Category Archives: Web Design

The Badian Collection at Alexander Library

When Rutgers Professor Ernst Badian passed in 2011, he left a significant personal numismatic collection to the University.  His collection is a teaching collection and in order to increase access to the collection, the approximately 1258 coins are being photographed and added to the RUCore Fedora Repository hosted at Alexander Library.

http://coins.libraries.rutgers.edu/romancoins/

I originally started working on this project because the coins were being photographed from 7 angles, instead of the traditional 2 angles of obverse and reverse.  You can see an example of the 7 angles here.  https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/41098/JPEG/play/#size:800,bgcolor:000000,start:1

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Alexander Library Historical Photography Database

The Alexander Library at Rutgers University has an extensive historical photography collection, but intellectual property policies at the University level are preventing library archivists from adding these to the RUCore System that makes resources available to the public.

In order to make accessing the images simpler for University departments/clients who have received clearance  to use the images, the University Archives needed an in-house database that uses a simple browser interface.  The link below is a proof of concept that provides both simple and advanced facet searches.

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Creative Writing Classes at the Library!

Several years ago I taught several fantasy/sci-fi creative writing classes at ASSETS Middle School in Honolulu.  Now that I’m back in NJ,  I’ve decided to begin offering the writing workshops at a few NJ public libraries starting this spring.

This image is all over the web, and I don't know who created it, but it is a great visual tool and basis for a graphic organizer.

There were two classes I really loved to teach.  The first was a broad literature review based upon the Hero’s Journey narrative structure that Joseph Campbell used to demonstrate the common themes in human mythology.   We read/watched selections of everything from The Hobbit to Princess Mononoke.  (We also read some actual mythology.)  Students then used their understanding of the story structure to write their own hero’s journey, and we all had a lot of fun using our imaginations.

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NLP and HP

A while ago I was doing a mockup of an HP Lovecraft full text index for a MLIS class.  After the  brainstorming and initial design process I decided I was just building another version one of the many Lovecraft repositories already available online.

However, I’m bringing the project back to the todo list after learning some more about the Stanford NLP Link Parser and Carnegie Mellon Parser   And the text analysis possibilities of R and Python.   It would certainly be interesting to experiment with the fantastic proper nouns and eloquent sentences.  Just imagine the opening sentence of “Call of the Cthululu” being processed by the link software…  (It turns out it does a great job.)

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

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