W00t, go command line

Well, I had a simple thrill yesterday. I needed to make a nested directory, something along the lines of 1000-1999/1100-1199/1110-119. . .etc, so this would have been an unbearable task by hand. Create folder, name folder. . .

Fortunately, as a faithful adherent of the virtues of a programmer #1, laziness. I knew there had to be a fairly simple way. Well, I’m sure there is another way out their to make this work, but this was the best I could find. I ran this on my mac, but it should work in any *nix set up. Essentially you are defining elements and then adding those as place holders for the mkdir command. Be sure to add the -p option, this will make any parent folders which do not exist.

This example works to make directories for 700000-799999 that are nested down to the tens.


for tt in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
do
for th in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
do
for hun in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
do
for ten in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
do mkdir -p new/7"$tt"0000-7"$tt"9999/7"$tt""$th"000-7"$tt""$th"999/7"$tt""$th""$hun"00-7"$tt""$th""$hun"99/7"$tt""$th""$hun""$ten"0-7"$tt""$th""$hun""$ten"9
done
done
done
done


Poster session, check

Well, I finished presenting my poster at the WAAL conference yesterday. It was pretty fun. It’s nice to chit chat and exchange ideas with other librarians. (Especially when wine and beer are served).

The poster was about a mock training blog I created. As a student worker/low level employee of libraries for many years, I’m always frustrated by the poor communication from full time employees.

There’s no point in quantifying, but here I go anyway. I’d say after every staff level 75% of information is lost. So if something happens in the ref. department, I’d have a small chance of hearing about it. If something happens at the admin level, well, ref has a 25% chance of hearing about it, and I’d have 6% chance of hearing about it.

This I don’t mind too much. But everyone always assumes that what they know, you know. And that is where the problem comes in.

So here’s a humble attempt to address the situation. Blogs are nice, lots of places have them. Through on some video tutorials about new databases, make them easy to navigate so we can refer back to them (we are librarians after all) and you have a tool that can be used. Listservs are not tools. Collected information is.

Anyway, I’ve been building one of these for my position at the limnology library. We have high staff turnover (100% every two years), so high level documentation is always important.

Is indexing illegal?

Well, operators of the largest bit torrent tracker Pirate Bay have been found guilty of violating copyright.

David Lane at the Linux Journal argues that by providing a search interface, they’ve just been proven guilty of. . .indexing. Could Lexis/Nexis follow? Probably not, but never doubt that the mere organization and access of information has ramifications that are larger than we thought.

An interesting take on a complicated matter.

Library Committee

Well, I had my first library committee meeting. I can’t say it went exactly how I expected. There was some confusion at first and as I was explaining the digital library I was able to successfully bore the computer savvy members while confusing the non-savvy members.

I guess it worked out in the end. Looking back I received some good feedback and people seemed very interested in one particular set up. Here’s a look at the presentation.

The digital world

As I’ve been researching and writing about “born-digital” items for one of my classes. I have to say I’m most struck at the reluctance of researchers to use more electronic tools. Now at least at journals like Science or Nature (which try to pack in piles of articles) there is a way for readers to access “supplementary material” usually this is graphs, tables, data sources that are too big to fit in print.

That’s great. But why, I wonder, isn’t this more present. Why aren’t there more links to large data sets or more complex and interconnected graphs and demonstrations. I’m sure most of this has to do with they way scholars are used to presenting information; highly distilled and packaged, protective of sources and information. This is starting to change with the increase of “escience” especially among the young uns. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to scholarly communication.