The THALI here at Libraries Interact have been receiving a lot of spam lately via some email addresses that we have been using for the administration of the Libraries Interact blog. Early last month I put in place some changes to the way we received email in an effort to reduce the amount of spam that we were getting.

Unfortunately the changes were too effective and legitimate email was being blocked as well. Therefore if you’ve emailed us, or used the contact us form, and haven’t heard from any of us please send your message again.

The prefered method of getting in contact with us is via the contact us form, but you can also email us at the address below if you prefer a direct email.

Registering as a contributor…

As well as these changes we’ve also disabled the ability for anyone to register as a contributor to the blog. While we encourage people to contribute, an unfortunate side effect of allowing anyone to register is that unscrupulous people use automated software to make as many accounts as possible. We were being inundated with bogus requests.

We’re putting in place a new form for people to use for those who wish to register and contribute content and until that is ready we encourage you to use the contact us form to let us know that you want to contribute.

Please remember that you don’t have to register to comment on posts and we certainly do want you all to continue to comment on posts here at Libraries Interact. Commenting on posts gives us the feedback that we need to keep posting.

The “Stop Sign” photo was uploaded to Flickr by Phil Gilbert and used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

This morning I’m pleased to report that an updated version of our popular THALI Tags page has been released. This new version is using the Diverse Group Tag Cloud plugin that we’ve been developing.

The THALI Tags page is a tag cloud that is generated by using content analysis of posts on our individual blogs, as well as Libraries Interact. The results of the content analysis, undertaken using a Yahoo! Pipe, are fed through a stop word list and the number of posts associated with the remaining tags determine the size of the tags.

Other aspects of the page new in this version include:

• The page is directly integrated with our WordPress blog
• The tag cloud is updated approximately twice a day
• If you click on a tag a list of posts associated with that tag are displayed
• A widget is displayed in the sidebar listing the top 5 tags
• You can now use the plugin on your own WordPress powered blogs if you like

We value your feedback and would welcome any thoughts you may have on the new THALI Tags page, either as a comment or via our Contact Us form.

The photo “King Cloud” was uploaded to Flickr by Karen Ka Ying Wong and used under a Creative Commons license.

Long time readers of our blog will remember that we started the Virtual Libraries Interact blog back in late 2006 as a sister site to our blog.

Unfortunately due to a number of reasons the Virtual Libraries Interact blog has been languishing for a while and no new posts have been added.

It with some regret, and a tinge of sadness, that we have decided to merge the Virtual Libraries Interact blog into the main blog. Do not worry, all of the content has been imported into the Libraries Interact blog.

The posts are still available and they have been aggregated into a new Virtual Libraries Interact category. Also preserved are Australian Libraries in SL and SL Avatar list pages.

In the new year we look forward to posting more information here about libraries and second life. Also, don’t forget that those of us using second life and other virtual worlds may be writing about their experiences on their own personal blogs.

Kathryn Greenhill. Image by Cindiann. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license.

We have a very happy and excited author here at Libraries Interact. Kathryn Greenhill has shared her very exciting news on her personal blog, but we want to make a fuss about her too.

Kathryn has been awarded the VALA Travel Scholarship and will be heading off to the United States and Canada next year to look at alternative discovery layers and open source library management systems.

Read more about it at Librarians Matter » Blog Archive » VALA Travel Scholarship

Congratulations Kathryn.

Our website has become very popular lately and our server has occasionally had some difficulty in keeping up. You may have seen an error recently when trying to login to the site for example.

In an effort to smooth things out I will be undertaking some early spring cleaning. In particular looking at our database server and deleting things that are not needed.

At Libraries Interact we like to be as inclusive as possible and therefore encourage any librarians who are interested to contribute. More details of how to contribute are available on our Contributing page.

A side effect of this open contribution policy is that we have a large number user accounts stored in our database that have never been used. As part of the spring cleaning I’m deleting any user account that does not have a post, or comment, associated with it. Sadly many of them are created by what appears to be “bots”.

If you try to login and find your account has been deleted, I sincerely apologise and invite you to create an account again. However, please remember that accounts are only needed to contribute, they are not necessary if you’d just like to comment.

If you do notice anything odd happening with our website, please let us know. Taking a screen capture of your browser at the time of the error is always very welcome.

Today I’ve released an updated version of our popular Aussie Library Blogs page. The page is now built dynamically created using a WordPress plugin that I’ve created with the assistance of the other THALI members. This new way of managing the list of Aussie Library Blogs is exciting in a number of ways including:

1. It is now easier for us to add and manage new links
2. Links are now always in alphabetical order
3. There are options to show “live blogs” and “abandoned blogs”
   (for us to consider a blog abandoned it has not been updated within the last 6 months)
4. Links are still in the categories of “Personal Blogs” and “Corporate Blogs”

This is a new initiative and as such there may be a couple of bugs and other issues that we’re yet to fix. In particular if we’ve, listed your blog incorrectly, put your blog in the wrong category, or haven’t listed your blog and you’ve asked us to. Please contact us using the our contact form, or leave a comment to this post, and we’ll fix your listing as soon as possible.

As the author of the plugin I also ask that you to let me know if you have you any questions or comments about the plugin.

Today a new look was unveiled for the Libraries Interact blog. If you’re reading this post via your feed aggregator please come and check it out.

Many of the members are attending, and even presenting, at two conferences in the near future (Beyond the Hype: Web 2.0 and VALA 2008) and so we thought this would be an ideal time to for a change.

The new look is based on a WordPress theme released by A.M. Griffin. Over the past couple of weeks it has been tweaked by Peta Hopkins and myself to meet the needs of the THALI. For those that may not be familiar with the term, the THALI is what we call the group of people who work on putting this blog together.

We encourage you to let us know what you think by either commenting on this post, or by sending us an email via our contact form.

Photo of the balloons uploaded to the stock.xchng website by user foobean01 and found using the everystockphoto search engine.

The other day Peta posted an item here about the Beyond Paper Bag project. In it she mentioned the unAPI plugin for WordPress. WordPress is the software that we use here to run the blog.

Recently WordPress version 2.3 was announced and I upgraded both librariesinteract.info and virtual.librariesinteract.info today. If you noticed something odd happening here with the blog this afternoon it was probably me doing the upgrade.

As part of the upgrade process I’ve installed and enabled the unAPI plugin. Now all of the posts here have metadata records available in the following formats: OAI-Dublin Core (oai_dc), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), SRW-Dublin Core (srw_dc), MARCXML, and RSS.

As with any upgrade odd things can happen as a result. If you notice something please let us know.

About a month ago I wrote about a new initiative that we introduced, the THALI-Tags tag cloud. This morning an updated version of the site went live. The changes are:

• Using a new Yahoo! Pipe for the analysis of posts to extract terms;
• The PHP code used to generate the tag cloud was cleaned up and generally improved;
• Tags are checked against a list of “stop words”;
• The SimplePie RSS and Atom class for PHP is now being used to retrieve the Yahoo! Pipe; and
• Tags that are more than two characters in length, and have two URLs associated with them, are the only ones used to generate the cloud.

I encourage you all to take a look and let us know what you think either by commenting on this post, or by sending us an email.

[Update: 27/09/2007]

Something I forgot to mention yesterday is the addition of an RSS feed of the top ten most popular tags in the THALI-Tag cloud. This RSS feed can be aggregated into places such as the side bar on a blog, or in your personalised iGoogle page.

Today a new feature of LINT has been released. It is called THALI – Tags. There is link to it in the top of every page or you can visit it directly by going to http://librariesinteract.info/thali-tags/.

What is the THALI – Tag cloud? It is tag cloud made up of tags derived from posts from the blogs of members of the Thali. When you click on one of the tags you’ll see a list of blog post titles that are associated with that tag.

For those that are curious about how it works more information on it is available on my personal blog. Essentially it is a combination of a Yahoo! Pipe and some custom web scripting.

In the true spirit of release early and often I encourage you to test it out and let us know what you think, and we’ll be adding extra features in the coming weeks.