Meta Interchange

On Wednesday, two committees of the Florida state legislature recommended removing funding for the Florida State Aid to Public Libraries program. This is the second time in as many years that this has happened. To compound the problem, the elimination of state aid would also mean that Florida libraries would no longer qualify for some forms of federal aid.

While a handful of library systems in Florida are independent taxing districts and could (painfully) weather this, elimination of state aid would mean that a lot of rural and city libraries would have to close branches, cut hours, and lay off library staff. Many rural libraries are already operating on shoestrings.

Do you live in Florida? Call your state representative and senator today and ask them to vote to continue funding for state aid to Florida libraries. Also, please ask them to stop this proposal from becoming an annual tradition. No brinkmanship with our libraries, please!

Not paying close attention to Perl’s definition of truth can sometimes lead to subtle bugs. Consider a simple scalar $x that should contain a string exactly one character wide. If the original value of $x can be undefined and you want to make sure it has a default value of a single space, do not do the following:

$x ||= ' ';


Why not? If $x starts off as ‘0′, a permitted value, this line will change it to ' '. Instead, do this

$x = ' ' unless defined $x;


Remember, 0, '0', '', and undef all evaluate to Perl’s notion of false.

Earlier today Chris Cormack and I were chatting on IRC about various ways to manage patches, and decided to stage a little tutorial about how to pull from remote Git repositories:

<chris> speaking of public repo’s … i have been pushing to github for a while
<chris> but i have set up git-daemon on my machine at home too
<gmcharlt> chris: anything you’re ready to have me look at to pull?
<chris> not really
<chris> one interesting thing is the dbix_class branch
<chris> http://git.workbuffer.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=koha.git;a=summary
<gmcharlt> even if it’s trivial, it occurs to me that doing it and writing up how we did it might be useful material for a tutorial blog post or maiilings to koha-devel
<chris> lemme check
<chris> tell ya what
<chris> ill do a history.txt update
<chris> and commit that, and we can pull that
<chris> gmcharlt: http://git.workbuffer.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=koha.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/documentation
<chris> so you can a remote for my repo
<chris> git remote add workbuffer.org git://git.workbuffer.org/git/koha.git
<chris> then git checkout -b documentation –track workbuffer.org/documentation
<chris> (probably need a git fetch workbuffer.org too(
<chris> then you can cherry-pick that commit over
<chris> thats one way to do it
<chris> or you could just checkout a branch
<gmcharlt> chris: yeah, I think I’ll do it as a pull
<chris> checkout -b mydocumentation
<chris> git pull workbuffer.org/documentation
<chris> i think that will do it anyway
<gmcharlt> yeah, then into my staging branch
<gmcharlt> git checkout test
<gmcharlt> git merge mydocumentation/documentation
<gmcharlt> or directly
<gmcharlt> git merge workbuffer.org/documentation
<chris> yep
<chris> i think the pull will do fetch + merge for ya
<gmcharlt> it does indeed
<gmcharlt> fetch first, though
<gmcharlt> lets you do git log –pretty=oneline test workbuffer.org/documentation
<chris> good point
<gmcharlt> chris: well, let’s make it official – send a pull request to the patches list
<chris> will do
<gmcharlt> e.g., Subject: PULL – git://git.workbuffer.org/koha.git – documentation – history changes
<gmcharlt> brief description of changes in body
<gmcharlt> something like that
<chris> works for me
<gmcharlt> “Welcome, all, to DVCS performance theatre”
<chris> off it goes
<chris> this was our first git tutorial right there .. quick someone take photos or something

Catalogers and technical services managers in public libraries are needed more than ever, but for a variety of reasons their numbers have been declining over the years. ALCTS CRG has convened a forum on careers in technical services in public libraries, but as the forum was not listed in the program guide, here’s the description. Full disclosure: I highly recommend this because, among other reasons, my wife, Marlene Harris, is one of the participants.

ALCTS CRG Forum in Anaheim Focused on Careers for Public Librarians in
Technical Services

Sunday, June 29, 8:00-9:30 a.m., Disney Paradise Pier Hotel, Pacific C/D

Want to get the scoop on the advantages and disadvantages of a technical
services career in public libraries? Be sure to catch the CRG forum,
Technical Services Careers in Public Libraries: Getting Started,
Building Your Career, or Making the Switch, on Sunday, June 29, 2008
from 8 to 9:30 a.m., in Room Pacific C/D of the Disney Paradise Pier
Hotel, when Carolyn Goolsby, Technical Services Manager at the Tacoma
Public Library, and Marlene A. Harris, Division Chief, Technical
Services at the Chicago Public Library, will offer advice and describe
from personal experience the ups and downs, ins and outs, of a career in
technical services within the public library setting. Ample time will be
provided for questions and answers after presentations by both
panelists.

The moderator is Elaine Yontz from the faculty of the Library and Information Science program at Valdosta State University.

Sponsored by ALCTS CRG (Council of Regional Groups)

Technorati Tags: alaannual2008, ala2008, catalogers, publiclibraries

I’ll be attending the following programs during ALA Annual this year.

Friday, 27 June

• 10:30 to 12:00: Old Records, New Records, New Interfaces (ALCTS Catalog Form and Function Interest Group)

Saturday, 28 June

• 13:30 to 15:30: Metadata Mashup: Creating and Publishing Application Profiles (ALCTS) or There’s No Catalog Like No Catalog (LITA)
• 16:00 to 18:00: Getting Ready for RDA and FRBR (ALCTS) or Science Fiction and Fantasy: Looking at IT and the Information Rights of the Individual. Hmm, RDA or Cory Doctorow? Decisions, decisions…

Sunday, 29 June

• 08:00 to 12:00: Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging (ALCTS and LITA). And where did I leave Hermione’s hourglass?
• 10:30 to 12:30: The Open Library, Promise and Peril (LITA)
• 13:30 to 15:00: Top Technology Trends (LITA)
• 15:30 to 17:00: Koha Interest Group Meeting (leaving early)

Monday, 30 June

• 10:30 to 12:00: Legal Issues in Developing Open Source Systems for Libraries Understanding Free/Open Source Software Licenses, Project Forms, and Project Governance Options
• 13:30 to 15:30: Open Source Systems Interest Group (LITA)

Other than that, I’ll be variously at the LibLime booth, in meetings, or hacking Koha.

Last  Wednesday I gave a lightning talk at Code4LibCon on some musings about Git qua distributed version control system and ideas for distributed cataloging. Check out my slides.

Slides from the other lightning talks are being posted here. Be sure to check out Andy Mullen’s presentation when his slides and the video are posted — making player piano MIDI files from OCRs of scanned scores is special enough, but his sense of dramatic timing during his presentation was marvelous.

Erasmus sitting on the bag I used to cart my laptop around at Code4Lib

Read more…

I was a math major in college, but it was my student job at the college library that ended up setting the current direction for my career and life. I started out filing update pages for the Standard Federal Tax Reporter (and sometimes reading it!). I worked for most of the departments at the library at various points in time, and ended up as a junior systems administrator.

Towards the end of my undergraduate career, the library changed its ILS, and I wrote most of the code to extract and migrate the library’s data from the old system to the new one. After college, I started working for the vendor of the new ILS. I have spent the last nine years migrating data, programming, moving from Chicago to Anchorage to Tallahassee to Chicago, finding love and kitty cats, and watching and experiencing the trials and travails of the library automation industry.

I changed jobs recently, and am now coding for and supporting an open source integrated library system, Koha.

I plan to blog about library automation, open source software, metadata and the many headaches inspired by it, and anything else I happen to think of.