29 augustus 2007
Open Source Software and XML Workshop by Eric Lease Morgan
In advance I had thought really hard about attending this session or not. After all, it is a bit outside the scope of my daily work. The objective as I formulated it to my superiors to get permission to attend this module of the Ticer summer school, was that I would gain a little bit more insight in the things they were doing at our own IT department. Not that they are really secretive about things at all, but just that I would be able to understand their language a wee bit better.
Eric Lease Morgan actually asked some of the participants about their objectives to attend his workshop. What I just described was also what I answered on his question. Perhaps another objective was that I could use some of the stuff I learned today and apply that on my own little bibliographies, or perhaps even my websites.
The workshop was started with some OSS evangelism. While he was spreading the word, I really wondered what kind of OSS tools our guys and galls were using in our systems. I really don’t know, whereas we have a completely independent in house developed LCMS. Have to find out though.
That Eric is serious about OSS, is clear from the fact that all his material used for this workshop is freely available at http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/07carte/publicat/oss-and-xml.zip. It includes, manuals, software and exercises. So if you are really interested you can go ahead. I think I you search a little bit around the same stuff can be found at other places as well (Lockss we call that). What you don’t get, though, when you do it yourself is Eric’s humoristic and enthusiastic way of presenting seemingly complicated matters. He is a gifted teacher.
Further on in the morning we did little exercises on writing and reading MARC records, extracting them from the Library of Congress, building a database of MARC records, indexing it and search the database. Interesting assumption on his part is that he assumed that most library catalogs were based on MARC records. That might be the case in the USA, but is not necessarily true in Europe. But this did not really matter for his exercises or the purpose of the exercises.
In the afternoon, we got around to XML. It really covered the mere basics, what I found interesting were some of the exercises where we actually transformed and presented the same texts (files) with different xsl or css. I new these things, but so far never actually did these little things myself. It was a bit of getting you hands dirty yourself. Some exercises were command line prompted, that gave those annoying little stupid mistakes. Reminding me of my days programming in Fortran.
All in all, an interesting day. We could have gone a bit deeper into the details and I would have loved a little instruction on Perl as well. There are only a limited hours in day though.
Eric Lease Morgan actually asked some of the participants about their objectives to attend his workshop. What I just described was also what I answered on his question. Perhaps another objective was that I could use some of the stuff I learned today and apply that on my own little bibliographies, or perhaps even my websites.
The workshop was started with some OSS evangelism. While he was spreading the word, I really wondered what kind of OSS tools our guys and galls were using in our systems. I really don’t know, whereas we have a completely independent in house developed LCMS. Have to find out though.
That Eric is serious about OSS, is clear from the fact that all his material used for this workshop is freely available at http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/07carte/publicat/oss-and-xml.zip. It includes, manuals, software and exercises. So if you are really interested you can go ahead. I think I you search a little bit around the same stuff can be found at other places as well (Lockss we call that). What you don’t get, though, when you do it yourself is Eric’s humoristic and enthusiastic way of presenting seemingly complicated matters. He is a gifted teacher.
Further on in the morning we did little exercises on writing and reading MARC records, extracting them from the Library of Congress, building a database of MARC records, indexing it and search the database. Interesting assumption on his part is that he assumed that most library catalogs were based on MARC records. That might be the case in the USA, but is not necessarily true in Europe. But this did not really matter for his exercises or the purpose of the exercises.
In the afternoon, we got around to XML. It really covered the mere basics, what I found interesting were some of the exercises where we actually transformed and presented the same texts (files) with different xsl or css. I new these things, but so far never actually did these little things myself. It was a bit of getting you hands dirty yourself. Some exercises were command line prompted, that gave those annoying little stupid mistakes. Reminding me of my days programming in Fortran.
All in all, an interesting day. We could have gone a bit deeper into the details and I would have loved a little instruction on Perl as well. There are only a limited hours in day though.
Labels: English, OSS, Ticer, XML
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There is lots of Open Source Stuff we are using in our own system, Wouter. The most important is probably the Libxml library which we use for xslt transformation ans schema validation in WebQuery. Then these is the YAZ kit we use to build our Z39.50. Lots of perl libraries, PHP, Apache, xslt function, etc, etc.
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