Time to clean out the weblog cupboard. While individually these might fail to spark much interest I’m hoping some sort of synergy results from their careful combination:
Working up a config file so we can have a “Mason†version of the LibX toolbar–a open-source project hosted by our colleagues down at Virginia Tech. Like Zotero, this is a Firefox-only extension.
What is it? The LibX toolbar provides an in-browser platform for offering a number of library-related services: an easy way to search the library catalog or query an OpenURL link resolver or provide a link between pages that display an ISBN (e.g., an Amazon page) and the library’s catalog.
So why am I not very excited about the possibilities? I’m not quite sure but I think it flows directly from my dislike of toolbars—they consume valuable screen real estate and always make me feel like someone’s trying to force me to use the web their way. 
Of course, some people like toolbars (perhaps not as much as the browser you’ll see by clicking on the thumbnail—over 200 Firefox extensions loaded at startup), so we need to make it available and we’re always ready to help advance the application of technology to the work of libraries. One point I should mention (of interest to those who share an ambivalence or worse toward toolbars): once installed, you can turn off the toolbar and still access some services (e.g., after highlighting a word in your browser a right mouse click offers the option to search that term in the library catalog).
The process of getting a LibX plugin ready seems a bit cumbersome–you submit the information to the LibX team at Tech and they build and host the necessary .xpi file. I completed what I hope is a “well-formed†config file this afternoon and will send it to the LibX team tomorrow. Will post a link to the extension when it’s built (and we’ve tested it).
Python
My “teach yourself Python†project reached a milestone today–a successful rewrite of a Perl script I use weekly to reformat and update the Mason Faculty/Staff Directory. 
It is, of course, chock full of brute-force algorithmic code but I did finally get it working (the task is parsing and reformatting a CSV file for import as a file of MySQL insert statements). The debugging process taught me a lot about the “show invisibles†command in my new favorite editor (TextMate). I doubt I would have found the mis-matched indentations otherwise (tabs != spaces).
The language-specific bundles that ship with TextMate (e.g., for Python there’s one to check syntax and another to “cleanup whitespace”) make it an incredibly powerful tool. To see TextMate in action (via screencasts), visit their website (or talk to any Ruby On Rails developer using a Mac—it’s what they all appear to use).
LOCKSS
Mason has decided to join the LOCKSS alliance (postponing for a couple of years a decision about Portico membership). I’m pleased with that decision both because I find the underlying technology of LOCKSS much more interesting and because I hope to use the platform to archive ETD’s as we move into that format for graduate theses and dissertations. We’ve been a LOCKSS participant for several years but joining the alliance will enable us to become more active in developing plugins for the system and allow us to lend financial support to an important project for the future of scholarship.
InCommon Federation
Speaking of memberships, next month Mason will be joining the InCommon Federation. Quoting from the federation’s website: InCommon is a group of universities working to create and support a common framework for trustworthy shared management of access to on-line resources in support of education and research in the United States. To simplify that a bit, we can just say the federation offers a way for a researcher/user known and authenticated at their home institution to become a known and trusted user at another.
The library is driving Mason’s entry into the federation, to help us solve some of the authentication issues that surround a statewide streaming video project we’ve been working on (sponsored by ViVA—the Virtual Library of Virginia). More on that as we roll something out this Spring.
InCommon uses Shibboleth as its federating software.