Coffee|Code : Dan Scott

Direct link to the instructional presentation on LibX and Zotero at Laurentian University (ODT) (PDF)

I had the pleasure of giving an instructional session to a class of graduate students on Monday, November 24th. The topic I had been asked to present was an extended version of the Artificially Enhanced Research session that I gave at Software Freedom Day earlier in the year. Apparently one faculty member was so impressed by seeing LibX and Zotero in action that he pushed to make this a mandatory session for all of the graduate students in his department. Cool! And a bit scary, too; it's one thing to present to people who are interested in what you have to say, but another thing when your audience is captive and have other demands on their time.

So of course it all started as poorly as possible - while plugging the VGA cable into the projector, my laptop suddenly died. Kaput. No power, and pressing the power button resulted in no response at all. Normally I wouldn't sweat too much, because I usually send the presentation in advance via email and copy it to a USB key. But this was, of course, the one time that I didn't take defensive measures. On top of that, I intended to run the presentation with lots of live demos and knew that my laptop was happily configured. Finally, I had come down with a killer head cold the day before, and the only reason I even showed up at work was to give this presentation - so my mind was already fuzzy (that's what I attribute my lack of file copying precautions to).

So, I went ahead with the session doing a live demo of everything on a machine that I had never used before with an operating system (Windows XP) that I rarely use and a keyboard layout (fr-CA) that I also rarely use... in the throes of a virus. With my wife (she's a grad student in the program) in attendance. Pressure much?

As it turned out, things went quite well. LibX and Zotero installed happily on the semi-locked down workstation and the only piece I couldn't demonstrate was Zotero's integration with Word - but I was able to vouch that it did work as one would expect and hope. In fact, doing everything from download and install to actual use live without a net was probably the best instructional session that the students could get - it made all of the steps nice and concrete, and reassured them that this wasn't something that only propeller-heads would be able to use.

Most pertinent question that I wasn't able to answer at the time: Does Zotero offer duplicate detection and elimination? The right answer is "it's been on the roadmap for a while, but there are no guarantees (and I can't sign up to add that feature, sorry)".

Oh, and the whole laptop dying thing? Apparently your laptop battery can act as a sort of circuit breaker - so if the laptop gets zapped by a jolt of static electricity, the battery can disable power to the system and protect it. After making the walk of shame to the local computer store for support, it turned out that I simply had to remove and reinsert the battery to enable the laptop to start drawing power again. A good lesson to learn, I suppose, and hopefully one that I'll remember the next time I find myself without any backups on hand in front of an expectant class

As I announced on the Evergreen mailing lists last night:

This release has been a long time in the making, and we'd love to have your help in testing it and flushing out bugs. Also, if you would like to contribute a translation, this is your chance to step up! We already have Brazilian Portugese (pt_BR), Georgian (ka), and Canadian English (en_CA) translations in the works, along with a commitment to update the Canadian French (fr_CA) translation. As this is the first real round of translations for Evergreen, I fully expect that there will be some work ahead of us to smooth out the translation process - but we have to take the plunge some time. Many thanks to Tigran Zargaryan and Natural Resources Canada for their respective contributions of the Armenian (hy_AM) and Canadian French (fr_CA) translations this summer; their willingness to be early guinea pigs for the translation process helped immensely.

Update: I noticed that the speedy Warren Layton beat me to the punch on the blog announcement of the releases. Warren's been very helpful with testing and suggestions for improvements to the documentation, so I don't mind being scooped at all

I noticed last night (Sunday, November 2nd, 2008) that the new and much-anticipated / feared OCLC WorldCat Policy had been posted. As far as the clarified terms went, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until they were actually posted. I was first alerted to the freshly released policy by Terry Reese's initial analysis and was fascinated by the discussion in the comments.

Then I noticed this morning on the AUTOCAT mailing list ("OCLC New Policy down after one day?") that the new policy had been pulled and replaced by

We are reconsidering some aspects of the policy. More information will be available in the near future.

Very interesting. That's not even enough time for most interested parties to read the policy and provide feedback.

Luckily, I made use of Zotero last night to capture a snapshot of the freshly released policy. So here, for your pleasure, is the archived version (retrieved Sun 02 Nov 2008 10:24:15 PM EST according to Zotero - and how sad a statement is that about my life that I'm cruising the library 'nets on Sunday evenings?) of the OCLC policy that had been posted and then was immediately yanked. I'm hoping that this helps informed discussion lead towards a reconsidered policy that reflects direct input from OCLC contributors.

Full disclosure: my library is not an OCLC Member library, not from any ideological stance but because I haven't had time to contribute records yet. Kind of busy with the Evergreen thing, you know? But we pay for WorldCat and some other OCLC services and intend to become members. On a personal note, I think we would best be served by a plurality of services developed using the metadata to which all of the OCLC Member institutions contribute.

I received the following email late last week, and took the time to reply to it tonight. I had originally been asked by a friend to help diagnose why his organization's site navigation wasn't working in some of his browsers. I noticed that the navigation bar was implemented in Flash, and suggested that the Flash be replaced with plain old HTML, CSS, and perhaps some JavaScript as Flash for navigation is generally a bad idea. My friend's response last week was:

Dan, I would be interested to know why the flash is a bad idea. ...Our [website] designer seems to think otherwise.

Uh-oh: getting into it with the designer via proxy can't be good. But here's what I wrote in response - feel free to set me straight if I've gone off-track:

Jakob Neilsen said it best back in 2000 - and all of his concerns still hold up: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html

To which I would add several more reasons:

• Flash is not a native part of the Web, it's a third party browser plug-in; HTML + CSS and arguably JavaScript are the core parts of the Web. Anything as basic as navigation should not have to rely on a third-party plug-in to function.
• How do you expect a person using a screen reader (due to visual impairment) to navigate through the site? With HTML/CSS/JavaScript, they can tab through the links on the page; with Flash, they hit something that forces them to use the mouse.
• Until very recently, Google could not navigate through Flash to crawl pages - and even now it's capabilities are subject to some limitations (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html).
• On breaking the Web experience - if you try to right-click on the Flash navigation, you don't get the option to open the link in a new tab or window, or add a bookmark to the page that link represents. And I bet the links would work for you everywhere
• For the paranoid, Flash is a proprietary format and therefore requires you to trust that the content that is being served up isn't doing something nefarious while appearing innocuous. A small percentage of people use plug-ins like NoScript to block Flash content and only enable Flash for specific pages when necessary. Having to enable it for navigation is annoying.

If your designer really, really wants to keep the Flash experience, the least they could do would be to put a plain HTML navigation menu inside the <noscript>...</noscript> section rather than the "Get Flash!" thing that currently appears.