Did you fix the apparmor config file for mysqld and restart apparmor?

first you need to edit /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld and add the new fully qualified (ie, no symbolic link) path(s). [you may want to leave the original /var/lib/mysql entries intact ]

then “restart” apparmor:

sudo invoke-rc.d apparmor reload

for more info, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AppArmor

I edited the file as appropriate, and MySQL started fine and now I don’t have to worry about my disk space filling up again.

The article stated that a computer science professor, Roy Campbell, was able to determine that the emails may have been sent by someone in the president’s office. The initial article I read didn’t say how the computer science professor figured that out so I thought he might have looked at the e-mail headers. I did some checking with e-mails sent to my personal e-mail account from people with Yahoo! addresses and found that, indeed, Yahoo! e-mail does include the senders ip address in the header (actual IP replaced by XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX):

Received: from [XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] by web112906.mail.gq1.yahoo.com via HTTP; Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:11:28 PST

However, I came across another article that had a little more information and while I don’t know that Dr. Campbell didn’t look at the headers (I imagine he did), he also found some clues as to where the e-mail was sent from because the person who sent them composed the e-mail using Microsoft Word and then pasted the content into the Yahoo! Mail. A Chicago Tribune article noted Dr. Campbell as saying “One should also be careful writing anonymous email using (Microsoft) Word .”

I did some testing with cut and pasting from Microsoft Word and I wasn’t able to find any personally identifying information in the mark-up that comes across when you don’t send the e-mail as plain text via Yahoo! but I am sure that depending on your configuration and version of Word it could happen.

I think the take-away from this story in regards to e-mail is that you should never assume any e-mail you send is truly anonymous. It is true that you can make it “more anonymous” and harder to figure out depending on how you sent it and what tools you used, but unless you really take great lengths and know what you are doing, given enough resources if someone wants to enough where an e-mail came from thy can probably can figure it out or come close enough. Maybe not enough for a court of law, but enough that you’ll probably wish you didn’t send it. While it was a computer science professor that first figured out the e-mail was probably not from someone on the committee, it really wouldn’t have taken a computer genius in this case to figure out where it may have come from.

Library Journal contacted OCLC about the announcement, but they did not immediately respond to LJ’s request for comment.

MITx has yet to announce what classes will be available but they plan to start offering classes in Spring 2012. More information can be found on the MITx announcement FAQ. If they have something I am interested in and it fits my schedule, I may try to take a class and, if I do, I’ll probably pay for the credential.

I skipped the last couple of LITAs National Forums as in the past I have not found them as useful for me as some other conferences I go to. With limited travel budgets, you need to look for value. LITA does not appear to be highly subsidized by sponsors and isn’t a cheap conference compared to other library conferences and the content has been a little weak in my areas. However when an opportunity to present with my co-editor, Heather Lea Moulaison, of Getting Started with Cloud Computing: A LITA Guide in her home state emerged, I figure, hey, why not? What else am I going to do with these vacation days? If I don’t use some, I’ll lose them, so I might as well hang out with some library peeps. Incidentally, one thing good about going to a conference on your own time and money, is you don’t have to think about skipping stuff if you want to since you are under no obligation to your employer to go if you’d rather do something else.

I am not going to review the whole conference but I was happy to see what seemed like an increase in sessions that were more advanced (technology-wise). It isn’t that past Forums were bad, I just wasn’t the proper audience. Kudos to this year’s program planners. I’d like to see less long breaks and it seemed odd that the posters were at the end of the day Saturday with no food or refreshment, but oh well. While I am on it, this isn’t just a LITA thing, but I think at most conferences sessions are too long. I’d much rather see two 25 minute presentations then one fifty minute one. I think this is were Code4Lib with it’s 20 minute time slots does a real good job. Library Journal has a good review of the 2011 LITA National Forum (and I’m not just saying that because they liked our presentation, although I’m pleased that they did.

The slides from our LITA presentation, Practical Approaches to Cloud Computing at YOUR Library, are available on CodaBox.

Is end-to-end Digital Preservation here today? Does it require an army of staff to manage? Is it a library function or a central IT function? Answer these questions and more while hearing Edward Corrado tell the story of turning the Binghamton University Libraries into the university’s identity and heritage storehouse.

Apparently you can register now and they will send you a link to the webcast is archived for your viewing pleasure.

It includes a lack of clear understanding of what exactly are the problems being solved for the profession by this technology that can only be solved with the Library Linked Data model or that can’t be otherwise solved? Are these problems shared across the profession, across institutions? Is it agreed that the Library Linked Data model is the solution? If so, how many institutions, or even personal services, are in production status using this model to solve those problems?

This are interesting questions and ones I don’t have any answer for. The idea of Linked Data in the library world has been pushed around for a while, but it has only been recently that I have seen any working prototypes and implementations. While I am impressed with what some people have done and I understand some of the potential benefits, I don’t think any of the above questions have been answered. I’d really like to see some answers to the first one – especially what benefit will our users gain from it. I really want to be convinced that any significant investment in Library Linked Data will benefit our end users and I don’t see it (yet). I have never heard a student or professor come to me with a problem that linked data will solve more completely or more efficiently then other solutions. I imagine that will come with time, but until it does it is hard to make the case to go all-in on linked data.

There may be some benefits (mostly in the form of efficiency) from a staff point of view, but I am still not sure that at this point they outweigh the costs of implementation. Also, as Carl asks in his post (question #3), “How do we see this data being maintained? ” Unless you can give me a clear plan that shows sustainability, again it is hard to get behind the linked data model.

What does this all me? The proponents of Library Linked Data need to get out and show some real world examples on how it will help end-users and/or how it will create efficiencies that can not be seen by other solution. For example, if you are talking about bibliographic and related data, how would linked data be better then OCLC’s centralized Web Scale Management Services or Ex Libris’s Alma (assuming for Alma that the community zone is populated with the appropriate data).

Will these answers come? I believe so. The Library Linked Data Incubator Group is a good start — especially if they can provide examples as to how linked data will efficiently benefit end users in ways other technologies can not — but it will be a while before we see any signs that the “Early Majority” are ready to jump on board,

Editing a book was a lot of work (more than I thought it would be, to be honest) but it was a rewarding experience and I leaned a lot along the way – both about the topic, and about editing a book.

By the way, if you happen to be in Europe, don’t fret, you can head over to Facet Publishing and get the UK imprint of Getting Started with Cloud Computing.

Out of this testing experience (which is still being analyzed), the Library of Congress issued “Transforming our Bibliographic Framework: A Statement from the Library of Congress” on May 13. According to the statement, “Spontaneous comments from participants in the US RDA Test show that a broad cross-section of the community feels budgetary pressures but nevertheless considers it necessary to replace MARC 21 in order to reap the full benefit of new and emerging content standards.” Therefore, Library of Congress is going to investigate, among other things, replacing MARC 21.

From what I have heard of the RDA testing, I think this makes sense. The general feel I get is that RDA by its self is not enough of a change to make libraries expend the resources necessary to implement it. Sure there are some improvements over AACR2, but there are also many things I read that are not improvements. This is especially true if you agree with the Taiga Forum 6′s 2011 Provocative Statement #2 that libraries will need to participate in radical cooperation. RDA offers a bit too much flexibility to insure that bibliographic records created by one library will fit well for other libraries. For example, the Rule of 3 is gone which on the cover is an improvement since it allows for more then 3 authors to be included as main or added entry. However, as discussions on the RDA-L list, it requires only the first author and illustrators of children’s books as author main or added entry. Local choices are great if you are only working for the local and not “radically cooperating.”

I won’t go through the list of complaints (and, to be fair, some complements) of RDA I’ve seen, as you can find them yourselves. I think my takeaway though is RDA on top of our existing bibliographic infrastructure is probably not going to make a monumental improvement for our patrons while at the same time it will be costly to implement (especially retroactively). RDA might be better than AACR2, but is it better enough that migrating to it is worth the time and costs? I am not so sure. Maybe simple changes to AACR2 would be just as good and more practical?

Some people I talk to think moving to RDA is a necessary first step that will make more significant or radical changes easier in the future. I, however, have a underlying fear that if libraries implement RDA in the current environment they will be stuck with it for a long time and it will actually make it harder to implement something different in the future. I hope the others are right and I am wrong since I believe in the short to medium term, RDA will be implemented on top of our existing bibliographic infrastructure – for better or worse.

If we replace our underlying bibliographic infrastructure with something else and change to RDA, say maybe something based on RDF or some other standard model for data interchange, we might actually get a significant change that will help expose our bibliographic data to the greater world of linked data while at the same time making it easier for libraries to take advantage of linked data.

One thing that the Library of Congress needs to take account in this process is the economic realities of implementing something new. I don’t see this specifically mentioned in the issues they plan on addressing. I assume that it will be part of the underlying discussions, but I would like to see it more prominently mentioned. Part of this is also involving vendors as well as open source developers of systems such as Evergreen and Koha. If LoC makes a change, it will effect libraries throughout the US (and probably the world). If the systems libraries use can’t function withing this new bibliographic framework, it will be a difficult and extremely expensive transition.

I think this is something librarians, especially those in systems and cataloging, should follow closely. I know I will be doing so.

Probably not surprisingly my statement sent off a mini-barrage of messages on the conference Twitter feed. Since the conference was almost over (my presentation was the second to last) and it wasn’t the core to what I was talking about, I didn’t have time to explain/expand on my position. I know that some of the people that responded to my statement on Twitter were not at the conference and at least a few I am pretty sure weren’t watching the live stream. Because of this, I wanted to take this time to put the statement in context and explain why I said I think MARC is better than Dublin Core. I understand people may not agree with me and this post won’t change that, but that doesn’t mean I need to agree with the band-wagon that wants to kill something that has been pretty successful for the last 40 or so years.

Before going any further since I’m not sure it was clear to everyone commenting on Twitter, I should point out that by MARC I mean MARC 21+AACR2 (which is the common usage of the term in the USA), but I imagine the same statements would likely apply to any version of MARC + what ever set of rules you want to apply, Similarly, by Dublin Core, I mean the Simple and/or Qualified Dublin Core Metadata along with the Dublin Core Metadata Element (DCMES) format (i.e. descriptive fields). I know that there are other aspects of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, but for the purposes of this discussion I don’t believe they are germane [1]. I am focusing on how Dublin Core can be used to describe objects. After all, that is why librarians use metadata – to describe things. No matter how easy it is for machines (or humans) to parse a metadata record, it would not be very useful if the standard does not make it possible to adequately describe, in a consistent way, whatever it is that one is trying to describe. I should also also point out, that while I love theory and research, in this case I am mostly concerned with the practical.

The statement came out of my experiences thus far with using Dublin Core for digital preservation at Binghamton University. Before we started on this, I was familiar with Dublin Core but never really had to work closely with it on a large scale so I didn’t have a strong opinion of it. I am not a cataloger, but as a systems librarian, I feel it is necessary to follow developments in cataloging and I am also having to work with MARC records on a fairly regular basis. Thus, I realize that MARC has its issues but please don’t kill it until we have something better and at this point, I don’t believe we do. [2]

In short, my problem with Dublin Core is that it does not allow for the granularity and consistency that I believe is necessary to adequately describe a mixed set of objects for long term preservation and access. Mixed sets is important here, if you are doing a long term preservation project that includes a disperse set of objects, I believe it is important that there is some consistency across collections. This is especially true if they are going to be managed or searched together. Librarians often comment on the need to break down silos or at least tie them together for discovery. The metadata needs to be adequate to do this. Maybe if you are a national library you can have multiple digital preservation solutions, but at a mid-sized university library that approach is problematic and most-likely not realistic. This is doubly so if you consider that one of the main components of preservation is ensuring access in the future (i.e. you are not talking about a dark archive). This is not really a new or unique criticism but I think it is often overlooked and/or too easily dismissed. Even one of the people who objected to my saying MARC was better than Dublin Core, Corey Harper, admitted this was a valid criticism in his article, “Dublin Core Metadata Initiative: Beyond the Element Set” published in the Winter 2010 issue of Information Standards Quarterly .

A couple of tweeters brought up DCAP (Dublin Core Application Profiles) which in theory could be used to allow for the use of additional (or alternative) metadata fields to address some of my issues with how well Dublin Core describes particular objects. However, as Corey Harper mentioned in a tweet, “I understand that DCAP infrastructure lacking, but…” (ellipsis in the original). But the “but” is not something that can be ignored. If the infrastructure isn’t there, it is a big issue – practice over theory. Even if the infrastructure wasn’t lacking, I am not sure how well it would address my criticisms. Even without DCAP I can add local qualifiers or elements for my application (and have in fact, done so), but as Dublin Core Metadata Initiative warns, “Nevertheless, designers should employ additional qualifiers with both caution and the understanding that interoperability could suffer as a result.” I don’t see how the use of multiple DCAPs would not end up leading to similar interoperability issues and result in a “Least Common Denominator” situation on the discovery end of things. Without discovery, you don’t have access, and without access you don’t have preservation.

Lastly, Michael Giarlo asked “But then is anyone actually putting DCMES up against MARC? Seems a category error to me.” I don’t think it is a category error at all. Both are metadata formats/standards that libraries are using to describe objects in their collections. Perhaps one might argue the category is overly broad category, but I think they are obviously in the same category. Comparing the two is only natural and is in fact, I think quite useful. DCMES may be easier to teach and for computer programmers to program, but in my experience it is nowhere near as useful when it comes to actually describing at an item – which as I said earlier is the goal in the first place. Maybe some technologists value interoperability over description, but I am not ready to go there. We need something better, not something different.

As I said earlier in the post, I doubt this will change anyones mind, but hopefully it explains why I said that MARC is better than Dublin Core.

[1] Truthfully I am a bit confused why this was an issue on Twitter. Wikipedia and even the official “Using Dublin Core” document Diane Hillmann created for DCMI just use the term “Dublin Core” to describe the metadata standard so this is pretty common usage.

[2] I do not mean to imply that anyone is making the argument that Dublin Core should completely replace MARC, but the MARC must die contingent is relevant to this particular discussion of MARC versus Dublin Core. At some point maybe I’ll make a post about some of the more complete alternatives to MARC being discussed.