τεχνοσοφια

I proposed an NJ Library BarCamp some months ago, not realizing that efforts were already under way to do the same in NYC. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't do anything to get things moving; I wouldn't have pulled things together nearly as well as the NYC folks did. The event was excellent. It was my first camp, and I'd definitely try another. A big thanks to Stephen Francoeur et al.

Here are the three sessions I attended, with links to the "official" wiki pages for summaries:

• Solr and Lucene (session moderated by AIP's Mark Matienzo and NYU's Jason Casden) seem to be gaining momentum in the library world. Having gone to the last Code4Lib conference, my head was already chock full of relevant tidbits, but the moderators did a great job of showing examples, evangelizing, and keeping the discussion going.
• Grid Services (session moderated by OCLC Openly Informatics' Eric Hellman) might have been very interesting if I hadn't kept receiving phone calls from an insurance company. I had to take the calls, and so this session was difficult to follow. The basic idea was to think of networked library services like the power grid. What would libraries want from the grid? What would they be willing to contribute back?
• Semantic Web (session moderated by NYU's Corey Harper and CUNY's Sunny Yoon) was the most widely attended session I went to: standing room only! When I first added the topic to the wiki, I had no idea it would draw this many people. Odd that I would suggest this topic since I had little to offer on the topic, so I gleaned an awful lot. The discussion was spirited and, as you might expect, the RDF vs. microformats arguments flew fast and furious across the room. I'm left wondering if the RDFa/GRRDL approach might not be a good middle-road between the "everything must be represented as RDF in a triplestore" camp and the "just embed microformats in xhtml" people.

And now, the requisite name-dropping. I got to reconnect with a bunch of people I hadn't seen in a while, like Terry Catapano, Jay Datema, Nicole Engard, Valerie Forrestal, Kevin Reiss, and Sunny Yoon. And I got to meet LibLime's Chris Cormack, NYPL's Josh Greenberg, Corey Harper, Mark Matienzo, Jenkins Law's RayAna Min Park, and Steven's Tech's Linda Scanlon, among other people.

It was about as good as any camp without kayaks and archery can be. Check out some more summaries.

1. Ruby

I gave a little talk on Ruby at today's VALE-NJ Technology Awareness Group meeting, and so I'm using my slides to finally kick off this vaporseries.

[Slides are embedded as Flash here if you're reading in an aggregator.]

It seemed to be taken pretty well, though it could easily have been dismissed as the fanboyish ravings of a neophyte Rubyist. The folks from Rutgers were interested in having me come talk to their software architecture group, so it couldn't have gone too badly, I suppose.

I need to stop cramming so much into presentations. Rambling about reflection and OO at a speed the Micro-Machines Guy would envy isn't the best way to share enthusiasm about Ruby.

The rest of the meeting was interesting: Ron Jantz, the Digital Library Architect at Rutgers, posed a number of challenging questions about trust, authenticity, and reliability in the digital realm; Terry Catapano, Special Collections Analyst at Columbia, exposed the lack of data model inherent in many current metadata schemas and suggested ontologies as a potential direction; and Jeffery Triggs, Applications Programmer at Rutgers, demonstrated the Java DjVu Viewer Applet for displaying DjVu-based images outside the DjVu browser plug-in. Many good questions were asked, and new faces were in the crowd, so the future of TAG seems to be bright.

I'm hoping to follow up my Ruby talk with another on Rails. That was my initial goal for today, but there was far too much to cover, knowing the audience was relatively new to both technologies.