Dan Scott @dbs@code4lib.social

And I have it working now, whee! Although I need to tighten and tidy up the code a bit. Ended up using the record URL returned by the API rather than launching another search, which also gives a much cleaner URL for the user.

A rough plan for surfacing HathiTrust ETAS materials in our catalogue and making it as easy as possible for our users:

Given an ISBN, check https://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/brief/json/isbn:<isbn> for HT records (could be ISSN or OCLCnums too)

If there's an HT record, add a link to https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ping/pong?target=https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?lookfor=<isbn>&searchtype=isn&ft=ft&setft=true&signon=swle:https://connect.laurentian.ca/idp so that users log into our Shibboleth IdP and can see the full text of the item.

So Ex Libris lets you configure your system to use a subfield delimiter like ‡ but the old & new metadata editors are hardcoded to expect $$ in most cases, throwing errors for every field where there's a ‡ - so what's the point?!?!

Like, sure, I could see them being concerned that it wouldn't meet our quality standards or whatever, but they could at least _try_ and say "Okay, here's what we did to make it meet our requirements--is this okay? Or do you want to go back to your graphic design team (HAHAHA) for a custom logo?"

"The image you sent us is wider than 300px, so we can't use it for your logo."

Okay, I'll take the 30 seconds to run it through ImageMagick to create the required size. Thanks for putting more work on us!

So we were asked what character we wanted to use as a subfield delimiter before every setting hands on an Alma system. Of course I chose ‡.

Little did I know that a) Alma's record editor is basically a big text field and that means we would have to type that ‡ for every subfield and b) Alma isn't really set up for alternative delimiters, as it loads every record with its default $$ delimiter and then raises alerts about every field not using the right delimiter.

Presenter started a presentation about yet another ILL product saying millenials / gen Z want all the information, and they want it now, and they want it to be easy to get.

I posted in chat that that's not a generational thing: we all want that.

It's not cool to stereotype a certain generation as lazy and demanding, and it doesn't help sell your thing to me.

"One advantage I haven't mentioned yet: shifting away from Audible is great news for libraries, since neither Audible originals, nor Kindle originals, are available at all for library purchase. Imagine a publisher boycotting libraries!"

Cory Doctorow, hoping his DRM-free audiobook will sell enough to encourage other authors to follow his route away from Audible/Kindle lock-in: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book/posts/2953470

Sadly, as a librarian, I had never considered that outcome of Audible/Kindle originals...

Also, found a topographic map I could mark up for my kayaking trip this weekend, thanks to Canada's open data portal for such stuff: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/d248b5be-5887-4cfb-942f-d425d82e6ea9

Upgraded my Raspberry Pi printer server from Fedora 31 to 32 today. It took _way_ longer than I had anticipated but it eventually came back up, all systems were go. Huzzah!

Still can't believe that this will be the only test load we get before going live. WTH?!?

"Verify that the patron has the same number of active loans in Alma and the source system"

HOW CAN I DO THIS WHEN IT TAKES YOU > 1 MONTH TO DO A SINGLE TEST LOAD?

I'm attending a virtual miniconference on library UX for the new consortial system (based on Ex Libris Alma) we'll be joining and all of these presenters are talking about their system teams, working teams composed from four library departments, etc... There were a few years when I was part of a team, but the (great!) systems librarian assistant left and was never replaced.

I'm getting tired of bearing all systems work on my shoulders. And it shows in our degrading UX.

Last night I dreamed I was prepping for a research presentation and had filled a blackboard with a grid displaying my data.

Then my boss started adding some nonsensical colours and annotations to it.

I told him his work was meaningless and glared at him as I erased it all and began again.

I mean I guess we could pretend like there's no pandemic and no risks, and we have been very isolated and careful, but I laughed when she said nobody wants to wear a mask all day.

"Mom", I said, "if we send our kids back to in-person schooling, they will be required to wear a mask all day. If I go back to work in-person, I'll be required to wear a mask all day. This is how it is now!"

We're all tired of this but it's no time to stop being vigilant.

My elderly mom, who we haven't seen since March, wanted to visit our family for a couple of days, on the condition that she would not have to wear a mask. This would be after she went and visited a couple of other family members.

I offered to instead drive the family down and spend the day hanging out with her & stepdad on their porch, go for a walk, check out her garden--all outside stuff. She just said no, maybe we can visit next year.

Fuck.

I laboured for days to put together a remote intro to library research workshop (with polls and breakout rooms) and comments like the following *should* be the reward: "Sorry but I can't give any bad feedback. Dan Scott was incredibly helpful and was able to properly explain everything with clarity."

But I mostly just feel tired and like I should have been able to do a much better job

Oh, plot twist: I looked into the print & scan software that our university uses and discovered that it offers OCR out of the box (https://www.papercut.com/discover/easy-scanning-and-capture/scanning-ocr-simple/).

So I guess our library admin didn't know that and didn't want to look like they had made a mistake in setting this up without including librarians with their "no we will not include OCR" stance - or they've deliberately not implemented it.

Scans will be created without OCR. If anyone wants an accessible version, they'll be directed to the Accessibility office.

OCR is one short step and it adds the ability to copy, search, and have the text read out loud: universal design!

I'm considering setting up a web-based Tesseract OCR service and apologetically telling students, staff, and faculty to use that. But first I'm asking teaching faculty to campaign for OCR, because they won't listen to librarians.