code4lib 2008

The 2008 code4lib conference will place Feb. 25-28 at Embassy Suites in downtown Portland, Oregon.

See discussion at conference home page and Google Groups and on code4lib IRC (cf. FAQs)

Some proposals of particular interest: Andrew Nagy on VuFind; Jon Phipps on the NSDL Metadata Registry; Winona Salesky and Michael Park on "XForms for Metadata creation," Terry Reese and Emily Lynema on DLF ILS Discovery Interface Task Force API, Aaron Swartz on the Open Library Project, Rob Styles on RDF extraction of MARC data, Gabriel Farrell on Solr-powered Helios, Casey Durfee on MARCThing


Registration is $125. Hotel rooms are $150 per night, and include full breakfast and "free happy-hour." There's a wiki page with suggested Portland restaurants/hang-outs.

Here's the basic conference schedule:

Monday, February 25 - Preconference Day
Tuesday, February 26 - Conference full day
Wednesday, February 27 - Conference full day
Thursday, February 28 - Conference half day

Also, regarding Panizzi supybot, download Last.fm

VuFind 0.7

Chris Barr (Design & Interface Specialist at Villanova University library) writes: "With this release [i.e., 0.7] we included an experimental browse feature that we would love to hear some feedback on from this list, as the topic of browse has come up here in the past.Try the browse demo here: http://www.vufind.org/demo/Browse/Home . This is still a work in progress. Some things in the browse are still buggy (Subject Area & Tags don't work yet). Hopefully you can overlook this and discuss, beyond the technical part, theoretically how you see a browse functioning and if this is going in the right direction or not... What can we do differently, beyond squashing the bugs, to make the browse useful for an average user?"

Yale Puts Course Content Online

The Dec. 11th Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Yale has begun providing open access to video, audio, and textual materials for selected courses.

”Lectures can be downloaded and run in streaming video or in audio only. There are searchable transcripts of each lecture, as well as course syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets, and other materials." (per University spokesman Tom Conroy.)

So far, 7 courses have been posted to the Open Yale Courses web site. I checked Shelley Kagan's lectures on the philosophy of death and Christine Hayes' Introduction to the Old Testament, and the production values are excellent.

Bibliographic Control Working Group Report

Release of the LC Report has been mentioned on the CMS Web Log, and was the topic of discussion at our last Catalog Librarians meeting. Here are my notes for Section 4.

OPAC 2.0 on Alice's Blog (Dec. 15)

See original page and CMS referral.