Cyberpunk Librarian

The Backchannel

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( Last updated: 2023-07-15 )

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2023-07-15

Okay, so I came up with an idea for this Gemini capsule and figured I might do a bit of development blogging/notes/rants as I'm working on two projects right now which share a lot of similarities and some important differences. One is a brand new thing while the other is something I've worked on for a while but I'm making a concerted effort to get back to it and do things with it. As I sat here at my Mac, typing notes into Tot(1), it occurred to me that maybe that stuff should go somewhere others could see it. And since the only people who are going to care about such projects are nerds, librarians, and archivists -- well, why not?

The projects are both catalogues, one bibliographic and the other archival.

Infopump - A bibliographic cataloguing system for books. The intention is to create a collection of books related to any topic and offer tht catalogue to interested parties who may want to do some research in to the topic or culture. This is the one I've been working on for a little while now.

ShadowCAT - A new project that aims to provide a catalogue of periodical articles (aka magazines, zines, etc.) and is geared towards the collection and cataloging of periodicals that no one bothered to catalogue and will likely remain uncatalogued due to the nature of the collection. For example, ZZap!64 isn't well represented in public library databases and, while you can find issues of it on the Internet Archive, I think the presentation of content and data is a bit lacking. (This is coming from a librarian's perspective.) So my thought is to create a catalogue that's light on jargon, easy to use, but yet provides a useful infterface for enthusaists and researchers alike.

Okay, that in mind, let's go.

=>blog.gmi The Changelog

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=>https://tot.rocks/ (1) Tot

2023-07-03

I don't know that I'd start a blog here within a Gemini capsule, though there's no reason you can't. I think, maybe, I'm showing my age when I'm interested in a semi-underground technology that operates almost entirely on plain text. I'm old enough to have watched the rise and fall of Friendster, MySpace, FriendFeed, Google +, Plurk, and Path. As I write this, Reddit and Twitter seem doomed to similar fates. It's almost as if it's a bad idea to centralize so much communication, discourse, and information, dropping it into one place that might someday turn a profit.

I need to bring some structure to my thoughts on this, but if nothing else, I can say that I'm a big fan of self-hosting these days. At least I have someone to blame for failures, even if that someone is me.

_."._.".[ Thank you to: ]_."._."._."._."._."._."._."._."._."._."._."._."._."._

Maddiefuzz and Liz and the whole gang at Hackers.Town.

=>gemini://gemini.hackers.town/maddiefuzz/ Maddiefuzz

=>gemini://gemini.hackers.town/liz/ Liz