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.

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.

Maybe I’m late to the party — nods to John Blyberg and Rob Styles — but damn(!), does Microsoft have some exciting visualization projects or what?

John and Rob wrote about Microsoft Surface, a hardware/software combination that allows for tactile manipulation of data. In Microsoft’s own words:

Microsoft Surface represents a fundamental change in the way we interact with digital content.

With Surface, we can actually grab data with our hands, and move information between objects with natural gestures and touch.

Surface features a 30-inch tabletop display whose unique abilities allow for several people to work independently or simultaneously. All with out using a mouse or a keyboard.

Don’t take my word for it; go watch a demonstration video and be amazed.

But wait, open the video in another window, and keep reading before you lose interest in my uninteresting prose.

I noticed among the recently released TED talks a brilliant short presentation by Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas on their Photosynth project. My first impression was just the visual joy of the photo browse / pan / zoom interface. It’s impressive in its own right. But what really tickles me about Photosynth is that it “takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.”

For example, throw it at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/seattlepubliclibrary/ and it will construct a collage-like view of the Seattle Public Library. Zoom in and you’ll see images at that level of zoom. Pan in three dimensions and (assuming there are enough photos to support the various views) you can virtually be in front of SPL. See for yourself:

Imagine browsing the stacks with this thing. Imagine finding a book on the stacks and being able to hook directly into its full-text. Super cool!

Microsoft Surface is tentatively planned for a November release, which will be targeted for “retail and entertainment settings”. It could be available to the public in a few years’ time though it will likely cost a few times more than an average PC. [Gleaned from a Seattle PI article.] Photosynth is also not available yet, but you can track its progress on the Photosynth team blog. (Yes, there’s a feed.)

[Disclosure: I lived in the shadow of Redmond not long ago, though I was not employed by Microsoft. I probably invest in Microsoft indirectly, but I haven't scoured my portfolio distributions in a while.]