Emily Clasper of the Suffolk County Library posted about some work she had done to embed status messages in the catalog using Twitter. This sounded like a really great idea because it is an out-of-band (e.g. something that doesn’t rely on OhioLINK infrastructure for reporting downtimes) way to get messages to member staff and users. But I didn’t get a chance to work on my implementation for a while, so for over a year ideas have bubbled around in my head about ways to apply this technique and improve on it. I finally carved out some spare time to actually work on it, and came up with my take on the concept. The result is the OhioLINK Status-Via-Twitter service.

A demo of the TwitterJS implementation using a copy of the OhioLINK homepage.

In Emily’s approach to putting messages on public pages, the staff would first post a message to the public status Twitter account which would then be turned into a block of HTML inserted into the public catalog page via JavaScript. The JavaScript would query the feed for the public status Twitter account and insert any tweets found there into the page. When the information in the tweet is no longer needed, the library staff would delete the tweet.

In my conceptualization of this service, there would be individuals or agents other than the catalog JavaScript code that would be looking to the tweet stream for updates on services. Those individuals and agents won’t know when a tweet is deleted, so an “all-clear” message needs to be posted to the tweet stream for those consumers. And, of course, we wouldn’t want an “all-clear” tweet to be posted ad infinitum (or at least until the next service message) on public web pages.

I would also like to include the tweeted service messages on all pages on our site, not just the homepage. But if we do that, then every page hit for one of our users would hit the Twitter API to get the tweets from the public status Twitter account…with possible privacy and capacity overloading concerns. So there would need to be a way to cache messages from Twitter for a period of time.

In bulleted-point form, what I was looking for was:

• A bit of JavaScript that would dynamically insert HTML into a <div> tag that contains the text of tweets.
• The script would not display tweets that contain a set phrase (e.g. “returned to normal”) or were older than a pre-defined period.
• The script would cache messages as cookies and only read new messages from Twitter after a pre-defined period of time.
• The script had to be compact and self-contained (e.g. not rely on external JavaScript libraries) for speed and simplicity.

The Implementation

The bottom of ‘twitter.js’ in the OhioLINK-Prod branch of the twitterjs project has an example of how to configure the JavaScript function. It looks like this:

getTwitters('ohiolinkstatus', {       // <div> to insert text
  id: 'OhioLINKstatus',               // Twitter id
  count: 20,                          // Maximum number of tweets to show
  ignoreReplies: true,                // Ignore @-replies (true or false)
  ignoreOlderThan: 36*60*60,          // Ignore tweets older than this (in minutes)
  stopIfSeen: 'returned to normal',   // Stop display tweets if this text is in tweet
  cookiePrefix: 'TwitterJS',          // Preface cookies with this prefix
  cookieDomain: 'dltj.org',           // Cookies stored for this domain
  cookieRefresh: 5                    // How often to check tweets (in minutes)
});</div>

To make this work on your pages, you’d need to follow these steps:

1. Download the twitter.js file from GitHub. At the end of this file, add the configuration to match your needs. At a minimum, change cookieDomain to match the domain of your website, or this won’t work. You probably also want to change the id unless you want to monitor OhioLINK services. ¹
2. Download the CSS file for twitterjs and modify to your tastes.
3. (Optional Step) Run your JavaScript through JSMinify to reduce its size to increase website performance. Do the same for the CSS file.
4. Upload the JavaScript and CSS files to your website.
5. Add these lines to the <head> section of any page you want to use this:

       <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://your.host.name/your.directory/twitter.css" type="text/css" media="screen" charset="utf-8" />
   	<script src="http://your.host.name/your.directory/twitter.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

6. Add this line to the <body> section of the document where you want the tweets to appear:

       <div class="twitters" id="ohiolinkstatus"></div>

   Be sure the id attribute value matches the first parameter of the getTwitters() function call in the first step.

getTwitters() will run the main body of code after the page is finished loading. If it finds a twitterjs cookie for the current domain, it replaces whatever is inside the <div> with that information. If it doesn’t find a twitterjs cookie or the cookie has expired, it pulls the feed of tweets, parses them, stashes the value into a domain cookie (even if the value is the empty string), and replaces whatever is inside the <div>.

For extra credit, note that you can do a lot of styling with the CSS file. For instance, the version of this I’m demoing at OhioLINK has an GIF encoded as Base64 data in the background of the unordered list of tweets. (We do the Base64 encoding like this to avoid the overhead of another round-trip back to the webserver to get the small graphic.) You can create your own graphic, translate it using a Base64 encoder, and replace that value.

If you end up using this, please let me know in the comments.

Footnotes

1. Note that at the time this is being posted, OhioLINK is not using this in production so don’t rely on this Twitter ID for actual outage messages.

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Using Twitter For Service Outage Awareness

At the ALA Annual Conference exhibit floor I got my first chance to see the RDA Toolkit. RDA is “Resource Description and Access” — the new standard for bibliographic description of content. So this was the first time I really got to look at the RDA Toolkit. (By the way, you can look at it, too, during an open trial access period that runs through the end of August by signing up for it.) What really struck in me the demonstration, though, was that the site is as much a subscription to access the content of the RDA standard as it is a subscription to a delivery service with functions and features that go beyond the text of the standard itself. The text of the standard will be available in printed form, but one cannot get an electronic copy of the standard itself. This strikes me as sort of weird, so this blog post talks through that weirdness feeling.

I’m trying to think of another example of a standard that inseparable from a delivery system for the standard, and I can’t think of any. Now granted, that the RDA Toolkit website has some very nice features for interlinking between documents, for creating local “workflows” and “mappings” for local activities, and creating group subscription-specific links to local documents. But this decision to only allow electronic access to the standard through this subscription service that requires an annual fee feels uncomfortable. Like I don’t really have access to the standard. Like it was a decision to limit competition for other delivery mechanisms to make sure a rather lucrative ongoing income through the RDA Toolkit website.

Also weird is the answer to the question “How does the site calculate the number of concurrent users?“. The notion of “concurrent users” is pretty hard in the web space because in the normal mode of operation there isn’t an ongoing connection between a user’s browser and the content server. There is a connection to deliver the HTML, associated graphics and other page content when a user initially asks for the page. But while the user is reading the page there is no ongoing connection between browser and server. I would expect to see mention in this section of “a concurrent user is counted for five minutes from when the browser last accesses the server” but that isn’t there.

Has anyone else thought about this, or is it getting discussed elsewhere? I may write more here as I have a chance to think about it and talk with others about it.

Update: Monday, June 28th

CC:DA Meeting with Ron Murray's FRBR Paper Tool documents spread out on the floor

Some other interesting facts. There have been 2,200 requests for trial access. (I wish they wouldn’t call it “open access” because that phrase has other connotations, but what can you do…) About 2/3rds of the trial access requests were for institutional accounts. 53% came from the United States; 11% from Australia; 10% from Canada; 4% from the U.K. Creating these trial access accounts has been a manual process, and there is a backlog at the moment. (I signed up for trial access on Saturday and I haven’t heard back yet — probably because all the people who would act on that request are here at ALA.)

There was discussion about the update process for the standard. They are taking a very deliberate approach to start with — thinking that even minor typographical changes might have major conceptual impacts — so they won’t make any changes without JSC approval. On the service side, there are plans to enhance the site with multiple translations and more user configurable options. There is also the print version, but no date or pricing information has been set. (The cost of the print version will probably be in the $150 range.) They are also preparing help guides and mechanisms for deep linking into the RDA Toolkit site and for advanced searching.

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

RDA-as-Service Only

Ron Murray and Barbara Tillett, both from the Library of Congress, are presenting their research in thinking about bibliographic information as networks of interrelated nodes at ALA Annual. This is a continuation of their “paper tool” work which was presented at the Library of Congress last year.

The title of the presentation is From “Moby-Dick” To “Mash-Ups:” Thinking About Bibliographic Networks. The presentation will be Monday, June 28, 2010 at 8:05 a.m. in the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill, Yorktown/Valley Forge Rooms. The presentation is scheduled to go for 75 minutes.

Presentation Summary: Traditional and contemporary attempts to identify and describe simple and complex bibliographic resources have overlooked useful and powerful possibilities, due to the insufficient modeling of “bibliographic things of interest.” The presentation will introduce a resource description approach that remodels and strengthens FRBR by borrowing key concepts from Information Science and the History of Science. The presentation will reveal portions of a network of bibliographic (and other useful) relationships between printings of Melville’s novel dating from 1851-1975 into the present. In addition, structural similarities between the print publication network and the multimedia “mash-ups” seen on YouTube and other websites will be demonstrated and discussed.

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

From “Moby-Dick” To “Mash-Ups:” Thinking About Bibliographic Networks at ALA Annual 2010

At the American Library Association conference this weekend, I’ll be part of a panel presentation from the LITA Emerging Technologies Interest Group with the title “What Is Your Library Doing about Emerging Technologies?” The presentation will be on Saturday, June 26 from 1:30pm to 3:30pm in room 103B of the Washington Convention Center. The publicity blurb:

A new job title of “Emerging Technology Librarian” seems to reflect an awareness among today’s libraries that there is a need for a librarians whose main role is to explore, evaluate, promote, and implement various emerging technologies. 19 librarians in different fields of librarianship at academic, school, and public libraries will discuss the topic of emerging technologies at libraries, their evaluation, implementation, adoption, and management challenges.

My panel group met by conference call this afternoon to discuss the topic, and I came away feeling great about the synergy of this group. The panel style is the panelists responding to a question from the moderator and reactions from each other with time for questions from the audience. No canned presentations!

Thanks to Bohyun Kim from Florida International University for setting up the panel discussion.

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

“What Is Your Library Doing about Emerging Technologies?”

Back in the early days of this blog, I had a post on Buzzwords Galore and Bandwidth that May Rival Your Station Wagon. The topic was a “hybrid optical and packet network” being deployed by Internet2 in 2006, and in the tail end of the post text I explained the reference to the station wagon part of the post title:

When you think you have a really zippy network connection, someone will (should?) bring up an old internet adage which says “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.”

In the post comments, Walt Crawford asked “How about a 747 full of BluRay discs?” I must have been bored, because I calculated that bandwidth as 37Tb/s, and I even showed my work. Last week an internet citizen going by the name “Steveo” updated the table for an Airbus A38-800F. He (or she) and I arrived at different numbers (Steveo seems to have mistaken cubic feet for cubic meters in the calculation and didn’t update the maximum airspeed figure), so perhaps it is time to revisit this topic. (And while we’re at it, we’ll throw in numbers for Boeing’s latest freighter aircraft: the 747-8F.)

Boeing 747-400F Main Cargo Deck. How many rectangular boxes can we fit in a round space?

Now, by contrast, the latest notice I could find of high-speed data transfer over a network was a mention in December last year. In a press release from Caltech with the title “High Energy Physicists Set New Record for Network Data Transfer” is this paragraph:

The focus of the exhibit was the [High Energy Physics] team’s record-breaking demonstration of storage-to-storage data transfer over wide area networks from two racks of servers and a network switch-router on the exhibit floor [of SuperComputing 2009 in Portland, Oregon]. The high-energy physics team’s demonstration, “Moving Towards Terabit/Sec Transfers of Scientific Datasets: The LHC Challenge,” achieved a bidirectional peak throughput of 119 gigabits per second (Gbps) and a data flow of more than 110 Gbps that could be sustained indefinitely among clusters of servers on the show floor and at Caltech, Michigan, San Diego, Florida, Fermilab, Brookhaven, CERN, Brazil, Korea, and Estonia.

So, 110 Gbps from a network and 217,648 Gbps from a Boeing 747-8 Freighter. (We’re not counting yet the capacity of the theoretical Airbus A380-800F.) Only three orders of magnitude before the proverbial station wagon full of tapes is put to rest.

Updates

Footnotes

1. The original posting listed 159 as the capacity using a source that is no longer on the web. According to the Boeing site, 159 is the capacity of the lower deck, which doesn’t include the 605 cubic meters of capacity on the main deck. Go figure.
2. Converted from Mach to knots via Google.
3. “Maximum Level Speed” from specs converted from mach to knots via Google.
4. “Includes 15 minute bias”

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Bandwidth of Large Airplanes

OhioLINK, my employer, is seeking nominations and applications for the position of Executive Director. The search is being conducted with the assistance of Brill Neumann Associates, and the position description is linked from their current searches page (direct link to PDF, cached link to PDF).

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

OhioLINK Seeks Executive Director

Did you know that Amazon offers a facility to make corrections to its catalog? Somewhere in the past few months someone mentioned this to me and I tried it out. (Unfortunately, it has been long enough now that I’ve forgotten who told me; if you are the one, please fess up in this post’s comments section. It was Ron Murray from the Library of Congress. Thanks, Ron!) And it works! Is this a model for crowdsourced corrections to library data?

Here is how it looks from a user’s perspective.

Step 1. Finding something to correct

Amazon page for 'How to Talk to Anyone' with typo

Step 2. Making the Correction

Excerpt of Amazon product information page with the 'update product info' link highlighted

Excerpt of Amazon Catalog Update Form

Preview of Amazon Catalog Updates

Submission confirmation page from Amazon Catalog Update service

Step 3. Getting Confirmation from Amazon

From: “gfix-noreply@amazon.com”
To: “peter@OhioLINK.edu”Subject: Your Amazon.com Catalog Update Request

==== This is an automated response message - please do not reply ====

Thank you for using the Catalog Update Form to send suggestions for

How to Talk to Anyone: 62 Little Tricks for Big Sucess in Relationships (ASIN 1593160267)

Your update has been accepted and processed. It will appear online within the next two to three business days.
Attribute: Title
Current value:
How to Talk to Anyone: 62 Little Tricks for Big Sucess in Relationships

Your suggestion:
How to Talk to Anyone: 62 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships

Data accuracy is highly important to us. We appreciate the time you have taken to submit your updates to us.

Best regards,

Catalog Department
www.amazon.com

And if you go to this product page now you’ll see the title has been corrected.

Would this Work for Libraries?

If we were to do it, I think it might have to be done by a bibliographic utility like OCLC who has ways to push the updated records to member libraries. Otherwise we run the risk of diluting the corrections across many individual library catalogs. Interestingly, this sort of user-generated correction facility one that the Open Library already provides. (Open Library is a wiki-like service that offers the ability for anyone to make changes to its records, much like how anyone can edit articles on Wikipedia.) So between Amazon and Open Library there is a continuum of workflows of mediated corrections to unmediated corrections for us to consider. This scheme, of course, begs us to consider the notion of distributed version control systems for handling our bibliographic data so that changes can be merged across many sources.

Lots to think about…

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Amazon Catalog Updates

This week I was at the Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability annual conference conference at the Ohio State University and was reminded again about the principles of Universal Design. The presentation was “Universal Design: Ensuring Access to All Learners” by Maria Morin from Project Enhance at the University of Texas — Pan American. Although she talked about Universal Design for Learning (encompassing assessments, instructional delivery and resource presentation), there was a point in her presentation that I snapped to Universal Design for Libraries.

Here were the two slides:

Universal Design for Learning is about Options!

• Representation refers to how one can design and deliver information to the class.
• Engagement refers to how students participate in class.
• Expression refers to how one can ask students to demonstrate what they have learned.

Options>>>>>>

• Multiple ways of REPRESENTATION to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge.
• Multiple ways of EXPRESSION provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know.
• Multiple ways of ENGAGEMENT to tap into learners’ interest, challenging them appropriately, and motivate them to learn.

Are there ways that we can provide options for multiple ways of representation, expression and engagement in the services we provide? A quick Google search for Universal Design for Libraries has some interesting possibilities, including a checklist from the University of Washington DO-IT office and an announcement about an ALA ASCLA Midwinter 2010 institute. Is anyone else thinking about this?

The Seven Principles of Universal Design, as offered in a handy bookmark from the presentation by the Project Enhance folks, are:

1. Equitable Use: The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
2. Flexibility in Use: The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.
3. Simple and Intuitive: Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
4. Perceptible Information: The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities.
5. Tolerance for Error: The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.
6. Low Physical Effort: The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue.
7. Size and Space for Approach and Use: Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of user’s body size, posture, or mobility.

As we design information systems, certainly the first five of these seven apply to us. And, as is the hallmark of Universal Design, are useful for not only people with disabilities but for everyone one in general.

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

UDL: Universal Design…for Libraries?

I’m working with some colleagues at the Library of Congress on the on the description of complex analog and digital resources. In that research, we want to get a better sense of what people who read DLTJ call a “mash-up.” We invite readers to provide examples (in any medium) of what they think are mash-ups of different resources in the comment area of this post. If you nominate a web-accessible mash-up, please provide a link for it. If you nominate an analog mash-up (they do exist!), please provide a reasonable citation. If it is a hybrid – do your best! Also helpful would be a short statement as to why you think the example is a mash-up, and whether you like the results.

The research involves how we describe the parts of a whole guided by concepts provided by FRBR. These sorts of mashups are typically made up of independently created parts, and acknowledging those parts are in single-record frames of reference. We’re exploring the use of interconnected networks of descriptions, and mashups are one of the exemplars.

Examples

“Avatar, Daybreakers, Prince of Persia, Book of Eli, Wolfman, Legion, Sherlock Holmes Trailer Mashup” from YouTube.

FooBar Poster, by Eboy Arts Inc.

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Mash-Up Request for Submissions

First, sorry about this getting posted prematurely through the DLTJ blog. I was trying the post-from-Flickr function, and it was telling me that the posting wasn’t working. So, it got posted here twice. And it got posted before I was ready; I was hoping it would land in the draft queue so I could edit it with further commentary. Oh, well; live and learn.

Charleston, SC Visitor's Center A/V Display

I’m visiting Charleston, South Carolina, and was struck — from a technical perspective — on the welcome display at the entrance to the visitor’s center. If you click through to the picture on Flickr, you can see the notes associated with the various parts of the display. But, basically, it consists of a data projector back-lighting a floating screen in front of a pedestal. Mounted on the pedestal is a trackball and button that control the interactive system displaying graphics on the data projector. Mounted above the pedestal is a sound dome directing the audio to just the people below the pedestal. There are four of these at the corners of a map of historic Charleston embedded in below the surface of the floor. The result is a very airy feeling with a high degree of technical usability without the technology getting in the way.

Post from: Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Charleston, SC Visitor’s Center A/V Display