τεχνοσοφια

I was pleased to see the note that Sandy Payette sent to the fedora-users mailing list earlier today, updating the community on the Fedora 2.2 release date. Version 2.2 is going to include a bunch of features, some of which have been long-awaited and are quite, well, sexy. Some of the highlights:

• Database support has been extended to include Postgres, which should make all the MySQL-haters happy
• Fedora may now be deployed via a .war file in an existing servlet container, such as Tomcat, rather than requiring its very own Tomcat server
• A Lucene- or Zebra-backed search service has been included, which is more robust than the previous search service that used the built-in Dublin Core-populated database

These are but a few of the enhancements, and I can’t wait to put it through its paces when it’s released on January 19th.

For a more complete set of feature enhancements, click on the link above to read Sandy’s message.

Now if we can come together as a community and work on some more UIs, and get them used in some high-profile projects, many of the gripes against Fedora may be silenced. It’s still not a perfect product, but what is? That it uses XML as a storage format and exposes its functions via web-services APIs and allows use of any metadata schema, in my humble opinion, puts it head and shoulders above many other library repository solutions. And for that, it’s at least worth consideration.

The magnanimous folks who are planning the 2007 NJLA conference have invited little ol’ me to give a presentation on unAPI in April. I’m excited about the opportunity to evangelize about all of the interesting work and ideas out there in LibraryLand and beyond, and I have subsequently, and humbly, requested to expand the scope of my talk. Fortunately, they have agreed, and I’m sharing the title and abstract here to gather impressions.

Thanks especially to Brian Hancock for encouraging me to present at TAG two months ago, to Mary Mallery for the invitation, and to Dan Chudnov for inspiring the lion’s share of the ideas I intend to ramble about.

A library revolution: Returning the means of production via service discovery, systems integration, and open standards

Imagine, if you will, a world where library services are automatically discovered; Library users retrieve information objects and metadata with a single click, never having to navigate the dark alleys of dead-ends that are full-text resolvers; Information sources and services are connected and remixed according to user preferences and needs, where and when they wish. What if we could leverage existing library and industry standards, applications, and protocols to make this a reality? And soon?

Technologies such as OpenURL, COinS, unAPI, OpenSearch, and DNS-SD are explained and their promise is examined in this context, alongside ideas such as service registries, auto-discovery, and integration of search and resolve systems. Such evolutionary steps paired with bold, forward-thinking direction and a commitment to innovation may indeed lead us to this “revolutionary” scenario.