InfoShare

Got Kleenex?

Just so you know...

Pat has bought a huge carton of kleenex boxes. She has them upstairs in the supply cabinet. This means we dont have to rely on Linwood running to the store when we need a refill at the Reference Desk. So now we can blow our noses until the cows come home...thanks Pat!

(box not exactly as shown)

Midnight, July 15....

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book of the Harry Potter series, by J.K.Rowling, was released at midnight on July 15. The book has made headlines worldwide, and sales of the other volumes have reached 300 million. CBC's Arts and Entertainment webpage even has a Harry Potter quiz.
In case you need help with answering these questions, or are just interested in the series, our Library has a selection of books under Library of Congress Subject Headings such as Rowling J K Characters Harry Potter

Managing Trackbacks and Comments

Most of our shared blogs (InfoShare, LearningCiti) have been automatically set to close the comments and not accept trackbacks. This is good because both of these features can be abused by spammers who are trying to increase the number of links to their sites. (Trackback and comment spam include links back to the spammer's website.)

Sometimes when people create a new entry they change the automatic comments or trackback settings because they are hoping to generate some authentic feedback and discussion from other readers. However if these settings are left open for too long the spammers will find your entry and send mountains of spam to your entry. It is very important to go back to any blog posting you have left open for comments and trackback and close the setting after a few wks.

It is also important not to accidentally change the settings. I have had to clean up comment and trackback spam from some blog entries so I thought I'd warn everyone to be aware of this when you are creating entries. Here is a picture of where you can change the comments and trackback settings. It is at the bottom of each entry that you are editing.

Special characters not displaying

I have noticed that sometimes when people copy and paste text from other documents or websites, there are special characters in the text (such as curly quotations marks or foreign characters) that are not recognized in the Moveable Type interface and display as questions marks. For example:

"According to Humberto Márquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destrucción de Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003." (http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=4710).

(I'm not picking on you Michael, this was just the most recent example. Also I was able to fix the problem which is why I'm writing this.)

OR

“This is what happens when you copy and paste the curly quotation marks around this sentence from MS Word.”

Here are some suggestions to avoid this problem.

For the curly brackets problem, if you must copy and paste text that was created in MS Word, you will need to edit it to remove the curly quotations marks (and any of other so-called "smart characters" that MS Word creates). You can do this manually after you have copied and pasted the code into Moveable Type (delete and retype the quotation marks and they will go back to being plain quotation marks), or you can do this more quickly (for large amounts of text) by copying and pasting the text into a simple text editor such as Notepad or WordPad. This will automatically strip and replace the special characters and make it safe to use in MT.

The foreign characters are a little more complicated. The easy solution is to use the Enlish language characters without the accents, etc. If you are dedicated to preserving the accents, you will need to use special HTML code to represent them.

For example, you need to use the follow code sequence to create their corresponding characters.

ó = ó
ã = ã

Here is a link to a table of special characters and the code that can be used to get them to display properly. Have fun!
http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm

New Category: Blogging Tips

Since there has been an increase in library blogging activity with the Library News blog, John and I have discussed creating ways to share trouble shooting tips and FAQs that are being addressed so that we can all use the Moveabel Type software more effectively. I think it makes the most sense to simply have a category in InfoShare where we talk about best practices and lessons learned.

I will try not to send notifications to our entire library mailing list for entries that are about blogging but have instead created a group in Groupwise that I will send emails to when there is anything new.

CUFTS JDB subject-browse scheme, showing call-number ranges

Hi all,

I just wanted to let anyone interested in the CUFTS JDB subject-browse
scheme know that it is available for viewing at:

http://cybrary.uwinnipeg.ca/staff-only/data_analyzer/browse_table.cfm?name=hilcc&table=CUFTS

Kevin Stranack modelled the table structure closely on the one
published for the Hierarchical Interface to Library of Congress
Classification (HILCC). The columns "CLASS1" and "CLASS2" refer to the beginnings and ends, respectively, of each call-number range. When two rows of the table differ only in their call-number ranges, e.g.

ROW_ID    CATEGORY1           CATEGORY2      CLASS1      CLASS2
14        Social Sciences     Psychology     BF1         BF1000  
15        Social Sciences     Psychology     BF1001      BF1400  
16        Social Sciences     Psychology     BF1401      BF1999

this means that the rows may for practical purposes be combined into
one; in this case, with the heading "Social Sciences -- Psychology." (I have not shown here the dummy columns "CATEGORY3" and "CATEGORY4" which are presently undefined in the CUFTS scheme, but were added to the database to maintain compatibility with the original HILCC scheme.)

There is no reason patrons can't see this information if they are
interested -- and we may want to have a printout of it handy at the
Reference Desk -- but I thought it would be a bit presumptuous of me to publish it on our site, particularly as it has not been officially
finalized yet.

Thanks,
John

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Images in blog entries hanging off bottom of page

We previously had a problem, illustrated in the screen shot at left, where stories with relatively large images close to the bottom were running off the bottom of the page when displayed as individual entries in the blog Archive. In the screenshot, taken from http://blog.uwinnipeg.ca/InfoResources/archives/001190.html (no offense intended to the person who created it), notice how the "Comments" area cuts into the space which should be reserved for the story.

In consultation with Carolyn, this problem has been fixed (via the site's stylesheet) since this story originally appeared. This story is being left here for archival purposes.

Problems with accessing articles in CPI.Q

Hello eveyone, good to be back. I've had a couple of frustrating experiences with accessing articles in CPI.Q where I was browsing individual issues for a particular article (for example, the Globe and Mail). When I access the Globe and Mail from the "Journals, Magazines and Newspapers" option under "Find" in the menues, I am unable to access individual articles past the first page of citations. Here is an image to demonstrate what I mean. If you click on it, you will be able to see a version with notes explaining what is happening. The quick solution is to access CPI.Q through the "Databases A-Z" list and do a "Journal Search" for the title you are looking for.