Coffee|Code : Dan Scott, Caffeinated Librarian Geek

I'm reasonably careful about the cookies I accept from Web sites - I don't want companies to be able to track every site I visit, for example, so that they can build a nice little profile about me. It's for the protection of the companies more than anything else: someone there might die of extreme boredom following the trail of "Evergreen", "Linux Weekly News", "Python docs"...

However, I recently learned about Flash "local storage objects" (LSO), which are similar to browser cookies but capable of storing much richer information and also completely inscrutable in terms of the effectiveness of Adobe's security model. Is Flash really capable of preventing a Flash application running on microsoft.com from accessing an LSO from mail.google.com? I certainly don't know, and as Flash is a closed-source application it's hard for anyone except for the developers at Adobe to know--but I bet there are people extremely motivated to find out. (Insert obligatory "See? Closed source sucks!" comment here.)

So, in my crude attempt to prevent too much garbage accumulating due to the occasional YouTube video or NBC Saturday Night Live skit that I might watch, I've added the following rules to my cron entries to delete my entire set of LSOs every four hours:

5 ∗/4 ∗ ∗ ∗ rm -fr /home/dan/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects 
5 ∗/4 ∗ ∗ ∗ rm -fr /home/dan/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/

You Windows users can probably do something similar, but I haven't bothered to track that down yet. Sorry.

Just poked at the OLA SuperConference 2009 schedule (January 28 - 31, 2009) and found four sessions listed that are all about Evergreen. Wow! Check this out:

I was responsible for the sole Evergreen presentation at OLA SuperConference 2008 - it's awesome to see a lot more people jumping in this year! I'm keenly anticipating this conference - we'll have to set up at least one Evergreen "Birds of a Feather" session.

In a few minutes I'll be giving a talk with John Fink at the Free Software Open Source Symposium at Seneca College on Evergreen: an enterprise-strength OSS solution for library ossification. I'm jazzed!

Here are the slides: (ODP format) (PDF format).

My place of work, Laurentian University, is looking for a new Director of the J.N. Desmarais Library. The call for applications closes October 30th. I think our library has done some impressive work (participating in the food security project for the Democratic Republic of Congo, building the Mining Environment Database), are doing some pretty interesting things (Project Conifer), and have the potential to do a lot more. Our outgoing director has laid the groundwork for his successor to take Laurentian University's libraries to even more exciting destinations.

On the chance that you haven't heard about this opening, and would be interested - or perhaps you know someone who might be interested and would be a good candidate - I'm going to attach the full job posting below. One heads-up: Laurentian is a bilingual (French / English) institution, and candidates would be expected to be bilingual.

Laurentian University – Director of the Library and Archives – effective July 1, 2009

Laurentian University is committed to serving the needs of Northern Ontario and its English-language, French-language and First Nations communities, and to extending its student recruitment into other areas of Canada. Laurentian’s recent major accomplishments include the establishment, with Lakehead University, of the first new medical school in more than 30 years in Canada, the introduction of 6 new PhD programs, the construction of new residences and a building custom-designed to house the B.Ed. program, establishment of a new Faculty of Management, and increasing success attracting research funding, all within a vibrant bilingual milieu that appreciates the past and is building toward the future. Please consult www.laurentian.ca for more information.

The Director of the Library and Archives will be an innovative leader who will build on the momentum of the Libraries’ information technology services, operational systems and capabilities, and provide strategic direction in accordance with the Strategic Plan approved by the Laurentian University Board of Governors.

The ideal candidate will be a respected academic who will bring dynamic vision and academic administrative experience, and who will be able to function in both English and French. The candidate will have a Masters’ of Library Science from an ALA accredited library school or equivalent institution plus at least five years experience in library administration, including planning, personnel, budget, policy development and services. The candidate will have the ability to view issues from an organization-wide perspective and to contribute effectively to collaborative projects within and outside the institution. The candidate will have knowledge of trends in higher education and information technology that affect acquisition, management, storage and dissemination of print, multi-media and electronic resources. Experience in writing grant proposals and effectively administering such grants would be a strong asset.

Laurentian University is committed to employment equity, welcomes diversity in the workplace and encourages applications from all qualified individuals including women, members of visible minorities, aboriginal persons and persons with disabilities. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.

Should you want to learn more about this unique leadership opportunity, e-mail Susan Silverton, Vice-President, Academic (Anglophone Affairs) at ssilverton@laurentian.ca or forward your CV, a letter of introduction and the names of three referees in confidence, to Linda Mainville, Assistant to the Vice-Presidents, Academic, Laurentian University, Ramsey Lake Road, Sudbury, Ontario P3E 2C6

Update: 2008-10-07 As of changeset 10774, the detailed record view in Evergreen's dynamic catalog is now recognized by Zotero.

I really like Zotero. And it works really well with Evergreen's current "basic search" because it embeds unAPI links that enable Zotero to consume MODS representations of the underlying bibliographic records and generate a complete citation based on that.

However, Zotero doesn't work with Evergreen's current "dynamic search" interface - which is a problem, because it is the default search interface. Evergreen embeds a link to the unAPI server, and fills in the unAPI link via an AJAX call after the underlying XHTML has been loaded - but it seems that Zotero doesn't recognize that the DOM has been changed by the AJAX event and never discovers the unAPI link. So... I had submitted a challenge to Hackfest to fix this, because I really want to be able to use Zotero with Evergreen when Project Conifer launches.

And, as with every other Hackfest I have attended, I end up working on my own challenge. In discussing the problem with William from canadiana.org and Walter Lewis from Knowledge Ontario, I described how the dynamic interface doesn't use any templating (apart from entity substitution for localization support), that there wasn't really any way to inject content server side into the underlying XHTML, and that I really didn't want to have to dig into the guts of Zotero to enable it to parse the DOM after events had completed. William asked "so you can't even do a server side include?", which ended up breaking the problem wide open - because yes, we already use server side includes to identify which DTD to load for localization purposes.

Step 1 was to modify the detailed record display to put the unAPI link template in place, and to modify the Apache configuration to pass in hardcoded values for each of the SSI variables. A quick test and - it didn't work. Uh oh.

That led to much scratching of the head. Was Zotero getting tripped up by the masses of XHTML elements in the dynamic template that are simply hidden? Did it give up after trying to parse 100K or so of content? Were there differences in the content types being served up by Apache? The next step was to compare the content of the "basic search" output against the "dynamic search" output - and that led to one seemingly innocent difference.

The unAPI server link in the "basic search" output included an absolute link to the server, while the corresponding link in the "dynamic search" output used a relative link to point to the root of the server. I didn't think that would be a problem, but eliminating variables is always good - and when I tested with a hardcoded server link, the Zotero hint icon lit up and the mystery was solved. Between enabling the record unAPI link to appear in the static XHTML via SSI and changing the unAPI server link to use an absolute value, Zotero and Evergreen could work together in harmony.

I haven't committed the fix for this yet to the repository, as I haven't finalized the exact SSI incantations that will be needed to embed the record ID in the unAPI link. But now you know the solution, and could tackle the problem yourself if you get tired of waiting for me and feel inspired. And once the problem is fixed, I'll update the post to let you know what version of Evergreen carries the fix.

Oh, and my hackfest report slides are attached, in case anyone cares.

On Friday, October 3rd, I had the honour of presenting the progress of Project Conifer with my colleague John Fink to my peers at Access 2008. Project Conifer is the effort to bring the Evergreen open source library system to a consortium of academic libraries in Ontario (Algoma, Laurentian, McMaster, Northern Ontario School of Medicine, and Windsor).

I'm just going to link quickly to the slides for now, as I'm a little bit brain-dead after the conference. John led off the talk with an overview of what Conifer is all about and why we were motivated to tackle such a large project - he has posted his slides via the SlideShare thingy. Editorial comment: I really enjoy John's presentation style and content. He's a hard act to follow!

And then I rambled on with an overview of the ups and downs of the project so far, the resources we have invested in the project, our progress towards our target go-live date (May 2009), and some sneak previews of the goodies that are included in the any-day-now-if-I-would-just-stop-going-to-conferences-and-apply-myself-for-a-few-days-dangit Evergreen 1.4 release. Well - they're not really sneak previews, because of course you could check the code out of the repository and built it yourself - but it's so much easier when somebody else already has it running, right?

Anyway, my slides are available in both OpenOffice.org Impress format and PDF.