives provided by most IT departments. If you’re using a memory key, I also recommend the very cool launcher known as geek.menu. For the paranoid among you, this app is tightly integrated with truecrypt for an extra level of protection.

On Visualizing Projects Beyond Your Ken – Freemind

Don’t you love that phrase? Beyond your ken? It’s a Scottish idiom meaning beyond your ability to comprehend.

It’s very much how I’m feeling in approaching some of the projects here at CNA-Q.  Just doing edits to the OPAC requires editing several files at the same time, then aut0-generating the html, testing it with (at least) two different browsers and tracking those changes over a number of days. This is in addition to keeping track of admin passwords, login details, ip addresses, and even the structure and location of folders on the server.

I’ve been depending very heavily on Freemind to do a lot of this. It’s a mind manager, available as a portable app, which allows me to install it when and where I feel like it. I’ve mapped the entire library network, with our library server as the center, as well as two sub-maps of users and employees. Here is just a sample,  this is a map of our online databases.

This is just a screengrab, from the little icons you can see there are notes about each database, as well as hyperlinks to the library admin pages. The color coding is temporary, and relates to our implementation of 360 Link.

Green is ‘Not done Yet’. Yellow is ‘Working’.  Blue is ‘Full Text and doesn’t need it’

There is no way I can keep all these connections in my head. Notes are helpful, but being able to map out the different systems within the library makes a huge difference. I keep Freemind open behind my work window, when I need to navigate to a new area of the network to work on another project, I pop it open and click on the links embedded there.

One Month In – The Williams’ in Qatar

We did survive the trip! Flying a family, plus two cats from Calgary to Toronto to Zurich to Doha all in one 19 hour fun fest was one of the more difficult things we’ve ever done. For future reference, some things to keep in mind whilst traveling this far.

1. European and Middle Eastern airlines often have different requirements for carryon baggage. Going from Air Canada with a 2 carryon bag limit, plus carseat to Qatar Airways with a 1 bag, 7kg limit with no carseat cost us a lot of time and a few bucks.

2. If you are moving internationally with pets, give yourself 2 hours padding on top of the normal 2 hours you would give to get on the plane. We gave ourselves one hour extra and almost missed our Calgary-Toronto leg.

We’re living in the Al Jazeeraland 1 compound and we arrived just in time to bid the whole compound a happy vacation. This has left us the clubhouse and the pool largely to ourselves.

Doha is a beautiful city that seems to be constantly under construction. To Canadian eyes, especially to someone who has been immersed in the greenery of eastern Canada for the past few years, the landscape is very stark, variations of brown, dun, sand… it’s a desert. After a few weeks, you start to see a lot of differences, especially down by the Cornice. The desert is still everywhere though, as we discovered last week when a gigantic sandstorm blew in and filled our villa with sand.

Now, CNAQ… Wow. Beautiful campus with air conditioning set at such a level as to freeze a penguin. As the systems librarian, I’m spending most of my time parked in front of my computer trying not to kill our server or the IT department… joking guys… don’t erase my user account. When I step out for lunch, the 45 degree heat is a relief.

My summer is shaping up to be somthing of a hermit’s existence, I’ve been describing my job as ‘the html gnome’. I’m hard at work implementing our OpenURL resolver, our Federated search tool and once those are up we’re going to be putting Aquabrowser on top of the whole system.

So! If you’re brand new (or an old fart) at CNA-Q and you need library help, it’s Brett.Williams@ the normal CNAQ email address. Soon you too will be fighting with your office phone and getting locked out of your computer while freezing in the magnificent ice machine that is the entire CNA-Q campus.

A summary of what I am thinking about and reading today

• 00:33 I’m trying is.gd/teD8 on a laptop w/ a broken screen. #

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New Job

As you might have noticed, this blog has gone almost totally dead recently. I’ve just accepted a job with the College of the North Atlantic – Qatar as their Systems Librarian. It’s likely that you won’t hear from me for the next 2 months as we move to Qatar, get ourselves settled and I get an introduction to the CNA-Q systems.

This is going to be a lot of fun, I’ll twitter what I can. Look for a return sometime in July!

A summary of what I am thinking about and reading today

• 16:18 # Web Tech Guy & Angry Staff Person #

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A summary of what I am thinking about and reading today

• 10:03 last fm is tightening down. very sad is.gd/oTaI #

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On Using Mashups as an Information Professional

Crosspost from the SLA Listserv

** I posted this in response to a query regarding mashups on the Special Libraries Association Listserv and it generated a little bit of interest.**

I usually have used mashups to shorten my own workflow, for instance working with English or History students when I’m unfamiliar with the specific texts, I can pull up an electronic copy from Google Books or the Gutenberg Project by searching for the title from my desktop.

For public sources, tweaked Google or Yahoo searches work really well. If the subject is complex I run a number of the search RSS feeds through Yahoo Pipes, remove the duplicates and use the geo or time tagging tools as appropriate. Google Custom Search can also work really well by whitelisting a number of websites so you cut down on the clutter. For instance, I’ve made a Google Custom search that searches Bloomberg and the WSJ for any mention of a company name, grabbed the RSS feed for that search and embedded the first four items on that feed in my desktop. This allows me to do an hourly search for any information on this company simply by minimizing any application and glancing at my desktop. I can extend it by combining multiple searches with yahoo pipes.

 I find that I use these kind of mashups only for my own personal workflow. Since I built them I know how to fix them if something goes wrong. My mashups are not enterprise ready, and it helps to know how to do the searches and the correlation the long way before you get the computer to mash everything together.  I build them to remove some of the busywork in searching public sources and to automate recurring searches. 

If your using public sources or public systems like Yahoo Pipes to create your mashups one of the more interesting ways that you can sanitize and present the information is through Serious Samurize. I use it to embed system monitoring for my computer, a number of custom Google news searches and a full text ebook search mashup I put together via Yahoo Pipes in the desktop of my computer and in a toolbar at the bottom of the screen. It turns my desktop from a pretty picture into a custom information display.

Samurize accepts just about any input via a web page or an RSS feed, so you can customize to your hearts content. It can even authenticate websites, so if you can generate a RSS feed or a custom webpage that is updated regularly you can display the desired information automatically without having to log in. There is a bit of a learning curve, but the Samurize forums are extremely helpful. 

Here’s some links to the tools I use when I’m putting mashups together.

http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

http://www.samurize.com/modules/news/

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

http://www.programmableweb.com/mashups

Enjoy! I really like mashups because they force me to think through every step of my searches while I’m building the tool. Building them has really helped my search skills and my ability to explain what I’m doing for my clients.