Dan Scott @dbs@code4lib.social

Ah that feeling when you've been focused on all the wrong things all day then realize that you forgot to take your meds and, yeah, that checks out.

Better living through automation: generate your updated dates, too!

The most recent stanzas shown are from 2021-01-14, so why is OCLC's page claiming it was last updated on Oct. 24, 2019?

And why aren't they consistently using ISO-8601 date formats? :)

People are so stressed out by receiving a library notice, they apparently don't notice that the due date is 2021-04-21 and just hit reply promising to return the item tomorrow.

I guess we've taught them to associate any communication from the library as bad news, so now that we're sending out weekly "Hey, just to let you know, here's what you currently have out" notices, it's freaking them out.

Saw a lengthy article had been proposed for deletion if no action was taken within 7 days. Then noticed it had been deleted after 4 days.

I reverted the deletion and then checked the proposing user's very active contributions--it looks like most of what they do is propose articles for deletion and then delete them.

Sure, sometimes we need to prune, but my instincts lean towards pitching in and improving deficient articles. So this felt shocking to me.

Just finished WikiPedia's WikiEdu training modules, and while they're fantastic, I find it ironic that the modules are not themselves editable.

I'd like to correct simple mistakes I've found, e.g. changing "Assigned trainings" into a heading on https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/training/instructors/new-instructor-orientation/dashboard-resources-tab or typos like "possibile" elsewhere.

But there isn't a feedback / report problem link on each page. Luckily, it does request feedback once you've finished the training. So I'm using that :)

I love @pluralistic but I also love Mastodon's ability to filter phrases. Just added 5 filters to drop the repetitive posts that he tacks onto every one of his threads.

If it was a single, long post that had the links to his books & newsletter at the end, that would be fine. But my feed fills up a little too quickly; filters help tame the beast a bit.

Also that document is 5 years old and shows a completely different UI for the Admin Tool. And nothing analogous in the new UI. Good job Elsevier.

"You can create data exchange tokens yourself using the ScienceDirect Admin Tool. For step-by-step directions, please download this 6-page Quick Reference Guide."

BWAHAHAHA

Another day, another Drupal 7 hack. We don't want to publish author names & pictures for our content-type "news" so after trying to re-immerse myself in templates, trying various hooks to unset the corresponding vars, and finding no difference I finally just added

.node-news .user-picture { display: none }

to my theme's style.css and it's good enough for me.

Sorry for the unnecessary bloat, Internet.

Well today is another day where I consider the benefits of federated / decentralized infrastructures, as my friends and family struggle to communicate with me on Signal.

It's my fault, I brought most of them to Signal over the past few years. *sigh*

Still better than most of the alternatives though.

Here's my slow, simple script for comparing the titles of the bibs our holdings were attached to in Ex Libris Alma against the bibs in our legacy Evergreen library system.

Necessary because of missing accents in many of the Alma bibs (thanks anglophone partners!) and outright mismatches based on OCLC numbers (often data quality issues in our bibs).

https://gitlab.com/denials/compare-bibs-alma-to-evergreen

SRU and a simple REST API #FTW although it's taken all week to process 600K records.

This was after I had given our contact staff person the required stunnel cert and the link to the Ex Libris docs on how to set up stunnel.

So I guess I get to go in and set it up myself. Glad we're paying all these professionals to do their professional stuff.

Ex Libris did the right thing and requires stunnel to encrypt the otherwise plaintext SIP communications for self-checks, RFID pads, etc.

BiblioTheca support person trying to configure their hardware fails to get stunnel working and tells the library staff person "there is no personal information passed between your PC and the server, just item IDs and titles".

And user IDs and names and emails, not to mention transactions that could be performed.

Argh.

The event "At Home (and On Campus) with EFF" that was supposed to happen today has been rescheduled for January 14th at 12:00 PM PST

https://www.eff.org/event/home-and-campus-eff

My son and I finished enough of the enclosure to move his beardie into his new home. We have more "furniture" (oven-baked birch logs) to add and arrange, but this holiday project has been a success!