My first post to the Code4Lib web site is Code4Lib North, an announcement of a new Code4Lib chapter for Ontario, Quebec, and nearby regions of the United States. Wendy Huot of Queen’s University and I wanted to get this started, so we did.

Here’s my entry in the Code4Lib 2010 t-shirt contest:

Dan Chudnov posted 2009 - A Year in Pictures. I’ve got a couple of Dan Chudnov pictures to post so here they are. Coincidentally and rhymingly, they’re Jan Dawson pictures, too.

In October, at Access 2009, a library technology conference in Charlottetown that I enjoyed immensely, one night Jan Dawson found a karaoke bar on the other side of town and a bunch of people poured themselves out of a pub and into cabs to go there. Jan sang “White Rabbit,” Dan sang “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” other library geeks mixed in with Charlottetown singers, and I did “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Dan snapped photos.

A couple of weeks later Dan was back in town and we went to see Jan at the roller derby. She’s one of the Death Track Dolls. They play in costume. Here’s Dan and Jan after the game.

When I arrived at library school at the University of Toronto in 2001, Nancy Williamson had mostly retired and was just teaching a half course a year on subject analysis. It was a very good course, I learned a lot, and I knew I was getting one of the last chances to learn from one of the greats. Outside of class Prof. Williamson was very friendly: I talked to her in the library, in the hall, even walked with her up to the subway once in a cold winter wind. She talked about writing FRBR (her name is on it), meeting people in the Classification Research Group, travelling in India, and more.

I was delighted to see today that Cataloguing & Classification Quarterly 48: 1 is a Festschrift in her honour. The introduction is by Lynne Howarth and one article is by Clare Beghtol, two other professors I studied under and who must have studied under Nancy Williamson. With Joe Cox, director of the library school library, they were the four who taught me cataloguing. What I learned from them all inside and outside the classroom has stayed with me ever since. I was lucky enough to be at the Faculty of Information Studies when it was one of the top schools in the world for cataloguing.

• Lynne C. Howarth, “Is There a Catalog in Your Future?” Celebrating Nancy J. Williamson: Scholar, Educator, Colleague, Mentor" DOI: 10.1080/01639370903351413
• Nancy J. Williamson, “Is There a Catalog in Your Future? Access to Information in the Year 2006” DOI: 10.1080/01639370903339913
• Clare Beghtol, “Nancy J. Williamson and the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO)” DOI: 10.1080/01639370903346652
• I. C. McIlwaine, “Universal Bibliographic Control and the Quest for a Universally Acceptable Subject Arrangement” DOI: 10.1080/01639370903356388
• Julianne Beall; Joan S. Mitchell, “History of the Representation of the DDC in the MARC Classification Format” DOI: 10.1080/01639370903345019
• Michèle Hudon, “Teaching Classification” DOI: 10.1080/01639370903356370
• James M. Turner, “From ABC to http: The Effervescent Evolution of Indexing for Audiovisual Materials” DOI: 10.1080/01639370903341919
• Louise F. Spiteri, “Incorporating Facets into Social Tagging Applications: An Analysis of Current Trends” DOI: 10.1080/01639370903338345

If knowledge, dedication, and narrowness of focus are three leading indicators of success of a blog, then my friend and colleague Tim Knight’s new KF Modified Blog should do well. KF Modified (good band name) is the Library of Congress Classification variation that Canadian law cataloguers use. Tim is the head of cataloguing at the Osgoode Hall Law School Library.

I had to move Mrs. Abbott, my homegrown library management system, from one machine (FreeBSD 6.4) to another (Ubuntu 9.10) so while I was moving files around and setting up MySQL and all that, I started using Git to manage the source code instead of RCS and I put it into GitHub: http://github.com/wdenton/mrsabbott/.

It’s a fairly poor library catalogue system, written in Perl, without many featuers, done by someone (me) who at the time (early 2001) knew nothing about cataloguing or MARC records and little about programming. I know something about cataloguing and MARC now, but I’m not much of a better programmer.

Back then I’d decided I wanted to keep better track of what was in my library, and nothing out there did what I wanted. I tried Koha but it was too complicated. So I wrote my own.

Later that year, I started library school. The first class I had was intro cataloguing, taught by Lynne Howarth. It was a revelation! In that half-year course I learned about why cataloguing is done, who it’s for, what’s important, and how it’s done with subject analysis, classification, Dewey, LC, LCSH, AACR, MARC, and more.

The more I learned the more I realized how many things Mrs. Abbott needed. It always did what I needed, though: tell me what I had in my collection and where it was. (I classify all my non-fiction with the Library of Congress Classification.) So I never got around to upgrading it to use MARC records or anything like that. If I did it over, I’d do it very differently, or perhaps I’d use LibraryThing. But I don’t need to yet.

The code’s embarrassingly bad, but I liked Dale Askey’s talk We Love Open Source Software. No, You Can’t Have Our Source Code. I doubt anyone will ever be interested in this, but I think it’s better to work on code in public than in private, and having it on GitHub means I can hack on it from anywhere should I want to (and that I have an extra backup out there). So I pushed it up.

I named the program after Nancy Abbott — Mrs. Abbott, as I called her, of course — who ran the library where I went when I was a young boy. Some lucky people had a librarian who was a major figure in their childhood, and she was mine.

E-mail to wtd@pobox.com is bouncing. I hope it will be fixed very soon.

UPDATE one hour later: It’s working again.

A Google search for yaml2json got fewer results than I’d expected, but had an answer, and convert yaml to json led me to another Perl one-liner I note here for reference:

perl -MYAML=Load -MJSON::Any -E 'say JSON::Any->new->Dump(Load(do { local $/; <> }))'

I needed the JSON::Any Perl module, which is libjson-any-perl in Synaptic on Ubuntu. Is it just me or is it hard to find things in Synaptic? How would I search for “json AND perl”? Anyway, searching for “json” and scrolling turned it up.