Mark Eaton

Once a project is built, one important thing that doesn’t get discussed enough is maintenance. Maintaining web projects is essential but mostly underappreciated. It usually doesn’t get you much reward. But web app […]

With some time off over the holidays, I took the opportunity to do a deep dive into Google Analytics. This was prompted by an article by Erin Crane which I found quite interesting. Erin shows how putting some time […]

It’s hard to believe this blog has been running for almost 7 years and I have yet to write a post about Zotero. Time to remedy that.

Many of you are probably already familiar with Zotero. It’s citation man […]

Git is useful, but troublesome at times. You can pull to the wrong branch and all of a sudden your nicely organized project is a mess. Of course the prickliness of git is not new news. But people don’t use it f […]

There are some well-travelled paths in library research. I came across one of them this week when I was looking for articles on LibGuides. There are a lot of articles by librarians about LibGuides. On the one hand […]

So I followed through on my plan to spend the Thanksgiving holiday by myself, working on the Open Journal Matcher. It went fine. I put in four straight days in front of vim, and I’m pretty sure that I more or l […]

It’s now been several months that I’ve been handling our library’s eresources, and I have a few thoughts. It has been mostly positive, with a few frustrations. My predecessor in this role prepared me well. Her s […]

I’m going to spend this Thanksgiving weekend at home by myself, with my dog to keep me company. When I tell people this, they promptly invite me to their family’s celebration in New Jersey or some such. But I’m […]

When I was studying Sanskrit in college, I was really taken by the vocative case. I think that the vocative case is partly what gives Sanskrit its unique feel when it is translated into English. This is probably […]

I’d like to share a status update on the Open Journal Matcher. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a grant to refactor and make the OJM more sustainable. I’m considering two different approaches to the rewri […]

Since the new library website went live a couple weeks ago, I’ve been poking at it, looking for problems. I was assuming there must be some unexpected use cases out there that would cause it fail.

I found […]

One thing I have found challenging about work is switching between coding and writing and back. Coding gives me something to write about; writing is the currency for advancing in my job. But these are not […]

You can now sign up to receive posts from this blog via email, over on the About page. Maybe this will make reading this blog a bit easier for some people. I recognize that (unfortunately) not everyone uses RSS, […]

I’ve spent much of this holiday weekend on Discord, asking questions. This is because I’ve been working on an overhaul of the Open Journal Matcher, and it has led me to work with technologies that I find very unf […]

This week our new library webpage went live, just in time for the fall semester. You can see it at https://library.kbcc.cuny.edu. It represents about 8 months of work: 4 months of technical work, followed by 4 […]

In my last post, I described how I want our library web pages to have no wrong info. It’s an important goal, but it’s not the only one. Our web design should also be correct, down to the pixel. This is imp […]

As the (relatively new) admin of most of our library’s web content, my goal is to have no wrong info in our public-facing content. This seems pretty basic, but we’re actually not there yet. Part of the problem is […]

Recently, my colleague, who is retiring soon, has been mentoring me on how to manage our library’s electronic resources. I’ll be taking over the function full time starting in September.

There has been a lot […]