Last week, inspired from a meeting, I started tossing together a little python program to solve a problem. It wasn’t perfect. It was warty. But I think I have something worthwhile now. Or, at least useful for me – It gives you what you want, and writes to a log when something goes wrong.
What I really want to do here, is just take a moment to sing the praises of learning by reading code.
Yesterday in a meeting for our Digital Initiatives Advisory Group we were discussing what collections we should consider sending over to the UofT Internet Archive shop, and I asked an innocent newbie question - So, do we have copies of everything we have had the Internet Archive digitize?
NOPE.
No big deal. We’re in the infant stages of creating a digital preservation program here, and everything that comes with it. INFRASTRUCTURE!
This past week, we started depositing digitized books into our institutional repository instance for The McMaster Collection. As of this posting we have 216 books in the collection. However, currently these materials are only available to the McMaster community. This is completely out of my control, and I agree what some of you may be thinking, “wait, out of copyright books are not available to the general public!?”
The workflow is a little complicated right now, but it is the beginning and will definitely be improved.