CODE4LIB List

DatAasee 0.9 - A Metadata-Lake for Libraries

Himpe, Christian — 2026-05-08T06:00:54+00:00

Dear All,

we, at the University and State Library of Muenster, are happy to release version 0.9 of **DatAasee** - a metadata-lake for libraries:

https://github.com/ulbmuenster/dataasee

This version simplified the API, added facets, and includes Redis commands for custom queries. Also, the ingest and interconnect performance has been significantly improved. For further details about this version, see the CHANGELOG and the documentation. Feedback is welcome! [...]

Upcoming Solutions Showcase Series Events

Arran Griffith — 2026-05-07T12:44:15+00:00

Hi All,
I trust your week has been going well. We have some exciting Solutions Showcases lined up for the next few months, so I wanted to share all the details. See below for what you can expect!! Please forward this email to fellow colleagues or mailing listservs that you are active on who may find value in attending the Solutions Showcase Series. [...]

Interested in a deep dive into CC licensing? Register for a CC Certificate course by 25 May

Shanna Hollich — 2026-05-05T11:45:52-04:00

Dear colleagues,

[Please excuse cross-posting.]

For those of you seeking a wonderful professional development opportunity,
please see below:

Registration
<https://www.classy.org/event/2026-cc-certificate-course-registration/e720698>
is open for the next round of CC Certificate courses, starting 1 June. Whether
you seek support for open licensing, or a better understanding of open
efforts and related considerations, CC Certificate
<https://certificates.creativecommons.org/> courses are available to
everyone. Each course provides the key building blocks for open licensing
efforts in just 10 weeks. [...]

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Stuart A. Yeates — 2026-05-05T10:46:42+12:00

Thanks Nate, I worked out pretty quickly about
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/collection_NamesUndifferentiated and
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/collection_NamesAuthorizedHeadings

I'll look at the converter

cheers
stuart

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Trail, Nate — 2026-05-04T22:21:51+00:00

Thanks for pointing this out; I'll look at the mads:affiliation; may be an oversight. Is it better in madsrdf?

We run the html display from the MADSRDF; here's the conversion from MARC to MADSRDF:
https://github.com/lcnetdev/marcauth-to-madsrdf

If you look at the MADSRDF, we've taken a lot of MARC controlfield data and converted it to collections: [...]

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Stuart A. Yeates — 2026-05-05T10:06:09+12:00

Either not all of the information in the HTML is in the MARCXML, or the
documentation at https://www.loc.gov/marc/authority/index.html is
insufficient for me to extract it.

For example "Collection Membership(s) - Names Collection - Authorized
Headings" is not obviously apparent in the MARCXML using the documentation.

If the HTML is generated from the MARCXML, can you point me to the code for
that? [...]

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Trail, Nate — 2026-05-04T21:05:01+00:00

MARC xml and MADS xml are listed at the bottom of each Name page under "Alternate Formats". Since you are using XSL those should work for you way better than a scraped html page in a warc file.

If you know the lccn, you can fetch the single page in the serialization you like: [...]

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Eric Phetteplace — 2026-05-04T14:02:55-07:00

Sorry if this is not helpful, but could you just strip commas and search
wikidata for matching entities? Unquoted queries for "lorde audre" and
"audre lorde" appear to yield identical results. If you are trying to match
the entity's name exactly then obviously this approach does not help.

Without using an LLM to select from a list of entities, I imagine I'd want
to: query on the name form minus commas, filter results to human entities*,
filter for entities with matching terms in the label (lots of possible
adjustments here), present the user with a list of matches to choose [...]

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Stuart A. Yeates — 2026-05-05T08:45:06+12:00

I've got many pages like
https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n2001028682.html (stored in WARC
files)

I've got names.madsrdf.xml.gz which is all the names in madsrdf, but it's
disaggregated rather than in the format exampled in
https://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/rdf/ so it's not really amenable to
processing in XSL. I'd prefer not to spin up a triple store and reasoner of
any kind.

I suspect that what I need is the MARCXML, which I'm familiar with
manipulating with XSL and has all the subfields I need explicitly marked. [...]

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Michael Monaco — 2026-05-04T19:40:17+00:00

As Kevin mentioned, there are in fact many possible patterns for names to appear in, so it's probably not possible to un-invert all the names in the NAF with a single RegEx.

You mention that you've downloaded the records in bulk -- what format are the records in? Could you provide some examples? [...]

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names?

Stuart A. Yeates — 2026-05-05T07:33:36+12:00

I should have been more expansive in my description of what I'm doing.

My end-game is to map all authorised personal name LCCNs minted or edited
by my local national library to usable wikidata.org items.

I have an RSS feed of LCCNs at https://id.loc.gov/tools/mynames/nz/feed/1 -
https://id.loc.gov/tools/mynames/nz/feed/475

Currently I'm downloading the HTML of LCCNs from the LoC and running them
through an XSL script and bunging them into mix and match. See
https://mix-n-match.toolforge.org/#/catalog/7866 for example. [Non-person
and/not applicable items there are LCCNs which I should not have uploaded
and/or ones I've queried with appropriate authorities.] [...]

access 2026 cfp

Eric Lease Morgan — 2026-05-04T15:08:10-04:00

[From Matthew Fesnak <fesnakm@mcmaster.ca> and forwarded by request. --ELM]

Access 2026 in Hamilton, Ontario October 14-16: CFP now live!

Esteemed list-mates,

We are happy to announce that McMaster University (in Hamilton, Ontario) will be hosting Access Conference 2026 in person October 14th-16th at the David Braley Health Sciences Centre.

For those that may not be familiar, Access brings together people working with library systems, digital projects, and emerging technologies to share ideas, learn from each other, and build community. For this year’s conference, we are working to prioritize Access, reduce costs, and encourage diverse participation. [...]

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Stuart A. Yeates — 2026-05-05T07:06:34+12:00

As it happens, I have already downloaded the records in bulk. What I need
is a regexp to parse the "quoted text"

cheers
stuart

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Stuart A. Yeates — 2026-05-05T07:04:27+12:00

Wikidata lookup is a fine idea, unfortunately the point of my project is to
migrate New Zealand LCCNs into wikidata. That is I'm ignoring every LCCN
that's already in wikidata, I'm interested in the ones that aren't already
there.

cheers
stuart

fun with mcp servers

Eric Lease Morgan — 2026-05-04T14:54:38-04:00

I've been having a grand ol' time with MCP servers.

As you may or may not know, MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers are one leg in a three legged stool. These servers return trusted information to large-langauge models for interpretation. Here is how the "stool" works. A person articulates a question/command. A large-language model maps the question/command to the functions of an MCP server. The server answers/addresses the question/command. The large-language model interprets the response and reformats it for the person. Thus, the large-language model is an interpreter. The model translates English into computer speak, and it translates computer speak [...]

Three-part series of OpenRefine-related blog posts

Tillman, Ruth Kitchin — 2026-05-04T18:54:40+00:00

Good afternoon, Code4Lib folks,

I wanted to share that I've recently published a set of 3 OpenRefine-related blog posts. They've got some intermediate-to-advanced tips and tricks which might be of interest to this list.

*
Blanking down only within records<https://ruthtillman.com/post/openrefine-blank-down-hack/> - solving the problem of blank down traversing records if you have two back-to-back records with the same data
*
Repeating functions in OpenRefine<https://ruthtillman.com/post/openrefine-repeat-functions/> - this one was embarrassingly straightforward but I'd never seen it demoed and never noticed it, perhaps because one doesn't often have to repeat functions. I figured it might be useful for others as well.
*
[...]

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Trail, Nate — 2026-05-04T18:33:28+00:00

Stuart,

You could download the entire Names file in "nt" serialization, then there's one line for each name you can filter on:

<http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/nr2001046558> <http://www.loc.gov/mads/rdf/v1#authoritativeLabel> "Smith, Jim, 1940 October 17-" .

Then you can do what you want with the quoted text.

Saves bandwidth for you and us.

https://id.loc.gov/download/

Good luck,

Nate

Re: Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names

Kevin Hawkins — 2026-05-04T11:08:04-07:00

Hello Stuart,

Do you mean that you want to convert LCNAF personal names from this sort
of order:

Mudge, Lewis Seymour, 1868-1945

to something like this:

Lewis Seymour Mudge, 1868-1945

? But then also deal with authorized forms containing no commas, forms
with more than two commas, and occasional use of parentheses. So, as
you know, it gets complicated. [...]

iPRES 2026 Bake Off (Tools Demonstration): Call for Contributions

Nathan Tallman — 2026-05-04T10:25:50-04:00

Dear all,

Calling all technical whisk-takers; the iPRES 2026 Ad Hoc Programme is now
open!

There are several categories available in the AdHoc programme, including The
Great Digital Preservation Bake Off
<https://ipres2026.dk/call-for-contributions/the-digital-preservation-bake-off/>,
which returns to iPRES 2026 (September 21-25 in Copenhagen). Whether you're
a seasoned baker or a first-timer, we want to see your tools in action. [...]

Regexp for rewriting LoC LCCN authorised personal names?

Stuart A. Yeates — 2026-05-04T08:25:42+12:00

Does anyone know of somewhere that describes LCCN authorised personal names
as regexps? I want to be able to rewrite them at scale to 'normal' order.

AI appears to be actively undermining the functionality of search engines.

cheers
stuart

Re: Dealing with bot traffic - what tools/services are you using?

Joe Hourclé — 2026-05-01T06:15:18-04:00

> On Apr 30, 2026, at 2:36 PM, Lucky, Shannon <shannon.lucky@usask.ca> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I am curious what methods folks are using to deal with aggressive AI harvesting on websites - particularly digital project sites. Many of our servers are being hammered with traffic that impacts our service delivery and the methods we have been using cannot keep up.
>
> Specifically I am wondering who is using services like Cloudflare or implementing OS solutions like Anubis, or are you using something else? I'm gathering information about what services or methods are being using at academic libraries [...]

Re: Dealing with bot traffic - what tools/services are you using?

George Macgregor — 2026-05-01T07:48:53+00:00

Hi Shannon,

At our institution we have employed a great diversity of techniques, including experimentation with Anubus and Cloudflare Turnstile — depending on the nature of the service. But, in general, the approach has been a combination of a) monitoring traffic more effectively and blocking where necessary, b) rate limiting, and c) web application firewalls (WAFs), as above. [...]