Text LIBRARY 12345 to 41411, assuming that your ZIP code is 12345 (and if it is, how’s the weather in Schenectady?). You will get a text message with the name, address, and phone number of the nearest library.

Here’s how it works:

• You send the text message “LIBRARY 12345″ to 41411 (TextMarks).
• TextMarks uses the word LIBRARY to assign the rest of the message (“12345″) to my TextMarks application.
• My TextMarks application sends the rest of the message (in this case, your ZIP code) to a server at freeshell.org. Running PHP scripts on freeshell.org isn’t free, but for a one-time $36 donation, you get that privilege.
• freeshell.org searches NCES IMLS for branch and central libraries, then finds the first result and identifies the name, address, and phone number in its HTML code.
• freeshell.org sends back a very simple result with newlines where appropriate (view the source to see how it’s really formatted).
• TextMarks sends you the literal answer from freeshell.org, plus a brief advertisement with which TextMarks pays the bills. (I don’t see a penny from this except when y’all phone up potential employers and tell them they’d do well to hire me for 2010.)

Things I’d like to add eventually:

• Support for other location forms like SCHENECTADY[,] NY or 1060 w addison st chicago il, probably with a call to a Google Maps API
• Support for libraries outside the US (though I caution you, if you give me a location on the south end of Grosse Ile, Michigan, my script won’t know that the Essex County Library in Amherstburg, Ontario is nearer than Bacon Memorial Library in Wyandotte, Michigan — though in that particular case you might not care unless you have a boat)
• A minor efficiency tweak: search for libraries within 1 mile, and if none are found, try again with 5 miles, 10 miles, and 50 miles before giving up.
• If no results are found, say so apologetically.

Please tell everyone about it, especially truckers and other business travelers, snowbirds, people who are moving to a new home, etc.

And please let me know what you think, and how to improve it! Thanks especially to Susan Hansen for suggesting IMLS as a more recent source of data.

OCLC supports “WorldCat data sharing that encourages innovation and benefits libraries, museums and archives while protecting OCLC’s members’ investment in WorldCat.”

Sharing bibliographic data freely, without worrying about whether it advances profitable causes, achieves all these criteria.  It certainly encourages innovation; it certainly will benefit libraries, museums, and archives; and the wealth of innovative services based on freeing the records will handsomely repay members’ investment in WorldCat while benefiting the world at large as well.  Let us not hoard metadata like a jealous dragon.

As librarians, we don’t ask our patrons whether their in-house use of business reference books is intended to help a for-profit entity. We don’t have separate usage policies for entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs. We trust that the use of our information will benefit society at large in many ways, some obvious and some subtle. Why should OCLC behave differently?

So let’s say I’ve read a scholarly article and I believe there’s no abstract available. I’d like to write an abstract and make it easy for researchers to associate it with that article. How should I do that? Is there an Abstracts Wiki somewhere? Should I use a COinS reference as a trackback of some sort?

They’ve been using SirsiDynix’s Horizon ILS for a while now, and they’ve asked me to conduct a feasibility study on using Evergreen. I’m going to be figuring out how well it works with their data, their workflows, and their business needs, and identifying any potential trouble spots.

I’m thrilled that Evergreen is being seriously considered by large university libraries. I’m not a zealot, though; for example, my preference for a desktop operating system is “whatever seems to work pretty well in the given situation”. I won’t hesitate to burninate Evergreen’s faults, whatever they may be. After all, my report is only valuable to the extent that it corresponds with reality.

In that spirit, I welcome propaganda from all sides. If you’re a SirsiDynix fan (or employee), and you want to point out Evergreen’s most serious flaws, please do. I’ll be glad to verify your comments in the course of forming a well-informed opinion. Similarly, if you’re an Evergreen fan and you want to point out its features or defend it against defamation, I’d love to hear tips about how to verify the truth.

Color me sadder-but-wiser. For the first month or two of my job hunt in Atlanta, ben@benostrowsky.com was hosted on a site that was sending some very peculiar, non-SMTP messages to the MTAs that tried to contact me:

MAIL FROM: ostrowb@tblc.org
250 2.1.0 ostrowb@tblc.org... Sender ok
RCPT TO: ben@benostrowsky.com
alias([username redacted—Ben])
aliaswait(implicit:/etc/aliases)
250 2.1.5 ben@benostrowsky.com... Recipient ok

Some MTAs had no problem with this. So when I tested the account, I was able to receive mail. Unfortunately, most people just got a cryptic bounce message.

I’m guessing that this has led to several potential employers deciding not to bother phoning me, especially since my cell phone still has a Tampa area code. (I’ve solved that problem by getting a local number from GrandCentral and having it ring on my cell phone—but all my circulating résumés have the Tampa number.)

Two nights ago I asked the readers of my personal blog to email me and post bounce messages as comments. Very few got through. Last night I repeated the experiment; lots of people got through and nobody has reported a bounce. So now I’m confident enough to email my potential-employers-thus-far and say “I’ve switched email hosts because of technical problems. Have I missed anything?”.

And this will be a good story for the interviews, when I’m asked to talk about lessons learned from mistakes.

Meanwhile, my reworked HIP-based catalog, SunCat 2.0, is at a fairly good place for a first look.  Please check it out and tell me what you think; it’s an ambitious project and I know there’s still quite a lot to do.  The comments link at the bottom of each page will send me your browser/referer info, so please use it.

And if you’re in Atlanta and would like to meet while we’re in town, email me!

I’ve improved it, at least as far as our needs are concerned:

• If the user is behind a proxy that sends the HTTP X-Forwarded-For header, we record the user’s real IP address.
• Since we have more than one HIP server, we record the name of the HIP server.
• Since our profiles represent individual autonomous libraries who are much more interested in their own users, we record the profile code.
• Timestamps are now in ISO 8601 format.

You can get what I’m audaciously calling version 1.10 here: http://www.tblc.org/~ostrowb/hiplink-1.10.pl.txt

Under the terms of DaveyP’s license, hiplink 1.10 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.

It sounds like a few sites are starting to collect user ratings (or just bare, anonymized circulation records) for their items so that they can be used in a “People who liked this item also liked…” suggestion.

This is a very good step, but there are advantages to the ability to use equivalent data from other libraries.

Some libraries will have use patterns that would be unhelpful. For example, just because the technical college’s library has a small popular-fiction section doesn’t mean that most people who liked the latest bestseller will also be fascinated by Chilton auto-repair manuals.

Other libraries’ data might be very helpful. For example, a small public library might be unable to generate a useful amount of also-liked information on its own, but would benefit from using similar information from a larger public library nearby, or from small public libraries across the country.

If we, as a community, haven’t already come up with answers to these questions, we ought to begin:

• What kinds of information do we want to share? Are there any kinds of information that we know we don’t want to share, regardless of whether a user might actually want us to do so?
  I, for one, would consider attaching my demographic profile and perhaps my identity to a list of books I’ve checked out or enjoyed. Let’s preserve my right to share information as well as my right to keep it private.
• How can we represent that information in a standard way that allows for optional components (like Dublin Core)?
• Where should this data live?
  I have a suggestion here: each library’s data should live on one of its servers, and there should be a more centralized repository of information about what these libraries are sharing. Updates pulled through RSS could keep my library’s server up-to-date on what your users think.
• How can we find only the information we want? (For example, you might want to retrieve a full data set with demographic information for each user. Or maybe you just want to retrieve the average overall rating for each item.)

Any thoughts, folks?

SirsiDynix recommends Oracle for the Rome server. The platforms supported include Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Windows, and Intel or Opteron-based Red Hat or SuSE LINUX, and we support both 32 bit and 64 bit.

The specific client workstation recommendations are as follows:

• Windows 2000, XP or Mac OS X (10.4 or higher on Intel or PowerPC)
• CPU Speed: Minimum: 700 MHz, Suggested: 1 Ghz
• Memory: Minimum: 512 MB, Suggested: 1 GB
• Screen Resolution: 1024 x 768 or better

So it looks like the only thing our customers might have to upgrade is some monitors; there are certainly some employees and volunteers who would be more comfortable on a 19″ screen if they’re going to be running at 1024×768.

We’re using Sybase, so that would have to change, but it sounds like that’s the biggest change we’d need to make.  That’s a relief.