I am doing a presentation at the 2014 COSUGI Conference on Friday, May 16, 2014, 11:15am-12:15pm. This presentation will explain how to use widgets and web services to integrate real-time information from Symphony into your Enterprise installation. Jeremy Newville with SirsiDynix will also be presenting some coding examples.
Tag: Technology
Internet & Privacy
Here’s a presentation I am doing for a discussion program at the the Anchorage Public Library and Haines Borough Public Library via the OWL video network.
- Internet & Privacy [1.6mb pdf]
Thanks for Jessie in Haines and Stacia in Anchorage for organizing this and for everyone who attended. I thought we had some great discussion.
How to Escape the Information Bubble
I’m doing a presentation with my colleague Judy Green called “Search Engine Secrets and the Information Bubble” at the Pacific Northwest Library Association Conference which is in Anchorage this year. My part of the presentation is about how to escape the bubble.
- Search Engine Secrets [pdf 27mb] – Judy
- Bing & Google Features [pdf 99kb] – Judy
- Escaping the Information Bubble [pdf 1.9mb] – Mike
Fixing a Zip Code Problem in WorldCat
We have a funny problem with WorldCat.org and at our library. When you are in the library or on campus and search Worldcat, our library appears to be 257 miles away when trying to find copies in a library nearby. It works fine if you are off campus somewhere else in town. So what gives? OCLC is looking a the IP address of the browser and doing a lookup to determine zip code location. Unfortunately, the lookup for our IP addresses on campus thinks we are in Fairbanks because that is where the statewide university system connects to the broader Internet.
We reported this to OCLC 3 years ago when we first noticed it. They had no way to specify or customize how IP addresses were associated with zip codes since they used an unspecified external service for their geo mapping. They offered that when WorldCat Local came it might be fixed. Turns out that’s not true. A couple of months ago we came up with a work around, not sure why it took so long for us to think of it. When we link to WorldCat on our website, we include the Ezproxy prefix so the site is included in the proxy server. We’ve configured the proxy server to automatically authenticate users on campus so they don’t have to login but to continue proxying the WorldCat website. Since Ezproxy is a URL rewriting proxy, we then use a search and replace command to insert the correct zip code:
Title Consortium Library WorldCat Local
URL http://consortiumlibrary.worldcat.org
DJ worldcat.org
Find &referer=
Replace &loc=99508&referer=
It’s not perfect. It only works when users access WorldCat from the library website. If users on campus go directly to WorldCat or end up there from GoogleBooks they will have a Fairbanks zip code. Since OCLC seems unable to offer a real fix, my colleague had the clever idea of contacting geo IP services and getting them to correct the zip code for our IP ranges. Maybe we will get lucky and fix the one that OCLC uses.
More Mobile (and text)
Last week we debuted a mobile version of the library website using the techniques we developed for the mobile library catalog. We automatically redirect to the mobile site for a selection of mobile browsers (iPhone/iTouch, Android, Palm WebOS, Blackberry, Mobile Opera, Mobile Firefox, and Symbian s60) that covers a broad segment of the smartphone and high-end feature phones. In addition, we have a link to the mobile site on the front page so users of mobile browsers we may have missed can make their own choice. Also, low bandwidth users might prefer the mobile site.
The mobile home page is laid out with a set of icons to selected resources on the library website with an emphasis on those that might be more useful for mobile users. However, we took a different approach than some web developers which only make a selection of pages available via the mobile version. Instead we make every page on the main website available in the mobile version. Mobile users also have the ability to toggle to the full website if needed.
Another nice feature is that we link to the mobile version of library resources when possible. For example, we link to the mobile version of the Ebsco databases like Academic Search Premier. We will keep our eye on other vendors and link to their mobile versions when they become available.
Finally, the work we did to make a mobile version of the website allowed us to easily add a text version for screen readers and non-graphical browsers. We had text version before but only for the home page, now the entire website is available in a text version. A link to the text version displays at the top of the page for screen readers and non-graphical browsers but is hidden from regular web browsers.