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Biological necessities June 17, 2008

Posted by Mia in Frontiers.
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The human propensity to differentiate and distinguish, as well as to categorize, occurs at the most primitive level: biological survival. One of the first, if not the first thing an infant learns, is distinguishing “mother” from “not mother“.

It is a requirement to learn to distinguish things from one another. It is at the core of how humans learn, develop, and interact with the world around them.

Preliterate, isolated cultures do a great amount of differentiation in order to insure their survival and the continuation of the species. It’s extremely beneficial to the species to have knowledge of the categories ‘poisonous mushrooms’ and ‘building materials with insulating properties’, for instance.

Categorization has its biological origins in saving the species time and expending of fewer calories, helping to insure our ultimate survival.

Nothing miscellaneous about it.

ERM monthly loading settling down June 17, 2008

Posted by Mia in ERM Module.
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All right!  Just finished up the June load of Serials Solutions bibs (adds, changes, deletes) in short order; followed by the catalog + coverage update this morning — the coverage load took 15 minutes, it was a snap!  Things are settling down now in terms of workflow process — finally.

I’ve learned to not attempt re-sorting any of the columns when ERM displays the processing reports — that part of the software is very glitchy and I’ve gotten hung at that end stage more than once now. That’s what I get for being curious!

I’m cleaning up the documentation for the coverage load wiki pages — that is turning out to be a great help.  The embargo conversion rules are working fine, except that I’d like to reorganize the lot of them so that they file decimally — we will be able to spot gaps better when loading new spreadsheets.

Also made loads of progress today looking more closely at the Serials Solutions “Client Center” side of things when we had a problem with the SpringerLink package.  Turns out someone left a footprint at SerSol — which got carried over to the spreadsheet.  Much easier dealing with human-generated errors than machine-generated!  Plus, now I get to work out a few methods for cleaning this kind of problem up, so all is not lost.

The learning curve is starting to level out.  Hope I didn’t just jinx myself by stating that…!