Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

# GLIS 607, Lecture 1 : Today was my first class of the Fall 2005 semester, GLIS 607 Organization of Information, which is basically about cataloging and classification. It is one of the core courses in librarianship, one that I skipped over so far because (a) I started in winter, (b) I was taking courses part time, and (c) it wasn't deemed necessary when I fast-tracked to the PhD. Now that I've dropped the PhD to go back and finish my MLIS degree, there is no getting around it.

The class started well enough, although as soon as the teacher started speaking, I realized that I had forgotten something very important: my coffee! Ah, I made it though.

The class was mostly administrivia, along with an overview of the topic of cataloging and classification. Mostly straightforward. We talked briefly about encoding the cataloging data. Strange looking at something that other then XML. It will be interesting to see if anyone will dare ask "Why isn't this done in XML?" Hopefully there will be a techie or two in the class and we can have a good run at it.

I looking at a MARC21 record after class to see if I could make sense of it, if the data was human readable (i.e. by someone who has not yet invested many hours learning the syntax and grammar). The answer is: NO! (at least not for me). Keep in mind that the example was labeled, saying what was what, and still, I couldn't make out all the logic. (Here's an example of MARC21)

I have to admit that I'm more then a bit intimidated by the amount of detail I'm going to have to know for the course. At the same time, I will feel more comfortable with my MLIS having doing the course.

Ed Bilodeau

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

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