Category Archives: Library

OAI-PMH for WordPress

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Umm frankly, I am not sure anything out there right now is going to work to bring OAI-PMH services to WordPressConsider these three resources for more info on OAI:

. If it does then is it going to be able to use WordPress to advertise things or is it going to use WordPress to aggregate things? if the former then nothing out there ever let the admin user choose which fields were matched to which attributes, dynamically. But if it is also the former then why would anyone actually want this functionality? What is the Use Case? If one is using WordPress as a bibliography reference system like some libraries do, then this makes a lot of sense. However, there is another use case I would like to present. That is, the website which is about several or a single language. There are potentially two ways to conceptualize this:

  1. If there were a website based on WordPress which was a dictionary website then the whole website might be considered a resource on a language. An example of this might be the use of SIL’s Webonary Plugin for WordPress and the Cherokee Language Project’s Dictionary.
  2. If there were a website presenting materials on several languages and each page was a resource on a single language then that would be a different use case. This would be more like what the Survey of California and
    Other Indian Languages     does or what the Central Institute of Indian Languages does.

OAI WordPress models

Existing Foundation

  • COinS-PMH (unAPI) WordPress Plugin (2005) [1] Peter Binkley. 9 December 2005. COinS-PMH (unAPI) WordPress Plugin. http://www.wallandbinkley.com/quaedam/2005/12_09_coins-pmh-unapi-wordpress-plugin.html [Accessed: 5 March 2012]
  • Peter Binkley tagged blog posts for OAI.
  • unAPI Server for WordPress. [2] Mike Giarlo. 19 May 2006. unAPI Server for WordPress. Technosophia. http://lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/unapi-wordpress-plug-in/ [Accessed: 5 March 2012]
  • WordPress, now with added unAPI! [3] Peter Binkley. 18 February 2006. WordPress, now with added unAPI!. http://www.wallandbinkley.com/quaedam/2006/02_18_wordpress-now-with-added-unapi.html [Accessed: 5 March 2012]
  • New OAI-PMH metadata format (It was an update).

I think there is a second question here too: why does one need OAI-PMH for wordpress… is it as a provider or as a consumer? If one needs a PHP app for OAI-PMH maybe they can use: https://github.com/caseyamcl/phpoaipmh

References

References
↑1 Peter Binkley. 9 December 2005. COinS-PMH (unAPI) WordPress Plugin. http://www.wallandbinkley.com/quaedam/2005/12_09_coins-pmh-unapi-wordpress-plugin.html [Accessed: 5 March 2012]
↑2 Mike Giarlo. 19 May 2006. unAPI Server for WordPress. Technosophia. http://lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/unapi-wordpress-plug-in/ [Accessed: 5 March 2012]
↑3 Peter Binkley. 18 February 2006. WordPress, now with added unAPI!. http://www.wallandbinkley.com/quaedam/2006/02_18_wordpress-now-with-added-unapi.html [Accessed: 5 March 2012]

Write it once Share it twice

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For some time I have been challenged by learning Wiki Markup. I learned HTML 4.0 then I took on xHtml 1.1 and the market keeps evolving. I help to maintain a few wiki pages on the digital archival of language based materials on the company I work at’s intranet. Way cool that we have a wiki, but I haven’t written much their because I like to compose in WordPress (xHtml) and use the full screen mode to block out distractions. Most of what I write comes from various internet sources. I feel a certain obligation to the sources to acknowledge them publicly, if I am going to use their content privately too. Therefore, I prefer to share those things externally as well as internally. The result is that I usually post what I write to my personal blog before I post to the company intranet. In the past I have had to rework the markup syntax when I move things from WordPress to the wiki.

However, I recently found an HTML to Wiki syntax converter: http://labs.seapine.com/htmltowiki.cgi. This tool allows me to compose in WordPress, convert to Wiki syntax and then repost to the corporate wiki.

Metadata Magic

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The company I work for has an archive for many kinds of materials. In recent times this company has moved to start a digital repository using DSpace. To facilitate contributions to the repository the company has built an Adobe AIR app which allows for the uploading of metadata to the metadata elements of DSpace as well as the attachement of the digital item to the proper bitstream. Totally Awesome.

However, one of the challenges is that just because the metadata is curated, collected and properly filed, it does not mean that the metadata is embedded in the digital items uploaded to the repository. PDFs are still being uploaded with the PDF’s author attribute set to Microsoft-WordMore about the metadata attributes of PDF/A can be read about on pdfa.org. Not only is the correct metadata and the wrong metadata in the same place at the same time (and being uploaded at the same time) later, when a consumer of the digital file downloads the file, only the wrong metadata will travel with the file. This is not just happening with PDFs but also with .mp3, .wav, .docx, .mov, .jpg and a slew of other file types. This saga of bad metadata in PDFs has been recognized since at least 2004 by James Howison & Abby Goodrum. 2004. Why can’t I manage academic papers like MP3s? The evolution and intent of Metadata standards.

So, today I was looking around to see if Adobe AIR can indeed use some of the available tools to propagate the correct metadata in the files before upload so that when the files arrive in DSpace that they will have the correct metadata.

  • The first step is to retrieve metadata from files. It seems that Adobe AIR can do this with PDFs. (One would hope so as they are both brain children of the geeks at Adobe.) However, what is needed in this particular set up is a two way street with a check in between. We would need to overwrite what was there with the data we want there.
  • However, as of 2009, there were no tools in AIR which could manipulate exif Data (for photos).
  • But it does look like the situation is more hopeful for working with audio metadata.

One way around the limitations of JavaScript itself might be to use JavaScript to call a command-line tool or execute a python, perl, or shell script, or even use a library. There are some technical challenges which need bridged when using these kinds of tools in a cross-platform environment. (Anything from flavors of Linux to, OS X 10.4-10.7 and Windows XP – Current.) This is mostly because of the various ways of implementing scripts on differnt platforms.

The technical challenge is that Adobe AIR is basically a JavaScript environment. As such there are certain technical challenges around implementation of command-line tools like Xpdf from fooLabs and Coherent PDF Tools or Phil Harvey’s ExifTool, Exifv2, pdftk, or even TagLib. One of the things that Adobe AIR can do is call an executable via something called actionscript. There are even examples of how to do this with PDF Metadata. This method uses PurePDF, a complete actionscript PDF library. Actionscript is powerful in and of itself, it can be used to call the XMP metadata of a PDF, Though one could use it to call on Java to do the same “work”.

Three Lingering Thoughts

  1. Even if the Resource and Metadata Packager has the abilities to embed the metadata in the files themselves, it does not mean that the submitters would know about how to use them or why to use them. This is not, however, a valid reason to not include functionality in a development project. All marketing aside, an archive does have a responsibility to consumers of the digital content, that the content will be functional. Part of today’s “functional” is the interoperability of metadata. Consumers do appreciate – even expect – that the metadata will be interoperable. The extra effort taken on the submitting end of the process, pays dividends as consumers use the files with programs like Picasa, iPhoto, PhotoShop, iTunes, Mendeley, Papers, etc.
  2. Another thought that comes to mind is that When one is dealing with large files (over 1 GB) It occurs to me that there is a reason for making a “preview” version of a couple of MB. That is if I have a 2 GB audio file, why not make 4 MB .mp3 file for rapid assessment of the file to see if it is worth downloading the .wav file. It seems that a metadata packager could also create a presentation file on the fly too. This is no-less true with photos or images. If a command-line tool could be used like imagemagick, that would be awesome.
  3. This problem has been addressed in the open source library science world. In fact a nice piece of software does live out there. It is called the Metadata Extraction Tool. It is not an end-all for all of this archive’s needs but it is a solution for some needs of this type.

Using Endnote X4 for Mac

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One of the most popular Citation Management software applications among academics is the application Endnote. Endnote has a long history is published by a reputable company, and has some pretty cool features. I use it (version X4) primarily because it is the only citation softwareThere is other citation management software for OS X which claims integration with pages but none of these solutions are endorsed or supported by Apple. Some of the other applications which claim integration with Pages are:

  1. Sente
  2. Bookends
  3. Papers – This is according to Wikipedia, but I own and use Papers 1.9.7 and have not seen how to integrate it with Pages. (However, Papers2, released March 8th, 2011 does say that it supports citation integration with Pages.)

which integrates natively with the word processor Pages, by Apple, Inc. The software boasts a bit of flexibility and quite a few useful features. Some of the really useful features I use are below.

However, regardless of how many good features I find and use in Endnote there are several things about it which irk me to no end. This is sort of a laundry list of these problematic areas.

  1. Can not sort by resource type:
    For instance if I wanted to sort or create a smart list of all my Book references, or just Journal Articles. This can be done, one just has to create a smart list and then set Reference Type to Contains: “Book Section”. There is not a drop down list of reference types invoked by the user.
  2. Can not sort by custom field:
    I think you can do this in the interface. Though it was not obvious on how to do it.
    Endnote Display Fields

    Endnote Display Fields

  3. Can not view all the custom fields for a resource type across all resources.
    This seems to be limited to eight fileds in the sorting viewer at a time.
  4. Can not view all entries without content in a specified field.
    This would be especially nice to create a smart list for this.
  5. No exports of PDFs or exports of PDFs with .ris files.
  6. There is no keyboard short-cut to bring up the Import function (or Export) under File Menu
  7. Does not rename PDFs based on metadata of the resource.
    This is possible with Papers and Mendeley. The user has the option to rename the file based on things like Author, Date of publication, etc.
  8. Can not create a smart list based on a constant in the Issue data part.
    I have Volume and Issue Data. Some of the citation data pulled in for some items has the issue set as 02, 03, etc. I want to be able to find all the issues which start with a zero so I can remove the zeros. Most stylesheets do not remove the zeros and also do not allow for them.
    Items are not selectable based on Issue Data

    Items are not selectable based on Issue Data

  9. Can not export PDFs with embedded metadata in the PDF.
  10. Can not open the folder which contains a PDF included in an Endnote Library.
    Endnote does not have a way to open the containing folder of a PDF

    Endnote does not have a way to open the containing folder of a PDF

    Endnote does not have a way to open the containing folder of an included PDF

    Close-up of the same menu.

  11. Modifying Resource type does not accept |Language| Subject Language|
  12. There is no guide in any of Endnote’s documentation for how to create an export style sheet.
    This is in the Help Menus I was expecting it on the producers website or in a book.
  13. When editing an entry’s meta-data i.e. the author, or the title of a work, pressing TAB does not move the cursor to the next field.
    At least some times it does not continue to TAB. If I do a new entry as a Journal article, then it will tab till the issue field, but not beyond. It gets stuck.
  14. There is no LAN collaboration or sharing feature for a local network solution.
  15. There is no Cloud based collaborative solution.
  16. There is no way to create a smart group based off of a subset of items in a normal group.
    i.e. I want to create a smart group of all the references with a PDF attached but I only want it to pull from the items in a particular group (or set of groups).
    Endnote no option for part of group filter

    Endnote has no option for 'part of group' filter

  17. There is no PDF Preview within the application. The existing Preview is for seeing the current citation in the selected citation style. (Preview of the output.) It would be helpful if there was also a preview pane for viewing the PDF or the attached file.
    No PDF Preview internal to Endnote

    No PDF Preview internal to Endnote

Notes and a Bibliography

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I have been looking for a way to create Posts with both Footnotes and a Bibliography section. I have wanted to make my post a little more professional looking, and let the information flow more easily with the way I write. What I have come to realize, is that Footnotes and Endnotes are different and function differently in respect to information processing. Traditionally, in print media Endnotes have occurred at the end of the article, whereas Footnotes have occurred at the end of the page on which the footnote is mentioned. This leads to a three way breakdown:

  1. Footnotes
  2. Endnotes
  3. Bibliography

The purpose of footnotes is to facilitate quick information processing without breaking the flow of reading or information processing of the consumer of information. On web-based media, the end of the article and the end of the page is the same if pagination is not enabled. So this creates a sort of syncretism between Endnotes and Footnotes. However, the greater principal of quick reference to additional information still applies on the web. There are several strategies which have tried to fill this information processing nitch, these include things like:

  • Tooltips (The pop-up text which appears when your mouse cursor hovers over a link or some other text.)
  • Lightbox (The darker shading of the background and the high-lighting of the content in focus.)
  • Pop-up windows (which have been phased out of popular "good web design").
  • Information (Text) balloons (an example of this is Wikipop Wikipop is really a combination of the above mentioned effects above to create an inline experience for the user. But some web-sites have a similar effect which is dependent on the mouse hovering over the "trigger".).

With strategies for conveying information like Tooltips it is possible to meet the same information communication and information processing goals which were formerly achieved through footnotes. For Web-based information, which is intended to be consumed through a web medium Wiki-pop makes a lot of sense. However, if the goal is a good print out of content then footnotes are still needed, that is why I am using footnotes on this particular web presentationA solution which does both, tooltips or solutions like Wikipop, and footnotes when the content is printed, would be ideal. .

So here is a quick post on how I am doing it.
I am using two different "endnotes" plugins. One for the Bibliography section and the other for the Notes section.

Creating the Footnotes section:
To create the notes section I have elected to use a plugin called FootnotesEven though there are other options for Footnote Plugins. One other option I know about is FD-Footnotes. by Rob Miller. (Big surprise on the name of the plugin...) Footnotes allows for me to put what I want to show up as footnotes in <ref>something</ref>In order to get these tags to display inside of <code> and </code> tags I had to use HTML codes for the greater than sign, less than sign and slash. There is some additional good information about character encoding in HTML on Wikipedia. tags.
Additionally I can set a tag <reference /> anywhere in the post and produce a list of footnotes.

Creating the Bibliography:
To create the Bibliography Section I am using WP-Footnotes (in the WP plugins repository) by Simon Elvery. More information can be read about his plugin here. What this plugin allows me to do is to craft the citation of the item I want to cite. I have to figure out how I want to "code" the citation and then present the citation.

[1]Hand Code the contents of the citation as it is to appear in the bibliography here, between a set of double parentheses.
Do not forget a space after the citation text and the double closing parentheses.

This will produce a citation marker (a number) as a super script inline with the text. Like this [2]Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 1998. Documentary and Descriptive Linguistics. Linguistics vol. 36:161-195. [PDF] [Accessed 24 Dec. 2010] :
And that will produce a citation in the bibliography section like the following:

Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 1998. Documentary and Descriptive Linguistics. Linguistics vol. 36:161-195. [PDF] [Accessed 24 Dec. 2010]

One interesting thing that occurs on the admin side of WordPress is that the plugin WP-Footnotes has an options page which shows up in the Settings menu, however what is interesting is that in that in the menu it is called Footnotes, not WP-Footnotes.
The options for WP-Footnotes really make it flexible, it is these setting which have allowed me to rename the section from Notes to Bibliography.

WP-Footnote Options

WP-Footnote Options

Final solution?
Is this my final solution? No. One thing I really don't like is that the bibliography is not orderd in alphabetical order of the last names, and then in order of the year of publication. Rather, citations are ordered in the order of appearance (as footnotes generally are). The plugin does not have any options for changing the order that thing appear in (though the headings on the ordered list can be changed). There is also no way to structure the data in the bibliography for reuse (even if it is just within this site), so each use of each citation must be hand-crafted with love. There are some other solutions which I am looking at integrating with this one but have not had time to really explore. One options is to integrate with Mendeley and aggregate bibliography data from a Mendeley collection. Another option is to create bibliographies as bibtex files and then use those to display the bibliography.

References

References
↑1 Hand Code the contents of the citation as it is to appear in the bibliography here, between a set of double parentheses.
↑2 Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. 1998. Documentary and Descriptive Linguistics. Linguistics vol. 36:161-195. [PDF] [Accessed 24 Dec. 2010]

No hCite format defined

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I am looking to re-skin Wikindex. I thought that I would add some CSS classes that would embed the meta-data in a manner that the citations could be picked up by Zotero quite easily. It seems to be a bit more difficult than I first anticipated. As a Microformat for citations is not yet been fully fleshed out. Obviously one way to go would be to embed everything in a span element as COinS does but that is not really what I am looking for. (Mostly because I don’t have a way to generate the Attributes in the span element automatically.) I have thought of using RDFa. But I still need to do some more research and see what can be gleaned in terms of which controlled vocabularies to use. I am hoping that this Lesson On RDFa will really help me out here. Finally I do need to know something about OAI so that once the Resources are put into Wikindex I can then tell OLAC what language they belong to.

Open Source Language Codes Meta-data

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One of the projects I have been involved with published a paper this week in JIPA. It is a first for me; being published. Being the thoughtful person I am, I was considering how this paper will be categorized by librarians. For the most part papers themselves are not catalogued. Rather journals are catalogued. In a sense this is reasonable considering all the additional meta-data librarians would have to create in their meta-data tracking systems. However, in today’s world of computer catalogues it is really a shame that a user can’t go to a library catalogue and say what resources are related to German [deu]? As a language and linguistics researcher I would like to quickly reference all the titles in a library or collection which reference a particular language. The use of the ISO 639-3 standard can and does help with this. OLAC also tires to help with this resource location problem by aggregating the tagged contents of participating libraries. But in our case the paper makes reference to over 15 languages via ISO 639-3 codes. So our paper should have at least those 15 codes in its meta-data entry. Furthermore, there is no way for independent researchers to list their resource in the OLAC aggregation of resources. That is, I can not go to the OLAC website and add my citation and connect it to a particular language code.

There is one more twist which I noticed today too. One of the ISO codes is already out of date. This could be conceived of as a publication error. But even if the ISO had made its change after our paper was published then this issue would still be persistent.

During the course of the research and publication process of our paper, change request 2009-78 was accepted by the ISO 639-3 Registrar. This is actually a good thing. (I really am pro ISO 639-3.)

Basically, Buhi’non Bikol is now considered a distinct language and has been assigned the code [ubl]. It was formerly considered to be a variety of Albay Bicolano [bhk]. As a result of this change [bhk] has now been retired.

Here is where we use the old code, on page 208 we say:

voiced velar fricative [ɣ]

  • Aklanon [AKL] (Scheerer 1920, Ryder 1940, de la Cruz & Zorc 1968, Payne 1978, Zorc 1995) (Zorc 1995: 344 considers the sound a velar approximant)
  • Buhi’non [BHK] (McFarland 1974)

In reality McFarland did not reference the ISO code in 1974. (ISO 639-3 didn’t exist yet!) So the persistent information is that it was the language Buhi’non. I am not so concerned with errata or getting the publication to be corrected. What I want is for people to be able to find this resource when they are looking for it. (And that includes searches which are looking for a resource based on the languages which that resource references.)

The bottom line is that the ISO does change. And when it does change we can start referencing our new publications and data to the current codes. But there are going to be thousands of libraries out there with out-dated language codes referencing older publications. A librarian’s perspective might say that they need to add both the old and the new codes to the card catalogues. This is probably the best way to go about this. But who will notice that the catalogues need to be updated with the new codes? What this change makes me think is that there needs to be an Open Source vehicle where linguists and language researchers can give their knowledge about a language resources a community. Then librarians can pull that meta-data from that community. The community needs to be able to vet the meta-data so that the librarians feel like it is credible meta-data. In this way the quality and relevance of Meta-data can always be improved upon.

Selected Works™ & BePress

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Bepress is an internet based service from Berkeley Electronic Press. They basically allow a user to display their work. i.e. a Professor’s CV which has a list of publications, those publications are then displayed by Selected Works™ & BePress as downloadable PDFs. These works can then also be described, downloaded, their bibliographic references can be downloaded, etc. Berkeley Electronic Press archives the Documents and presents them in an understandable, accessible, usable format. They have integrated Google search. Seems like lots of Love all around.
This kind of thing would be really good for an organization like the one I work with.


This is a picture of a page. See this page live.


This is a picture of a page. See this page live.

BePress has a lot of features, it integrates with a lot of other services too. One service which looked really cool was their service for working with the editorial process used in working papers.


Merging iLife Libraries

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The Problem:
One user on in a small business / family network can’t use (with metadata) all the media in a colleague’s or family member’s iTunes or iPhoto Library.

In our family there are three Macs (2 everyday machines and a server). On many work and personal tasks we function as a small workgroup. Unfortunately iTunes and iPhoto do not facilitate the sharing of media libraries (or for that matter the merging of media libraries). For instance, my wife had her own music and photo collection before we got married. Now if I want to browse that collection from my machine, there is iPhoto & iTunes sharing. But I can not add tags or other metadata to photos on her Mac. I can not create smart folders which we both can use.

iTunes
For our music we moved my collection to the Server and made it like a “media center”. When we get new music we add it to the server. If we want a copy on our own machines we pull it as needed. i.e. for an iMove project. This solution has not allowed my wife to add her collection to the server, nor has it solved the manny duplicates which exist because we like many of the same songs. Now I have found a solution to this: PowerTunes.

iPhoto
Now the same problems exist for our photos. However, there is no real advantage (or software) for hosting the family photos on our sever. But we still need to define a photo capture strategy.

  • When we take new photos, to which computer are we going to download the photos?
  • Where will we have the master library?

I don’t have a complete solution to our photo capture, retention and access needs but iPhoto Library Manager is the only software out there that will let us maintain the metadata and merge our iPhoto Libraries. However, This is a fantastic first step strategy:

  • Consolidate the iPhoto Libraries.
  • Designate an computer to be the Master Library holder.
  • Share that iPhoto library across the network.
  • Back that computer up.