When I was studying Sanskrit in college, I was really taken by the vocative case. I think that the vocative case is partly what gives Sanskrit its unique feel when it is translated into English. This is probably because sentences with vocative elements don’t really have an exact equivalent in English, which makes them stand… Continue reading Nanogenmo 2021 (part 2)
Status update
I’d like to share a status update on the Open Journal Matcher. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a grant to refactor and make the OJM more sustainable. I’m considering two different approaches to the rewritten OJM. The first relies entirely on PythonAnywhere, while the second still involves Google Cloud Platform. This post describes where… Continue reading Status update
IE
Since the new library website went live a couple weeks ago, I’ve been poking at it, looking for problems. I was assuming there must be some unexpected use cases out there that would cause it fail. I found exactly what I was looking for when one of my co-workers fired up Internet Explorer to do… Continue reading IE
Research agenda
One thing I have found challenging about work is switching between coding and writing and back. Coding gives me something to write about; writing is the currency for advancing in my job. But these are not necessarily an easy pair. It takes a big mental shift to move from one to the other. I sometimes… Continue reading Research agenda
Posts by email
You can now sign up to receive posts from this blog via email, over on the About page. Maybe this will make reading this blog a bit easier for some people. I recognize that (unfortunately) not everyone uses RSS, and no one “checks websites”, like they did in the late 90s. So maybe posts-by-email may… Continue reading Posts by email
How I spent my weekend
I’ve spent much of this holiday weekend on Discord, asking questions. This is because I’ve been working on an overhaul of the Open Journal Matcher, and it has led me to work with technologies that I find very unfamiliar (hello, task queues!), so I have a lot to ask. Discord channels focused on very specific… Continue reading How I spent my weekend
A new library webpage for the new semester
This week our new library webpage went live, just in time for the fall semester. You can see it at https://library.kbcc.cuny.edu. It represents about 8 months of work: 4 months of technical work, followed by 4 months of organizational work. I particularly enjoyed the technical bits, while the subsequent, unavoidable bureaucratic work was not as… Continue reading A new library webpage for the new semester
To the pixel
In my last post, I described how I want our library web pages to have no wrong info. It’s an important goal, but it’s not the only one. Our web design should also be correct, down to the pixel. This is important because in the past, we’ve had problems with hasty or careless design, where… Continue reading To the pixel
No wrong info
As the (relatively new) admin of most of our library’s web content, my goal is to have no wrong info in our public-facing content. This seems pretty basic, but we’re actually not there yet. Part of the problem is that the library does not yet have control of some essential pages (the library homepage is… Continue reading No wrong info
E-resources
Recently, my colleague, who is retiring soon, has been mentoring me on how to manage our library’s electronic resources. I’ll be taking over the function full time starting in September. There has been a lot to learn. The learning curve has been steepened by the simultaneous roll-out of Alma in our library, which has added… Continue reading E-resources
