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- Cyberpunk Librarian
( 2023-07-20 )
Infopump is a little weird, but that makes sense when you take a look at the guy developing it. At its core, Infopump is bibliography software. You use it to present books and media related to a given topic or subculture. For instance, I'm working with some folks within a Cyberpunk subculture and it was our conversations that Infopump came to be. They've got a great spreadsheet full of cyberpunk realted books, media, games, and more. But a spreadsheet isn't a database and a spreadsheet isn't very appealing to look at. And given the nature of the collection, this spreadsheet is one helluva resource for those looking for insight into cyberpunk culture, philosophy, and media. And it occurred to me that there's no reason to limit this to a cyberpunk topic. Infopump could be used to collect items, books, and media about any topic: GLBTQIA, Wicca and Paganism, retro gaming, space music, weird movies, and whatever else.
However, Infopump is not a media distribution system. So while there may be a bibliographic entry about something, there's no link to directly download it. Nevertheless, there's plenty of information and linkages to allow someone to find the item elsewhere. I'll write more about that later, I'm sure.
Infopump's other primary objective revolves around ease of use. Infopump has no cataloguing system of its own. Instead it relies on Calibre, the free and open source eBook management system, for cataloguing and for its database. Calibre is easy to use, has lots of great functionality built it, it's completely cross-platform, and it has a well constructed and predictable database. A cataloguer can work in Calibre, send their images and the metadata.db (which is a SQLite database file) up to a web server and like that, the database is updated.
Unlike ShadowCAT, there's a working demo of Infopump online, link below.
But yeah, this is Changelog so... what's changed?
Well, my time for one. A few changes in my life, mostly positive, have allowed me to carve out more time to work on projects like Infopump and ShadowCAT. Which is why I'm here writing this post in the first place. But over the last 24 hours, Infopump changes and updates include:
Anyway, have a look if you have the interest.
https://cyberpunklibrarian.com/infopump
( 2023-07-15 )
Let's start with ShadowCAT. The entire point of the project is to give enthusiasts, researchers, and collectors a way to catalogue the contents of their periodicals collections in such a way that they can put the catalogue online for others to use. Librarians will be familiar with magazine databases like MasterFile Premiere by EBSCO. MasterFile is a great resource filled with magazines and their articles in a searchable catalogue, indexed, and offered for use. But fot the most part, all you'll find there is mainstream periodicals.
One night I found myself staring at two fairly sizable collections of old periodicals, lovingly digitized by people who absolutely care about these things. Some of these are available on the Internet Archive, and we'll come back to that. But plenty of these things aren't, mostly because of the content of the periodicals, because one is a large collction of pornographic magazines.
I won't entertain arguments about whether or not pornographic magazines are useful, or relevant, or worthy of archiving. I think they are because they represent the mores and attitudes towards human sexuality at different points in time. A quick perusal through a porno mag from 1968 is going to look quite a bit different than one from 1978 and one from 1988. Definitions of beauty and sexuality change and shift as aspects arise and fall. So whether or not someone else thinks they're useful, that's on them. No one will force them to look at a catalogued collection of erotica.
On the more socially accpetable side side of things, I've also got a decent collection of old video game magazines. Once again, you're not going to find those in MasterFile, but that doesn't detract from their importance. I'll likely write more about that topic later but here's what started the whole idea for The Changelog:
A hierarchy.
A cataloguing system needs a hierarchy and every major cataloguing system does. Librarians know about the chain of Authority to Bibliographic to Item records and archivists have the DACS, finding aids, and so on. A non-librarian enthusiast isn't going to know about any of that stuff, so I figure it's easier for everyone to think of a different sort of easy-to-use hierarchy. ShadowCAT, thus far, has four levels:
Collection -> Entity -> Source -> Item
A Collection is the overarching catalogue of periodicals pertaining to the theme or topic. Below that, you find the Entity, which is one of the overarching periodicals. A Collection can have one or many Entities. The Source is a specific issue of the periodical. Finally, the Item is a thing within that issue.
And I think I can easily explain that to someone without a background in libraries and archives through a simple example.
Say I have a Collection called Bit by Bit, described as a catalogue of video gaming magazines from the 1980s. Within that collection, I'm cataloguing issues of ZZap!64, which was a Commodore 64 gaming magazine out of the UK. With that in mind:
The Collection = Bit by Bit
-> The Entity = ZZap!64
--> The Source = ZZap!64, Issue 29 from September 1987
---> The Item = A review of Guild of Thieves, pages 47 & 48
And remember, the Collection can contain multiple Entities so there could be issues of Amstrad Action and Amiga Concept in there too.
Wow... okay, it feels good to get that written down, because it helped me organize the process in my head. I should go write some more code or something.