Live from Code4Lib

Yesterday I attended that Evergreen pre-conference led by Dan Scott of Laurentian University. By show of hands, it seemed two-thirds of the attendees (myself included) were unable to get prerequisites installed before coming. I should have installed VMware or Parallels and then Ubuntu or Debian Linux at home, but there just wasn't enough time. In any event, the installation of the Evergreen software still seems too complicated to expect widespread adaptation in the near term. Once up and running, though, Evergreen seems very impressive and holds a lot of promise.

Terry Reese led a preconference later in the day on LibraryFind (cf. demo at Oregon State), which is "an open source metasearch application developed by librarians for libraries, built with Ruby on Rails", and including an OpenURL resolver, 2-click workflow, ability to locally index collections, web-based admin, 3-tiered caching system (to improve speed of searches), and customizable user interface. Terry warned that Ruby is increasingly unsupportive of XML and espouses a philosophy of "make things work first; optimize later." In terms of Installation, it shouldn't matter what version of Linux you use. Actually, Jeremy Frumkin has installed it on a Mac (cf. article on installing on OS X).

The regular program begins this morning with a keynote address from Brewster Kahle.