Here they are.

Even though Fiddles and Vittles closed several years back, Captain Bart’s didn’t open for the season, and the tourism world is drenched in “golf product,” there are still some classically Island tourist attractions — things that, by all rights, shouldn’t exist in a sensible universe, but that have delightfully squeaked through.

King’s Castle Provincial Park is one example: a free, giant children’s playground created and maintained by the Province of PEI.

The latest addition is the Elmira Miniature Railway, a new addition to the Elmira Railway Museum.

Leaving aside that the project cost $237,000, which seems, well, insane, the resulting little railway through the forest is wonderful: Oliver and I visited on Saturday, paid our fare, got our tickets, and had the train to ourselves as we sped through the wilds of rural Elmira. This is no carnival ride: there’s a mile of tracks through the woods, and the ride takes about 20 minutes to complete. It’s perfectly child-sized, and because this is PEI and not Orlando, there are no superfluous seatbelts or roll cages: you just sit in an open carriage and enjoy the ride.

This is one of those great times when political need — funnel money into Eastern Kings — results in a crazy hare-brained scheme that is probably doomed to fail (great as it is, I don’t see the railway as the key to the revitilization of Eastern PEI) but that also results in something that is actually a lot of fun, and will become, I think, a favourite destination for Island families.

CBC is reporting that Superior Sanitation applies for city wind turbine. Mark this day, for it’s the day that wind power reached a tipping point.

Thanks to this very helpful comment, I’ve found that my local OPAC speaks XML. And not just for search results, but for every page in the OPAC! This is truly amazing, and will enable some fantastic tools. Kudos to Dynix and the Provincial Library; I’ll modify the script I created earlier today to take advantage of this capability shortly.

All of this library fun reminded me of my first foray into the world of PEI, libraries and the Internet.

When we first arrived in Prince Edward Island in the early 1990s, the Provincial Library was automated with a custom-designed, mainframe-based system. As any librarian who was there back in the day will attest, it was an evil beast of a system; if I recall correctly, for example, I don’t believe there was any way to search by author or title. I was once told the process for bringing a new book into the system: it involved a complicated set of operations, some of them in Charlottetown (where the mainframe was) and some of them in Morell (where the Provincial Library is headquartered; the victim of an since-aborted plan to decentralize government operations that also saw the road-sign shop move to Tignish and Vital Statistics to Montague).

Needless to say, the system was neither public (in the branches) nor online.

When I started working with the province on their website, I brought up the idea of making the library catalogue searchable on the provincial website, and by some miracle was able to convince the mainframe operators to export the entire list of holdings (about 400,000 records) as an ASCII text file. I use the word “export” here loosely, as the mainframe had no “export” feature per se and they actually had to “print to a file” to get me what I needed.

The state of Linux database technology at the time was very primitive — this was before MySQL, PostreSQL and the like. If you wanted to have a Linux-based webserver use databases, you had to roll your own (early versions of the Vistors Guide search, for example, used Berkeley DB and Perl.

As a result, making the library catalogue searchable required a hand-stitched system. What I ended up with was a Perl wrapper around grep, a general-purpose UNIX text search tool. Users would enter a keyword, we would grep the 400,000-line ASCII file, and display the results. Because the file was somewhat structured, we could even provide automatic hyperlinks to other works by the same author, other books on the same subject and so on.

I can’t recall how long this system was in place — it was eventually replaced by the current web-based OPAC with the Provincial Library converted to Dynix — but it fulfilled a useful role for a while. Those were the days.

While the Provincial Library web OPAC does allow for a search by ISBN — on its advanced search page — there’s no easy way to link directly to a particular book from another website simply by its ISBN.

So I created one.

If you go to a URL in the following form:

http://ruk.ca/isbn/XXXXXXXXXX

Where you replace XXXXXXXXXX with the actual ISBN you’re linking to, you’ll automatically get redirected to the record for that ISBN (if there is one) in the PEI Provincial Library web OPAC.

Here’s an example:

http://ruk.ca/isbn/0596003838

That’s a link directly to the record for Content Syndication with RSS by Ben Hammersley.

Note that this will obviously only be of value if there actually is an item for the ISBN in question in the library’s collection. Note as well that it looks like the library only started entering ISBNs into their OPAC recently, so this is missing for earlier items.

Following from this script to create an RSS feed of items checked out of the library, I’ve created another little tool: dvd2rss.pl is a Perl script to extract a list of DVDs from the Provincial Library OPAC, sorted so that the newest DVDs are listed first.

Like the earlier script, this one is designed to work with the web-based Dynix OPAC (and is probably to some degree dependent on the way the PEI catalogue works, and how results are rendered). It should be easy, however, to modify it to work with other Dynix installations, and to display other sorts of searches (new books, new kids books, etc.).

Here is the RSS feed that the script generates. I’d like to enhance it a little to pull the description of the DVDs from the OPAC too. As it is, though, each RSS item links to the DVD in question in the catalogue, so you can easily check its status, and put it on hold if you like.

Here’s what the result looks like in NetNewsWire:

A reminder that if you pay your Prince Edward Island property tax in installments, there’s one due on August 31, 2004 (tomorrow).

I am always forgetting when my library books are due. The PEI Provincial Library sends out handy email reminders, and they have a website that lists checked out items, but I need more (and more obvious) prodding.

The result is opac2rss.pl, a Perl script that automatically connects to the web-based Dynix (aka Epixtech) OPAC and grabs a list of the items I’ve got checked out and the date they are due. It then creates an RSS feed that I can read in my newsreader every morning.

The result looks like this:

The Alibi project in Nova Scotia was invaluable in getting this working, and the O’Reilly book Spidering Hacks was useful in understanding how to use the Perl HTML::TreeBuilder module.

Blogger reports 40 people on Prince Edward Island using their service. Most of them I’ve never seen. Neato.