Below is our discography, including Simon’s cover art. Technically speaking, it is not a discography as these recordings only exist on cassette (and I no longer have a player). There is also in existence an additional compilation I made for a over-curious university friend. He did say he was going to put it onto CD at some point. Maybe it’s best for all concerned if I don’t remind him. I’ve been meaning to put this up somewhere on the web since about 1996 when making lists of bands’ output on the web was the thing to do (those were the days when I made a few HTML lists and had arguably one of the best Radiohead sites on the web).*

Albums

In Bed with Dobbin (1992)

Side A

1. Indeedy
2. Chinese Water Torture
3. Viel Vergenugen
4. Locomotion (Twin Peaks Karoake Mix)
5. Sit
6. Spot the Song

Side B

1. Full Woolen Cardigan
2. Full Woolen Cardigan (Reprise)
3. Famous Ladies
4. 1812 Underture
5. Toxin in Loco Parentis
6. The Last Political Waltz
7. The Krypto Factor
8. In Bed with Dobbin

Donkey Mafia Records DM1 (1992)

Dobbin sans Frontiers

Side I

1. Epilogue
2. Dobbin sans Frontiers
3. Entice the Judicature with Dough
4. Dobbin to Q4
5. The One to Blame
6. Nightmare
7. Pump up the Aussie
8. Stop the Snog?

Side II

1. Tipping the Balance of the Scales
2. Over Rated Stoat
3. Shakepeare’s Second Cousin
4. Norma Major
5. Jive Dobbin
6. Beeline for the Grave
7. The American Dream
8. Prologue

Donkey Mafia Records DM2 (1992)

Singles

Dobbin Is Dead

1

• Dobbin is Dead

2

• Indeedy (No Song Swansong Remix)

Donkey Mafia Records DM2 1/2  (1992)

Full sleeve notes explaining the works would doubtless be beneficial although unwanted. As a taster, Indeedy is a reference to a maths teacher’s catchphrase. Full Woolen Cardigan is a Cagean concrete poetry-style piece using a knitting pattern. Dobbin to Q4 is a follow up to the latter with obvious chess inspiration. Chinese Water Torture is roughly what you would expect…

If you would like to hear any of this, you will need a means of converting cassette to CD, and an awful lot of persuasion.

* At my first successful library job interview in 1997 (I’m still here) I was asked something like whether I thought the web was any good for academia. I said no, as it was just full of things like band websites. LOL.

• Customizing Classification Web with Greasemonkey. This is a couple of short scripts using Javascript, which is what the default Codeacademy lessons use. Javascript is designed for browers and is a good one to start with as you can do something powerful very quickly with a short script or even a couple of lines (think of all the 90s image rollovers). It’s also easy to have a go if you don’t have your own server, or even if you’re confined to your own PC.
• Aleph-formatted country and language codes. I wrote a small PHP script to read the XML files for the MARC21 language and country codes and convert them into an up to date list of preferred codes in a format that Aleph can read, basically a text file which needs line breaks and spaces in the right places. It is easy to tweak or run again in the event of any minor changes. I don’t have this publicly available anywhere though. PHP is not the most elegant language but is relatively easy to dip into if you ever want to go beyond Javascript and do more fancy things, although it can be harder to get access to a server running PHP.
• MARC21 .mrc file viewer. I occasionally need to quickly look at raw .mrc files to assess their quality and to figure out what batch changes we want to make before importing them into our catalogue. This is an attempt to create something that I could copy and paste snippets of .mrc files into for a quick look. It is written in PHP and is still under construction. There are other better tools for doing much the same thing to be honest, but coding this myself has had the advantages of forcing me to see how a MARC21 file is put together and realising how fiddly it can be. Try this with an .mrc which has some large 520 or 505 fields in it (there are some zipped ones here, to pick at random) and watch the indicators mysteriously degrade thereafter. I will get to the bottom of this…

The following examples are less useful for my own practical purposes but have been invaluable for learning about metadata and cataloguing, in particular, RDF/linked data. I was very interested in LD when I first heard about it. Being able to actually try something out with it (even if the results are not mind-blowing) rather than just read about it, has been very useful. Both are written in PHP and further details are available from the links:

• Lodopac: Linked Open Data OPAC. My entry for the UK Discovery Developer Competition.
• In Our Time booklist. A forerunner to Lodopac, written in response to an idea raised by psychemedia for the Open Bibliographic Data Challenge: the BBC “In Our Time” Reading List. Sadly it no longer works as the BNB service it relies upon was taken down.

Nothing to do with cataloguing, but what I am most proud of is this, written in Javascript: Cowthello. Let me know if you beat it.

Update: Shana McDanold also wrote an excellent post on why a cataloguer should learn to code with lots of practical examples.

To install it:

1. Install Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
2. Make sure the monkey (probably at the top-right) is happy and colourful. Click on it if not.
3. Install the tomsnow script by going to http://www.aurochs.org/zlib/js/userjs/tomsnow.user.js then
4. Click on the Install button.
5. Go and look at a new web page or reload one.

If you want to turn Greasemonkey off altogether, click on the monkey so he’s grey. If you want to stop individual scripts, click on the monkey, click on Manage User Scripts, and click on Disable next to the script.

These instructions were tested on Firefox 3.6.24 on Linux although I imagine they would be fine on any recent version of Firefox. I would be interested to hear anything confirming or undermining that assertion.

If you’re happy to play around, the snow is very customisable: you can easily alter the amount, speed, and style of snow, and so forth:

1. Click on the monkey
2. Click on Manage User Scripts
3. Select tomsnow from the list
4. Click on Options
5. Click on Edit this user script (you will probably have to select a text editor at this point)
6. Look for the section under the line of asterisks where more instructions can be found on how to make customisations.
7. Save the file and reload any pages to see changes.

The Greasemonkey version of the script uses slightly different default settings to the previous version, in particular using a lower density of flakes as a huge blizzard of snow is not likely to be welcome if used on all sites one browses.

I haven’t found any particular problems and it doesn’t seem to stop any sites working although sites that are already very script heavy are obviously less happy about running more, e.g. Twitter which is fine but can get sticky, although Gmail seems curiously OK. My cPanel was the only one which was really not happy. When you manage a Greasemonkey script, you will see a box where you can specify websites that you don’t want it to work on. For example, put https://twitter.com/* and it will stop tomsnow working on that URL with anything after it.

The British National Bibliography (BNB) server is generally more responsive than the Cambridge University Library one; title seems to work better than author. The following are hopefully useful examples useful:

• author=”fisher” seems to work (at least in BNB) so long as the number of hits to return is small (e.g. 5).
• title=”fisher” works well for both.
• ISBN=”0709039425″ should very quickly give you a single hit in both BNB and CUL.

I would really like to try and think of ways of improving free text regular expression search times for things like author and title in Sparql* although I doubt there is one that doesn’t rely on the configuration, processing power, or indexing of the server being searched.

* thinking aloud, some ideas might include: downloading a larger imprecise set for further local searching (e.g. for an author/title search downloading the title matches and searching the authors locally: although this would also be slow, it would get round the timeout at least); forcing a look-up in a controlled vocab first in order to get an exact string match (esp for authors, although even if this is possible, this forces a user to do more work, which isn’t the point);  local indexing of the triple store (this is probably the best way but I’m not sure how to go about it, whether I really have the server capabilities to do it, and can be committed to the updating required).

bee”]

This is a [hairy

Example with square brackets:

By the way, for an excellent Sparql tutorial with ample opportunity to play as you go along, do have a look at the Cambridge University Library’s SPARQL tutorial. It also gives clues to the way their data is structured. Of use for the BNB is their data model (PDF), which is not nearly as scary as it looks at first, and incredibly helpful.

Author keyword search

This would be relatively straightforward-the unavoidable regular expression being the main complication- but for the fact that the traditional author/editor/etc of bibliographic records can be found in dc:creator as well as dc:contributor which necessitates a UNION. The BNB used foaf:name:

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>

{?book dc:creator ?author} UNION {?book dc:contributor ?author} .
?author foaf:name ?name .
FILTER regex(?name, “author”, “i”) .

Cambridge uses much the same recipe except that it uses rdfs:label instead of foaf:name:

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>

{?book dc:creator ?author} UNION {?book dc:contributor ?author} .
?author rdfs:label ?name .
FILTER regex(?name, “author”, “i”) .

Title keyword searches

This is more straightforward and is in fact the same for both the BNB and Cambridge University Library:

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>

?book dc:title ?title .
FILTER regex(?title, “title”, “i”) .

Date of publication (year)

I imagined this one being simple and for Cambridge University Library it is. However the BNB took some unravelling as they have modelled publication as an event related to a book. The various elements of publication are then related to the event. So, for the BNB we have this:

PREFIX bibliographic: <http://data.bl.uk/schema/bibliographic#>
PREFIX event: <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>

?book bibliographic:publication ?pub .
?pub event:time ?year .
?year rdfs:label “date” .

By contrast, Cambridge University Library has it in one line:

PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>

?book dc:created “date” .

ISBN

As an identifier, ISBN is relatively straightforward in both models, although care must be taken with the BNB as 10 and 13 digit ISBNs are treated as separate properties and the following assumes that the search will cover both:

PREFIX bibo: <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/>

{?book bibo:isbn10 “isbn”} UNION {?book bibo:isbn13 “isbn”} .

For Cambridge University Library, also using the bibo ontology, this is:

PREFIX bibo: <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/>

?book bibo:isbn “isbn” .

Conclusion

I didn’t set up to provide ground-breaking conclusions. However, it is remarkable how different data models can be formulated for modelling the same type of data by similar organisations. The real question is whether this is a good, a bad thing, or doesn’t really mattter. Will it need to be standardised? My understanding of how this works is probably not. I think the days of monolithic library standards are probably now gone. I wonder, for instance, if there ever will be a single MARC22 (or whatever you like to call it) and doubt RDA will ever completely replace AACR2 in the way we imagine. What will emerge I suspect will be a soup of various standards and data models, some of which will be more prevalent. One thing I picked up from various linked data talks is that information has frequently been published then re-used in ways that the issuers never imagined; if that is the case, the precise modelling and format is probably not as important as the fact that it is of good quality and intelligently put together. The BNB and Cambridge University Library models are clearly quite different but quite capable of being mapped and used despite this.

If there are any other bibliographic data Sparql endpoints, I would like to include them in a future version of the Lodopac search. Do let me know if you come across them.

More mundanely, do say if there are errors in my Sparql recipes or if there are ways they could be done more efficiently.

• The opening of a new tab/window when you click on the MARC view for a subject or name.
• The confusing menu. We don’t use LCC or DDC, and the browse options don’t really add much, so we only really need two options: Search LC Subject Headings and Search LC Name Headings.

I managed to work out a simple way of modifying how Classification Web works on Firefox using the Greasemonkey add-on and a couple of simple scripts, all of which is quick and easy to install:

1. Install Greasemonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
2. Make sure the monkey in the bottom-right corner is happy and colourful. Click on it if not.
3. If you want to prevent the MARC view opening a new window, install the classweb_no_new_ window script by going to http://www.aurochs.org/zlib/js/userjs/classweb_no_new_window.user.js then
4. Click on the Install button
5. If you want to reduce the main menu, install classweb_prune_menu script by going to http://www.aurochs.org/zlib/js/userjs/classweb_prune_menu.user.js then
6. Click on Install button
7. Reload/refresh Classweb if it’s still open and it should work.

If you want to turn Greasemonkey off altogether, click on the monkey so he’s sad and grey. If you want to stop individual scripts, right click on the monkey, click on Manage User Scripts, select a script from the list, and un-tick the Enabled box in the lower left corner.

These instructions were tested on Firefox 3.5.3 although I imagine they would be fine on any recent version of Firefox. I would be interested to hear anything confirming or undermining that assertion.

If you’re happy to play around, these scripts can be further altered. In particular, you can choose which menu items appear in the pruned menu script:

1. Right click on the monkey
2. Click on Manage User Scripts
3. Select classweb_prune_menu from the list
4. Click on Edit (you will probably have to select a text editor at this point)
5. Edit the list of pages under the line var menu_items_to_keep = Array (. Enter each page you want to appear on the menu on a separate line in quotes, with a comma at the end of each line except the last line. The menu item must appear exactly as it does on the Classification Web menu, including capitals. E.g., the default set up looks like this:
   

   var menu_items_to_keep = Array ( // end each line with a comma except the last line
     "Search LC Subject Headings",
     "Search LC Name Headings"
   );

6. Save the file, and reload Classification Web.

If anyone else finds this useful or can think of more customizations let me know.