Entries Tagged 'Conferences' ↓

I recently returned from a trip to Asheville, North Carolina for this year's Code4lib conference. Despite the unavoidable hiccups that some attendees experienced as they tried to head home from the conference, I believe that this year's conference was the most successful one that I happened to attend. If I'm right, I think this year had a record number of attendees, a record number of new attendees, and much tighter organization to make the new folks feel welcome.

The social activities were certainly more planned and organized than last year, which was a welcome change. While I certainly didn't mind hollering out to the crowd that I would be going to see some bands or to a particular restaurant like I had in previous years, it was nice to see other folks take the lead. The newcomer dinners seemed to go pretty well; the brews cruise and barbecue excursions went smoothly; and even the game(s) of Werewolf seemed to take a life of their own.

What of the program? Well, again, I was extremely happy with the way it turned out, personally. I spent the morning of the Monday preconference in the Solr blackbelt session led by Erik Hatcher from Lucid Imagination and Naomi Dushay from Stanford. During that afternoon, I helped out Dan Chudnov by bumbling through a demo of pymarc. The keynotes of both Cathy Marshall and Paul Jones were both delightfully thought provoking and whimsical.

In all, the sessions were pretty fantastic, but the following stuck out for me:

• Ross Singer - The Linked Library Data Cloud: Stop Thinking and Start Doing. Ross consistently has practical approaches to Linked Data, and this talk was no exception.
• Ryan Scherle and Jose Aguera - HIVE: A New Tool for Working With Vocabularies. While HIVE's implementation thus far seems pretty domain specific, it's clearly pretty extensible to any vocabulary with a seemingly minor amount of tweaking.
• Bess Sadler - Vampires vs. Werewolves: Ending the War Between Developers and Sysadmins with Puppet. Bess proves that dealing with sysadmins is more an issue of trust than anything else, and makes us all chuckle during the process.
• Chris Beer - Media, Blacklight, and Viewers Like You. Chris and WGBH Interactive have been doing some pretty consistently amazing work with Fedora, and now they've invested in working on Blacklight to help provide access to their massive collections of digital video.
• Ian Walls - Becoming Truly Innovative: Migrating from Millennium to Koha. While I no longer work for an III institution, Ian's struck a chord with those of us who have had to cope with the vagaries of Millennium. His talk was pretty damn funny, too.
• Naomi Dushay and Jessie Keck - A Better Advanced Search. Naomi and Jessie help unpack what we (i.e. library-types) think of as advanced search vs. what our users think it is, and then go into some fantastically gory detail about what you can do to and with Solr to make it possible.

Finally, I believe that the Ask Anything session deserves its own treatment. The idea was to ask a roomful of people for help, advice, references, etc. on anything, and I think it largely worked. This session itself proved the vibrancy and strength of Code4lib: largely unstructured, highly social, and focused on mutual aid. I will spare you any comparisons to Rainbow Gatherings, but I'll say this much: I'm proud to be part of Code4lib, and I'd like to welcome you to next year's.

In my previous post, I included a screenshot of a prototype, but glossed over what it actually does. Given an OCLC record number and a ZIP code, it plots the locations of the nearest holdings of that item on a Google Map. Pulled off in Python (as all good mashups should be), along with SIMILE Exhibit, it uses the following modules:

• geopy
• simplejson
• web.py
• and, of course, worldcat.

If you want to try it out, head on over here. The curent of the code will soon be able as part of the examples directory in the distribution for worldcat, which can be found in my Subversion repository.

I've had my hands full lately. Two weeks ago I was at the MCN conference (wherein, among other things, I have continued my dominion as Archduke of Archival Description by taking over the MCN Standards SIG chair position from The Bancroft Library's Mary Elings), and next week I'm off to Philadelphia for the PACSCL Something New for Something Old conference. I hammered out the coherent, written version of my paper I gave at EAD@10. I prepared a proposal for next February's code4lib conference in Providence (ahem, vote for mine, if you're so inclined):

Building on Galen Charlton's investigations into distributed version control systems for metadata management, I offer a prototype system for managing archival finding aids in EAD (Encoded Archival Description). My prototype relies on distributed version control to help archivists maintain transparency in their work and uses post-commit hooks to initiate indexing and publishing processes. In addition, this prototype can be generalized for any XML-based metadata schema.

On top of that, I'm working with a fine group of folks on the RLG Programs project to analyze EAD editing and creation tools, doing hardcore schema mapping at work, and somehow finding enough time to play a little Doukutsu Monogatari to unwind. And you guys wonder why I never blog.

Oh, and last but not least, I got an ISSN. That's right, folks, I've hit the big time.

OK, OK. A post about code4libcon 2008 is long overdue. The minor details: the weather was nice, food was decent, good beer was abundant, and live music was enjoyable. Onto the real meat...

This time around, I felt like I got a whole lot more out of attending; I'm not sure if this is due to the changing nature of my job, increased attention, or some other factor, like neckferrets and dongles. The great majority of the talks, be they keynotes, traditional presentations, or even just lightning talks, were excellent. Furthermore, this time around I felt a whole lot more connected to the miasma - so much so, in fact, that I ended up giving two lightning talks (or three, depending on if you consider the one I gave with Gabriel Farrell on kobold_chiefain Fac-Back-OPAC). The most impressive thing overall, though, were lolcats that came out to play:

Thanks to the work of Noel Peden and Dan Scott, the videos should be up soon enough. If you want to see the detritus available through Web 2.0, search for the tag code4libcon2008.

ArchivesNext recently discussed the possibility of having some "Archives 2.0"-themed events this summer, and I think it's a great idea. Now, we may not be able to throw something together in time for SAA, but it seems like the idea of at least meeting up informally is percolating. There's a wealth of opportunities available for archives and archivists to improve access to their holdings through social software and the like. My vision, as I said in a comment on the post, would be to end up with an unconference along the lines of a Library Camp (or more generally, a BarCamp), maybe with lightning talks if enough of us have something to show off or talk about. Like Library Camp, I'd like to see a "bridging the gap" session where we learn and share ways about how to talk to IT staff and other stakeholders essential to our ideas taking off. I facilitated a such a session at Library Camp East, and although trying at times, it was really instructive. But really, it's not just about what I want - what do you all want to see at an Archives Camp?

The mid-Atlantic archivists are in a brief recess between now and the final session of the day, and it's been thoroughly interesting to say the least. I missed the caucus meetings this morning, unfortunately, but the plenary session was well worth it because it's got the gears turning about archival access systems even though it wasn't directly about them.

Paul Israel of the Edison Papers Project spoke at length about Edison's legacy and collaboration with others. The talk emphasized that Thomas Edison was much more than a great inventor and owed a great deal of his success to his entrepreneurial nature, which I didn't know much about. While we didn't get to see him give us an interactive presentation of the site, I noticed how exhaustive the digital edition was. While the architecture of the site is a little confusing for me, there's so much content I didn't know where to begin or even what to search for! The series notes are a great way to browse through the collection, though. Even better is that the site is written in PHP.

The "Politicking for Archivists" session, chaired by Alison Oswald of the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History, gave the audience a lot of ideas in terms of keeping good relations with anyone who wants to be or needs to be involved in archives. I particularly liked the remarks made by Jim Gerencser, College Archivist for Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections.

"'More Product, Less Process' in the Real World" focused on application of the principles laid out in Dennis Meissner and Mark Greene's controversial article in American Archivist 68:2. What caught my attention most was the mention of a decision one repository made to not process materials under restriction since they would be unavailable for research anyhow. That seems like a possible area of application of the Meissner-Greene principles for us at AIP.

I'm at the Westin Governor Morris in Morristown, New Jersey for the MARAC Fall Meeting. I just got back from visiting the Morris Museum with a few folks, and now I'm enjoying the (expensive) wireless connection here. This time around I don't know so many folks here, so shoot me an e-mail or comment if you're in attendance. Expect a more detailed post soon; I'm exhausted from being up early to catch Amtrak!

I know this post is well overdue, but the last few weeks have kept me extremely busy. Library Camp East was amazing; fun, thought-provoking, and inspiring. John Blyberg and Alan Kirk Gray (as well as the rest of the Darien Library Staff) did a heck of a job preparing for all of us descending into the auditorium. They even gave me a cool mug that my co-workers envy. I also finally got to meet Dan Chudnov and Casey Bisson, whose blogs I've followed for a while now. Jessamyn West and John posted nearly exhaustive lists of posts by LCE attendees for reference. (For what it's worth, Jessamyn also tips her hat to ArchivesBlogs and apologizes for us not meeting at two conferences so far. I share the blame!)

Fortunately for my readers, I have precious little to add in terms of comments (although I tagged some Library Camp-related links on Unalog). I actually was called into service to lead a session by accident (I happened to be scratching my nose), but I was happy enough to moderate the discussion on how techies and non-techies can learn to talk to each other. The discussion was spirited to say the least, and it seems like some good networking occured as a consequence. The OPAC discussion was pretty interesting as well.

At the end of the day, a number of us -- Michael Golrick, Janie Hermann and Peter Bromberg of Library Garden, and Kim Gabert -- talked over beer and appetizers. Much of the discussion centered around ALA, which made me realize I was pretty clueless in regards to its organization. I left early to catch the Metro North train back to Grand Central, where I met up with Julia as we started to make our way home to Washington.

Once again, thanks to everybody! I'd like to see a Mid-Atlantic Library Camp; I just wish I had more resources to make it a reality.