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.

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.

"The Three Worlds of IT"

In "Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology," (Harvard Business Review, November 2006, p. 141-149) Andrew McAfee argues that "managers who distance themselves from IT abdicate a critical responsibility." They should "stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage." He goes on to distinguish three categories of IT that need to be understood and harnessed by managers. My notes are posted on the CMS Weblog.

Map of Israel

Plugged in from Google Maps. Click on virtual pushpins to view labels.



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OSS for the Masses

This article in CNet was slashdotted today. Why should you care about open source?" the author asks rhetorically, "You should care because the vast majority of common applications, even complex commercial stuff like Adobe Photoshop, Windows Media Player and Microsoft Office, have free, open-source alternatives."

"Productivity Toolbox"

Posted on LISNews 11/14/07: Productivity Toolbox: 37+ Tools ..., including the book Getting Things Done, "the most famous resource about completing your tasks and checking things off of your to-do list. Written by the now-famous David Allen, it is a must read if you haven’t already," Lifehacker.com, Simple GTD (free software based on Allen's work), Mee Timer (compares business versus personal web browsing at the office), clockingit.com, "a free web application that will keep track of your tasks and the time you spend on them. It’s really well designed, and fully featured, considering it is available for free," joesgoals, Motivation Hacks, toggl, etc.

Things to Do in Rochester and Buffalo

On the way to Kitchner, Ontario, Rochester, a 6-hour drive from New Haven,


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has the George Eastman House; and Buffalo, the Albright Knox Gallery

Movable Type Goes Open Source

Slashdot story: Movable Type Goes Open Source. But is it too late to catch up with Wordpress?

Cf. dlovins.wordpress.com

Fun with LoC Authority files

Back on February 12, Jessamyn West mentioned on librarian.net that a complete set of LoC authority records had been made available for download by Simon Spero. Tim Spalding also announced it on his thingology blog. Now (per Nathan Rinne on AutoCat 11/13) Bernhard Eversberg has used it to create a user-friendly BrowseLCSH application.

Michigan and Yale Take Heat on Commercial Digitization

In response to accusations that the UM Library has sold itself out to Google, Dean of Libraries Paul Courant told the Library Journal (Nov. 11 LJNewswire), "As part of our arrangement with Google [for 7 million volumes scanned in 6 years], they give us copies of all the digital files, and we can keep them forever," he wrote. "Our only financial outlay is for storage and the cost of providing library services to our users. Anyone who searches U-M's library catalog Mirlyn can access the scanned files via our MBooks interface. That's right, anyone." A related LJ article appeared on Nov. 12: "University of Michigan Library Head, in New Blog, Defends Google Deal."

A related article appeared in the Nov. 9 Yale Daily News, regarding the contract signed between Yale and Microsoft. The reporter points out Yale's endowment now exceeds $22 billion, and the 2008 library budget is $89.6 million. And assuming a $3.5 million price tag, covering the full processing of 100,000 volumes would cost only one-half of one percent of the University's $615 million capital expense budget. (Though estimate I've heard was more like $7.5 million).

Some Upcoming NELINET Events

These three look promising:

Nov. 16, 8:30 AM-3:30 PM, the 2007 Bibliographic Services Conference: "Subject Access - Out of Control?"

Dec. 10, 9:30 AM-3:30 PM a workshop by Ed Sperr on "Widgets, Mashups and Web Services", a kind of companion to the "Exploding Your OPAC" class of October 25.

Dec. 12, 10-11 AM, a webinar on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).