Dilettante’s Ball

Dan Chudnov “interviewed” me about the Ümlaut for the first “Library Geeks”. It’s crude and show obvious signs of “learning as we’re going”, but if you want to hear more about the Ümlaut from my voice and hear my favorite curse word (and boy is it a doozy), take a listen.

Note the “3-2-1″ at around the 31st minute. It took us several attempts to get this recorded. The first session was lost after about 30 minutes of recording courtesy of GarageBand crashing. We then lost the 2nd quarter, again thanks to GarageBand crashing. I had to do the 10 questions twice. Why? I’ll let you guess.

In other Ümlaut related news (is there any other right now?), I have the project page up. I’ll be adding to the HowUmlautWorks when I get free moments.

Also, thanks to Dan’s lead (lots of links to One Big Library today), I added the OCLC Resolver Resolver Registry to the Ümlaut. When you start a session, it checks your IP against the OCLC registry. If the registry returns a link resolver based on your IP, the Ümlaut will check to see if your resolver is SFX (I’ll be happy to add other XML enabled resolvers) and, if so, includes those holdings in the results, as well. If not, it includes a link to your resolver. If it doesn’t work for you, my guess is that OCLC has ILLiad (or whatever you use for Interlibrary Loan) first in your library’s profile.

Here are some screenshots of this in action:
How this citation looks at Georgia Tech [pdf]
How this citation looks at Drexel [jpg]

How does it work for you?  

Thanks to Gabriel Farrell for trying this at Drexel and supplying the screenshot (and congratulations on the new job!). It still needs some work (for instance, it needs to tell the user that the fulltext is courtesy of Drexel or wherever), but I think it’s a start.

We’re about a week away from launch, so I’ll be working on migrating to the production server. I’ll be sure to document it so others can partake if they desire.