A Database of French Researchers (1)
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A Database of French Researchers (1)

During the spring and this summer, I worked on and off, in my free time, on a side project about French researchers and their publications. This is an ongoing work, it will probably move slowly and last for some time, but I think it’s interesting to start documenting the first results. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the French Higher Ed landscape will know this is a daunting task: polite decision makers talk of a fragmented system; less polite people confess it’s a terrible mess, a jumble of overlapping structures and competing loyalties, with Universities, University groups, Ecoles, the CNRS, labs big and small with multiple parent organisations.

RA21
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RA21

TL;DR un pas dans la bonne direction attention Ă  la dĂ©finition des attributs minimums nĂ©cessaires particulièrement adaptĂ© Ă  la situation en France on pourrait dĂ©jĂ  plus utiliser Shibboleth Nathalie Clot attire mon attention sur un dĂ©bat en cours autour d’un effort pour crĂ©er une norme NISO pour la gestion de l’accès aux ressources Ă©lectroniques. La recommendation est RA21: Resource Access for the 21st Century, et le billet sur lequel pointe Nathalie est What Will You Do When They Come for Your Proxy Server?

Gollico - ToC
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Gollico - ToC

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) has opened APIs for a number of services, including their Gallica digital library, which contains 4.3 millions of documents: digitized books, maps, photos, musical scores, etc. from the collections of the BnF and partner libraries. I thought it’d be a nice little project to do a small set of client functions for those APIs: I’d practice Go, and familiarize myself with the APIs. So I started doing that.

Azure Vision Api
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Azure Vision Api

Following an experiment with the Google Cloud Speech API, where I tried to extract information from sound files - transcripts of speech, keywords, etc. - I thought I’d try another Machine Learning API, with the same overarching goal but a different project. The overarching goal is still to use the Machine Learning APIs provided by such internet giants as Google or Microsoft and try to somewhat automate the treatment of archival and library material.

Brexit 1956
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Brexit 1956

As is quite normal, people being worried about what comes next, talk about Brexit tends to look at what comes next. When people talk about the past, it’s usually about either the campaign, or Cameron’s Premiership. But I’m really interested in the long term thinking around Brexit. In 1994 I was studying History at the University of Bristol, and doing a Master’s paper on the U.K. applications to the European Economic Community of the 1960s, and specifically how that process was presented to the public and framed in the media.

Future library
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Future library

In the early 1990s, when I was a student, I visited an art exhibition with photographs by Sugimoto Hiroshi. It was from a series called Seascapes. The photographs were all in black and white. They had been taken around the world with a view camera, but all showed the same thing: the sea and the sky, with the line of the horizon cutting the picture in two halves. Sometimes it was almost night, sometimes the horizon disappeared in fog, sometimes it was as thin and clear-cut as a pencil line on a white paper.

Hugo on Firebase
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Hugo on Firebase

This is a short post to document how I deployed my Hugo static website to Google Firebase hosting. I do not cover Hugo itself: see their Quickstart guide. You need to install Node.js first, as it is required by the Firebase CLI, which is then installed from the terminal using: npm install -g firebase-tools You can now connect your local machine to your Firebase account: firebase login will open a browser window and ask you, using your Google credentials, to authorize Firebase.

Amazon 2017
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Amazon 2017

Qu’est-ce qu’un supermarchĂ©? Un endroit oĂą le client doit faire le travail d’aller chercher les produits qui l’intĂ©ressent en rayon, sans avoir le choix des quantitĂ©s, en Ă©change d’une baisse des prix et d’une variĂ©tĂ© de stock importante. Par opposition Ă  la situation avant les supermarchĂ©s, oĂą le client fait appel Ă  du personnel qui va chercher en magasin un produit, et lui en sert la quantitĂ© souhaitĂ©e. Confer Au Bonheur des Dames, et aussi les courses de ma grand-mère, qui passait au boucher, puis au crĂ©mier, au boulanger, etc.

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Learning Go

TL;DR: It’s a great language, a good choice to learn programming in general; there’s great documentation available, and it’s detailed. But in part because the Go community doesn’t view frameworks favorably, it can be hard to move from grasping the details to working on a fully fledged project. I’m not a programmer, i.e. I have not had any kind of formal training in Computer Science; nor do I work as a developer.

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Books 2015

In 2015 I spent many, many hours reading on the web. On Medium, The Atlantic, the NYRB, the LARB, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The NYTimes, etc. But it was also the first year in a very long time, maybe ten years, that I went back to reading a fair number of full-length books, and specifically contemporary novels. I didn’t take notes on any of these books, and I’m not sure I remember them all very well, but I thought I’d do a quick roundup anyway.

Une histoire de l'informatique documentaire
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Une histoire de l'informatique documentaire

Caveat lector : il ne s’agit pas d’une histoire, puisque je n’ai fait aucun effort de recherche ou de documentation, ce sont simplement mes souvenirs de la période et du sujet. Les années 1990. Je suis entré dans les bibliothèques en 1995, pour faire mon service national d’objecteur de conscience à la BPI, au Centre Pompidou. Je suis reparti à l’université fin 1996, mais je suis revenu dans les bibliothèques, comme bibliothécaire cette fois, fin 1998, à la bibliothèque de la Sorbonne.