Superpatron

How do I turn this form into a command line that fills in the form?

How do I turn this form into a command line that fills in the form?
Originally uploaded by Edward Vielmetti

I have this library web site that I use, you see, that I find myself logging into every day to renew my library books, and I'm thinking that this process could be replaced by a very small shell script, and I'm hoping you can help me write it.

It should be a simple matter of posting a form but I'm too lazy right now to decode the curl or wget syntax to do that.

kthxbye

Ed

(for the Ann Arbor District Library)

Things I want to write more about here - categories A-G

Every so often I run into corners of the world that I want to explore. Here's some list of the things I'd like to write more about, even if I don't have a full blog-length posting for any of them written right now. I'm keying off the categories I've set up.

This is part 1: Amazon through Google Book Search.

Sorry no links yet....will hyperlink as I have time to edit, but I thought I'd get this out into the world.

Amazon - about the book cover and album cover art database they have; how to set up an affiliate bookstore that actually works; on using Amazon to do wish lists that are then fulfilled through your library (via Jon Udell); on using Amazon as a book finding system and then using Book Burro or similar to connect back to your library; much more I'm sure.

Ann Arbor - plans for a new library downtown; reviews of all of the branches; reviews of other Washtenaw County libraries; special libraries in town like the Ford Presidential Library

Archives - an interview with the folks who run the Labadie Collection; an interview with the Prelingers; an interview with Brewster Kahle; some discussion of the peculiar nature of archives in the digital age

Archival Television - Jeff Ubois blog of the same name; the loss of the video record; clearing and securing rights; bootlegs on Youtube; museums of the broadcast industry

Beyond big vendors - this was the title of a talk I gave; an exploration of consolidation in the integrated library systems space, and some understanding of new alternatives

Book Burro - at least an annual post on what it is (repetition is the soul of the net); a screencast showing how I use it; documentation for online book finding system developers to get them to have Book Burro pop up on their book screens; a discussion of how tools like this can be funded by affiliate revenues

Book covers - as finding aids; variations between editions; in online book finding and book inventory systems; search by contents of the cover, not contents of the book

Book trading - more reviews of any book trading systems I find; some stories about book swap clubs that meet in person; children's birthday parties where everyone brings a book and everyone gets a book

Bookins - how they advertise new inventory on Twitter; comparison with other book swap sites; integration with LibraryThing

Books - more book reviews, lots of book reviews would be welcomed; the book publishing industry as a whole; old books; smelly books; pretty much anything is fair game.

Books sorted by color - more discussion of cover art, illustrations, other metadata about the book captured in the cover art but not indexed by typical book finding systems; the book illustration business; how covers are designed; history of binding systems; algorithms to determine which color a book is; art and photographic illustrations of installations where books have been sorted by color

Bookshelves - compact shelving, buying shelves for personal libraries, reviews of bookcases, shelving for libraries, innovations in book shelving, reviews of books about bookshelves, how to build your own, built in shelving, what to do when yours fill up

Code - more code! software that does interesting things with book and library data; mashups, data extraction, search algorithms, recommender systems, page layout, interactive design, home grown alternative views of the library

Collection development - impact of patrons on collections; controversial materials and how they are added to the collection and perhaps subtracted from the collection; metrics used for weeding and deaccessions; building your personal library from another library's discards; libraries as endangering printed materials

Electronic collections - library originated book and non-book collections; hardware, software, and systems for managing and cataloging same; preservation of digital relics; copyright, fair use and international implications of same; the proper provenance of enthusiast collectors

Events and exhibits - individual events and exhibits, and also ways by which libraries can improve their ability to bring people through the door by hosting book-themed events. Compare libraries to bookstores and see how they stack up; facilities building and planning with events in mind.

Film - libraries for film; collecting video and film; archival television (via Jeff Ubois); rights, copyrights, and the like; stock footage libraries; impact of digital distribution on the circulation patterns in public libraries that have big DVD collections

Friends Bookshop - relationships between Friends groups and libraries; examples of particularly fun bookshops; self service bookshops; using friends book inventory to do outreach; purposes of friends bookshops - to entertain people who want to run a bookstore, or to raise money, or both

Friends of the library - about national and local organizations; demographics of friends groups; "Friends of the Library, for the net"; library advocacy; when friends groups turn into haters groups

Games - games in the library; word games; something more about Eli@AADL; Wii at the library. Games in the kids room - ice cream truck. Learning from games.

Google Book Search - contracts, restrictions on use of data, inaccuracies within, quality of scanning, quality of metadata, shout out to Ben Bunnell, aftermarket greasemonkey hacks to fix issues with, comparison with Microsoft et al, comparison with Open Library, Distributed Proofreaders

Google Scholar - library use and access to, Andrew Odlyzko on open publishing, relative frequency of citation of non-internet publications, Math 40 yr history of increased collaboration via Patrick Ion, quality of data, quality of metadata, use by scholars as replacement for vita

Social Publishing (from Oort Cloud)

Paul Hartzog writes in an essay on Social Publishing:

In the emerging system, authors create and distribute their work, and readers, individually and collectively, including fans as well as editors and peers, review, comment, rank, and tag, everything. This is already happening at sites like LibraryThing and BooksWeLike.

Read more on his Oort Cloud site - The Future of Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. He's going to be talking about this at ArbCamp this weekend, Saturday at Washtenaw Community College.

AADL is hiring an Information Desk Clerk - from MICHLIB-L

as posted to MICHLIB-L:

The Ann Arbor District Library is accepting applications for an
Information Desk Clerk position in our Access & User Services
department. Applications postmarked or received at one of our locations by 9:00pm on Thursday, November 1, 2007, will be eligible for consideration. The job description for this full-time position and an employment application are available at each of our locations and on our website at
http://www.aadl.org/aboutus/employment/jobposting/display/?jid=22.

This is a 1.0 FTE contractual position; hiring range $27,095 - $32,514.

Contact Jennifer Brown with any questions.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Jennifer Brown, Human Resources
Ann Arbor District Library
343 S Fifth Avenue
Ann Arbor MI 48104

734.327.8304

Wordie

New words, old words with definitions, for word lovers, flickr without the pictures.

Wordie is a lot of fun.

Technorati Tags: wordie, neology, words

Thomas Jefferson's library on LibraryThing

I delight, knowing
That my library lives on,
On the Internets.

http://www.librarything.com/profile/ThomasJefferson

Top tags: politics (1,059), geography (237), religion (213), american geography (201), languages (155), american history (135), agriculture (129), technical arts (129), medicine (127), Foreign History (126)

My library is being cataloged by helpful Thingamabrarii from the "I See Dead People['s Books]" group. The 6,487 volumes included here (eventually) are those I sold to the Library of Congress in 1815 for $23,950.

A note on my reviews: the Thingamabrarii are gleaning them from the excerpts printed in the annotated print edition of my catalog. They have been edited for capitalization, but otherwise have been left in original form.

What would TJ think? (CNET)

"Thomas Jefferson would have loved Google Book Search. He believed in contemplating every possible idea. He advocated the diffusion of knowledge and the power of universities to make that happen," Mary Sue Coleman told attendees of the annual conference of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers.

Technorati Tags: librarything, superpatron, thomas-jefferson

Patron privacy: the Michigan Library Privacy Act

from the Michigan eLibrary site:

What Information Does MeL Share With Other Organizations?

Patron information gathered by MeL is not made available outside of MeL and its participating libraries except as follows:

Michigan Freedom of Information Act and Michigan Library Privacy Act: MeL and its participating libraries have agreed to abide by the Michigan Library Privacy Act, 1982 PA 455, MCL 397.601 et seq. For text of this statute, go to: Michigan Library Privacy Act. Under the Michigan Library Privacy Act, patron and borrowing records are not subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. Libraries may be ordered by a court to disclose library records, but only "after giving the affected library notice of the request and an opportunity to be heard on the request" (MCL 397.603).

FISA and USA Patriot Act: MeL staff may be asked to provide information in response to legal court orders or subpoenas as required by the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) and its amendment (USA Patriot Act of 2001, Sections 215 and 216). As required by FISA and its amendment, MeL staff involved in providing the requested library records will not disclose to any person, including the patron whose records were seized, the existence of the court order or the fact that records were produced as a result of the court order.

Only the State Librarian or his/her designee is authorized to receive or comply with requests from law enforcement officers for MeL records. Legal counsel will be consulted whenever possible before determining the proper response.

Commercial vendors: Individual records or log entries gathered by MeL are never sold to or shared with commercial firms. Aggregate data may be shared with MeL vendors to document our use of their services.

This is worth comparing to commercial sites - recently the Patriots football team sued StubHub to get the names and addresses of people reselling season football tickets. (AP via MSNBC)

Technorati Tags: michigan, law, privacy, library

Judge a book by its cover

from Marginal Revolution, on the practice of buying (or more generally reading or finding) books based solely on cover art:

My thought was this: presumably the publisher designs the cover to appeal to people who will spread favorable word of mouth about the book. As a sometimes good (but non-reductionist) Bayesian, if I like the cover I should infer I will praise the book. Furthermore I should be especially keen to buy on this basis for a "word of mouth book," and indeed this author does not have a celebrity name.

If I like the cover *a lot*, can I receive a worse evaluation by checking out the blurbs and thus skewing or minimizing my gut reaction to the image? Surely if someone is able to manipulate me, my optimal strategy is let just some of the manipulative information through. The case for viewing the cover -- and only the cover -- is simply that many more people see the cover than evaluate any other part or aspect of the book. Might we then not expect the cover to be the strongest and best thought out signal?

My own experience with cover art is that especially for kids books you can tell a huge amount by what you see on the cover, and even if you end up with a story that's meh you can still get a lot of enjoyment out of good art. I've picked a few choice titles out of my "wall of books" just this way - the "street sweeper" book that entranced my 2 year old was nothing I would have ever found with a text based search.

Technorati Tags: books, cover-art, coverflow, covers, illustration, library

TechShop: Build your dreams here

I've written about tool libraries before, but this is something a bit different:

TechShop is a fully-equipped open-access workshop and creative environment that lets you drop in any time and work on your own projects at your own pace. It is like a health club with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment...or a Kinko's for geeks.

TechShop was founded in 2006 by Jim Newton, a lifetime maker, veteran BattleBots builder and former MythBuster.

TechShop is located in Menlo Park, California, on the San Francisco peninsula 25 miles south of San Francisco.

Anyone can come in and build and make all kinds of things themselves using the TechShop tools, machines and equipment, and draw on the TechShop instructors and experts to help them with their projects.

They were featured in Inc Magazine, and they're riding on the success of Make Magazine.

This is not-quite-a-library (or even a "tool library"), but it has some of the characteristics of a collection of creative tools that libraries are trying to build. It is for profit which lets them do some things that libraries can't.

Technorati Tags: techshop, makezine, workshop

Google Book Search data metadata quality check

Google Book Search list of books printed between 0-100 A.D. At this writing, 2315 works.

I only noticed this because there was a search I did with a date range trying to get very early books that turned up a bunch of books from the year 0019.

Metadata is hard.

I've reported this to Google - the response I got back from Ben was "We're working to make the metadata better across the board."

Technorati Tags: metadata