τεχνοσοφια

… meanwhile, the Code4Lib Journal has published its second issue and boy is it packed with articles; Eric Lease Morgan, Coordinating Editor of the issue, does a bang-up job on the introduction (though the title has effectively Bostonroll‘d me).

Each article in this issue has a little bit of something for all who call themselves a librarian or work in a library. Each identifies some sort of library problem to be addressed, and offers one or more solutions. Many are complete with code snippets. After all, this is Code4Lib.

For example, people in public service may be interested in Edward M. Corrado and Kathryn A. Frederick’s review of database-driven subject guide applications. Kenneth Furuta and Michele Potter describe a simple help system that brings librarians running to the reference desk. Margaret Mellinger and Kim Griggs explain how library resources can be organized into course pages without the need of HTML knowledge and yet sport Web 2.0 features. Nancy Fried Foster, Nora Dimmock, and Alison Bersani shed light on participatory design.

For those of us who enjoy cataloging and metadata issues, Jonathan Gorman outlines how he modified VUFind to exploit Wikipedia and cataloging authority records to enhance information about authors in a library catalog. Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic, Jay Paige, and Marc Crozier illustrate a different use of Library of Congress Subject Headings by integrating place names with Google Maps. Carol Jean Godby, Devon Smith and Eric Childress describe a technique for crosswalking just about any metadata format into just about any other metadata format.

For the systems librarian in you, Dan Scott and Kevin Beswick share how they used Linux live CDs customized as kiosk browsers to provide laptops as ‘quick lookup’ stations at their library. Andrew Darby takes advantage of the Google Calendar API to easily manage the display of library hours. Jody DeRidder exploits Google sitemap technology and static HTML pages to make content in the “deep Web” more accessible. We hope you find these articles useful, stimulating, and relevant to your daily working lives.

I am ashamed to admit that I have not yet finished the first issue, so I now have pages upon pages to read. Ordinarily when I am behind on my reading I wind up letting bits fall by the wayside but the material largely looks too good to ignore.

Congratulations to Editorial Committees past and present and to the community on the whole!

Dorothea left a comment on a post announcing the publication of a little conference review some colleagues and I splurted out. In the announcement I lamented a bit about impact and she wisely suggested I consider depositing the review in a subject repository such as E-LIS.

We looked into our agreement with the publisher and it was actually quite permissive. (Way to go, Emerald.) And here’s the review in all its open access glory.

Thanks, Dorothea!

Antonio reports that our review of the 2007 Code4Lib conference has been published in volume 27, issue 6 of Library Hi Tech News.

Though these articles have very low impact, the more press code4lib gets, the better.

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.