τεχνοσοφια

Hear ye, hear ye, techie librarians and library techies:

Birkin James Diana, representing the host, Brown University, announces a call for proposals for talks at the code4lib 2009 conference:

The code4lib conference is wonderful in large part because of what you folk share.

Head over to the Call For Proposals page and submit your idea for a prepared talk. Information about the time-frame, scope, and evaluation process — as well as the link to the submission form — can be found at:

http://library.brown.edu/code4libcon09/proposals/

Some important notes:
- Proposals can be submitted through Sunday November 23 2008.
- Just like when you vote, use your code4lib username and password.
- You initially won't be able to edit your proposal(s), but I'll have that implemented in the near future.

More information on prepared talks from the proposal page:

Prepared talks are 20 minutes, and must focus on one or more of the following areas:

* "tools" (some cool new software, software library or integration platform)
* "specs" (how to get the most out of some protocols, or proposals for new ones)
* "challenges" (one or more big problems we should collectively address)

The community will vote on proposals using the criteria of:

* usefulness
* newness
* geekiness
* diversity of topics

We cannot accept every prepared talk proposal, but multiple lightning talk sessions should provide everyone who wishes to present with an opportunity to do so.

Do consider submitting a talk if any of that sounds interesting to you.

… 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.

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.