[CODE4LIB] code4lib theatre outing?
As an unofficial social event for code4libcon this year, I invite any live theatre fans who will be in attendance to join me at Common Ground Theatre the evening of Thursday March 27 to see a play. You can purchase tickets here: http://amadeusdurham.brownpapertickets.com Can't wait to see everyone in Raleigh! Bess Amadeus by Peter Shaffer Usually told as the story of an older man trying to destroy a more gifted younger man, we are presenting Amadeus as a brothers play with actors of the same age playing the two male roles. Jade Arnold will play Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and John Jimerson will play his rival Antonio Salieri. Molly Forlines will play Constanze Weber, the woman caught between them. The play is directed by prolific local director Jaybird O'Berski, Artistic Director of Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern. In a style inspired by Robert Wilson. At Common Ground Theater in Durham. March 27 - April 12.
Re: [CODE4LIB] Stand Up Desks
I love geek desk: http://www.geekdesk.com I have one at home and one at work, and we have since bought two more in my department at work and even more people have asked for them. I highly recommend a motorized adjustable height desk. I sit and stand throughout the day depending on how bad my thoracic outlet syndrome is at the moment. You do get used to standing after awhile (in fact, part of what happens is that it forces you to get stronger), but I notice that I am better at writing prose and reading articles when I'm standing, and better at writing code when I'm seated. YMMV. I see these becoming a recognized best practice. The geek desk is less expensive than our usual office furniture, and even if you don't want to use it as a standing desk, being able to easily adjust the height of your desk by an inch or two can make a huge difference ergonomically. We used to have to call in a service request to building maintenance in order to adjust the height of a desk. This is much better, and it allows for the fact that one's best ergonomic position might change from day to day. My move to a standing desk was a major factor in my recovery from a severe pinched nerve in my neck last year (a.k.a. thoracic outlet syndrome). I combined it with body work designed to debug what it was about my posture that was causing the pain. I went to this place, and it is great, but plenty of other places can help with this too: http://www.balancecenter.com If you find a good place they will also help you look at the ergonomics of your bed, your walk, your car, your bike, your clothing, and anything else that might be reinforcing dysfunctional posture. It is worth the investment to figure out where you pain is coming from and to address it. A standing desk is a good start, and combines well with other strategies too. Good luck! Bess -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Mark Pernotto Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 12:09 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] Stand Up Desks Despite my best efforts of sitting up straight, getting an ergonomic chair, making sure my desk is a proper height (I'm a tall guy, so my desk is 'modified' to reflect this), and I make sure I stand up and at least stretch every 30 minutes (or so), my back still bothers me some days. I saw a Wired article a few months back hailing the benefits of stand up desks (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/mf-standing-desk/), and also found an article in NY Times ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/business/stand-up-desks-gaining-favor-in-the-workplace.html?_r=1; ) and wondered if there were any other developers/list members who used them. In my mind, I'm trading one problem for another, and I'm not sure I want to be standing up all day long. On the other hand, my back is killing me today. Suggestions? Mark -- Nate Hill nathanielh...@gmail.com http://4thfloor.chattlibrary.org/ http://www.natehill.net
[CODE4LIB] c4l13 pre-conferences: please add contact info
If you are signed up for a pre-conference at code4lib 2013 (sign up here: http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2013_preconference_proposals) please add an email address so organizers can get in touch with you. There are lots of reasons why organizers might need to get in touch with everyone signed up for a given session and you will make our lives much easier by providing contact info on that page. Thank you! Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] Do we really want two Blacklight pre-conferences?
The issue is that I would really like to participate in the RailsBridge pre-conference, but I had proposed the morning Blacklight session before Jason proposed the RailsBridge session. I would be willing to miss the RailsBridge session if we had tremendous demand for the morning Blacklight session, but that is not the impression I'm getting. I have marked the morning Blacklight session as cancelled on the wiki and I have added my name to the list of helpers for the RailsBridge session. The afternoon Blacklight session is still happening, and will be targeted for folks who are new to solr and rails. Adam, thank you for offering to gear the hydra session to cover the necessary parts of Blacklight. Shawn, you would be very welcome to join us at the afternoon Blacklight session, or it sounds like you'll be able to get a Blacklight intro in the Hydra session too. Cheers, Bess On Dec 14, 2012, at 6:22 AM, Adam Wead aw...@rockhall.org wrote: Bess, Shawn's point is well-taken. Is the issue that we don't have enough people to run both, or are we just trying to consolidate? To Shawn's point, you don't have to know Blacklight to use Hydra, although it certainly helps when you're trying to customize. Depending on the outcome, I could gear the Hydra session to cover the necessary bits of Blacklight. ...adam On Dec 14, 2012, at 6:54 AM, Shawn M Kiewel wrote: As one of the people signed up for the morning session, I'd like to object. I wanted to attend the morning Blacklight session for more background and deeper understanding, even though I am also going to the afternoon Hydra session. I also would like this, as I'm pretty sure I'm going to use Blacklight for my new technology stack, but I'm not sold on Hydra yet (I don't know enough to make that call, and we use DSpace already, instead of Fedora). But even if we go with the full Hydra stack, I'll still need to have a good Blacklight understanding for proper customization, right? So, personally, I'd still like to see the morning session, though I certainly don't think you should hold it just for me. Shawn On Dec 13, 2012, at 7:31 PM, Bess Sadler bess.sad...@gmail.com wrote: I am looking at the pre-conference sign up and here's what I notice: - not many folks signed up for the morning Blacklight session - lots of folks signed up for the morning RailsBridge session - lots of folks signed up for the afternoon Blacklight session - lots of folks signed up for the afternoon Hydra session I am reaching the conclusion that we do not need the morning Blacklight session. I would like to cancel the morning Blacklight session and help out in the RailsBridge workshop instead, but I'm happy to have two Blacklight sessions if we have the demand for it. Are there any objections to canceling the morning Blacklight session? Bess This communication is a confidential and proprietary business communication. It is intended solely for the use of the designated recipient(s). If this communication is received in error, please contact the sender and delete this communication.
Re: [CODE4LIB] Question abt the code4libwomen idea
I am not aware of any recent egregious issues and I don't think code4lib is a hotbed of misogynist behavior, certainly not compared to more mainstream tech conferences or something notorious like DefCon. Having a policy in place (which was my only request in that original email, and which we now have, yay!) is a good idea regardless of whether any individual incident in the past meets anyone's individual criteria for harassment. It protects conference organizers legally, it gives us an agreed upon way to respond if incidents do arise, and having such a policy is a proven way to make conferences more welcoming to women and gender minorities. I am not comfortable discussing my individual experience in public more than I already have. I have acted as a lightning rod for these kinds of discussions in the past and I am not interested in playing that role again. I am not comfortable discussing specific incidents that have been related to me in confidence, and I am REALLY not interested in rehashing more public incidents, I think that would be a train wreck. As for what has happened that we're trying to address: Sometimes people make thougtless jokes. Sometimes people say alienating things without meaning to. Sometimes people do things they might later wish they hadn't done, because they were drunk, or having a good time, or never knew a certain word carried a certain connotation for some people. These things are not really news-worthy individually. I would prefer instead to put energy into knowing how to respond to problematic behavior in the moment, how to discuss questions of privilege and inclusiveness without creating hostility, and how to make library technology more inclusive in general. Bess On Dec 18, 2012, at 5:16 PM, Michele R Combs mrrot...@syr.edu wrote: Much better to do it that way than on the list, IMHO. Then the list can get back to code :) It's possible that the ratio of idiots at a code4lib function is comparable to the ratio of idiots anywhere else (e.g., an ALA conference or SAA function or, heck, your basic office party). In that case, I submit that no special method of attack or treatment is required -- just the same approach used when one encounter jerks in any other area of one's life. Michele From: Code for Libraries [CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] on behalf of Jonathan Rochkind [rochk...@jhu.edu] Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2012 7:14 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Question abt the code4libwomen idea ...Is this a good idea, or just a disaster trainwreck lying in wait? If it's a good idea, we could easily set up a wiki page where people can easily anonymously describe incidents (again, what I'm going for is NOT calling specific people out, but just giving us an idea of what it is that has happened that we're trying to stop from happening, you know?)...
Re: [CODE4LIB] Thoughts on Digital Library Trends
From where I'm standing one of the most important trends in digital libraries right now is that more and more institutions are realizing: 1. Many digital library software needs exist for which there is no commercial software that can be purchased, or it is prohibitively expensive 2. Software teams in libraries rarely have the resources to develop and maintain digital library software on their own, and this is probably not a good long-term strategy anyway. These realizations, hopefully, lead to the conclusion that, 3. It makes the most sense to sign onto a larger digital library software strategy and pursue community based development. I observe massive growth in the number of institutions adopting Blacklight, Hydra, Islandora, VuFind and similar broad-based coalitions that can resource and staff large scale digital library development efforts. See as evidence this year's code4lib talk proposals. The same trend is evident in talk proposals for DLF and Open Repositories. Choosing community based open source development gives institutions immediate access to a suite of free (free as in beer and free as in speech!) digital library solutions, a community of support, training materials for staff, skill development workshops, and ongoing improvements, bug fixes, upgrade guides, and new features without having to bankroll those themselves. That gives individual institutions the ability to focus on their core areas of expertise, focusing their development efforts on local deployment, data management, and putting effort into the parts of the software ecosystem that make the most strategic sense for their patrons. Increasingly there are also vendors serving this market, so institutions who feel more comfortable purchasing support and/or hosting contracts can have that option as well. Additionally, developers who regularly submit their code to larger projects where it is subject to review by developers at other institutions and (for some projects) rules around required code testing, tend to up their software engineering game and start applying higher standards of quality even to unrelated development efforts. I have noticed that many libraries hire developers without having anyone on staff who has a good handle on how to supervise developers. Being part of a larger project can also be a way to grow this skill set among managers. Good luck with your talk! Best wishes, Bess On Dec 17, 2012, at 11:49 AM, Matthew Sherman matt.r.sher...@gmail.com wrote: Hello all Code4Lib folk, I am putting together a small presentation with the topic about trends and issues in digital libraries for an interview next month. While I am doing quite a bit of searching and reading on my own, I wanted to see if any of you would be willing to provide your thoughts on what you see as emerging trends and issues in digital library, particularly as they deal with our ability to serve our users. I think it would be helpful to have insight from those currently in the trenches. Also this topic could be of interest to others in the listserv. Any thoughts are welcome and appreciated. Matt Sherman
Re: [CODE4LIB] Question abt the code4libwomen idea
There have been some contradictory statements made about #libtechwomen because it was an emerging idea, and like code4lib, there is no formal power structure or authority. There is no requirement that one be female to participate, indeed many of the people involved explicitly reject the notion of a binary gender model. Allies of any gender who wish to discuss how to make library technology spaces more inclusive, particularly for women and gender minorities, are welcome and encouraged to join us. The suggestion has been made that the name libtechwomen might not be welcoming to someone who wants to participate but does not identify as a woman. We have already discussed changing it and welcome suggestions. Best wishes, Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] Question abt the code4libwomen idea
On Dec 7, 2012, at 12:59 PM, Joshua Gomez jngo...@gwu.edu wrote: Others have mentioned they fear that a subgroup will only decrease the diversity within code4lib by pulling women away from it and into the new group. This was my initial concern as well, but when I look at other kinds of women in tech groups I realize that they don't decrease women's participation in mainstream groups. In fact they help boost women's profiles and skill sets, thus increasing their likelihood of participating in mainstream groups. Well said, Joshua. Any separate women in technology groups I've been involved with (e.g., devchix, grrlswithmodems back in the day) have been what you describe here. These groups are supplementary, and create a place to get support if one needs help navigating mainstream (and yes, male-dominated) communities. Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] Mentorship Program
ranti++ I added myself as a potential mentor and mentee. Thank you for setting this up and I look forward to seeing how it evolves. Bess On Dec 6, 2012, at 2:27 PM, Ranti Junus ranti.ju...@gmail.com wrote: Welp, here's the mostly empty wiki page for this project: http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Mentorship_Program Feel free to deconstruct the page as needed. I supopse those who want to be mentored could help by adding what are their goals/projected outcomes from this mentorship and what kind of mentor they are looking for. Or we might not need to be so formal, if people wish so. ;-) ranti. On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 5:14 PM, Jessica Wood wood@gmail.com wrote: I'm also very interested in being mentored in a program along these lines. I very much like the idea of combining training, mentoring and volunteering - having a specific, practical project to work on, plus someone to talk to about it, would be tremendously beneficial to me. And, you know, not to be completely selfish - doing something useful to others would be great too. Side note (also selfish): I hope that at least parts of this idea will be available to people not attending the conference. I'd love to go to a future conference, but I'm not making it to this one. On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Andromeda Yelton andromeda.yel...@gmail.com wrote: In terms of structure, drupalladder.org and Dreamwidth ( http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Dev_Getting_Started ) are good models for how to scaffold the process for new developers, and to help new community members regardless of skill level find places they can contribute and understand the socially accepted workflow. --ay On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Rosalyn Metz rosalynm...@gmail.com wrote: Hey Shaun, I was actually thinking about some of this this morning, so I'm happy to see there is someone else out there thinking about the same things. I like the idea of some type of structure to a program, I wonder if maybe we could combine Karen's idea of training with a mentorship program. I also like your idea of projects being a way to recruit future volunteers, both because it helps us know where to go to find people, but also because it would help newbies figure out what's out there in the Code4Lib world (it took me forever to realize that the website was something i needed a password to in order to vote). If you already started a wiki page point me to it, I'm happy to start fleshing out ideas! Rosalyn On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Shaun Ellis sha...@princeton.edu wrote: Hi Rosalyn, I agree that we should encourage women to step up and mentor other women at Code4Lib. I also see the pairing of women mentors with women mentees as fitting into an overall mentorship program, and I would be interested in collaborating with you and others to help frame it out. I don't think it needs to be very formal, but it would be important to give some structure to it so folks know what they are getting into, how to make sure everyone meets their goals, and measure the effectiveness of the program in terms of meeting code4lib goals (such as increasing diversity, getting more volunteer help, etc.). We can start a wikipage to start to flesh this out, unless folks would like to use a different forum. In addition to the RailsBridge workshop, I was thinking that Code4Lib community projects would be a great way to both learn and recruit future volunteers. I was also trying to find the list of maintenance projects wiki page that someone (Jonathan?) was referring to as being top priorities for Code4Lib. Is this it? http://wiki.code4lib.org/**index.php/AdminToDo http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/AdminToDo Thoughts? -Shaun On 12/5/12 3:57 PM, Rosalyn Metz wrote: So rather than focusing on statistics and math, I'd like to steer the conversation in a different direction. Let's say Ross is right and more women chose to take the survey based on the topic -- maybe that's a way to get women involved in Code4Lib. Karen had the idea of creating a women Code4Lib IRC channel, maybe that can be a place to start. Or maybe we have a few women that are willing to step up and be a Code4Lib mentor to other women -- similar to what we do for the new member event at the conference. I'd even be willing to step up and organize that if people like the idea. Thoughts? On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 4:00 PM, stuart yeates stuart.yea...@vuw.ac.nz ** wrote: On 06/12/12 09:05, Sara Amato wrote: I'd been staying out of this discussion, but the thought occurs to me that someone with access to the list of subscribers might run that against a list of traditional boy/girl names, and be able to make some guesses…. That idea runs into problems both with non-western names (there is more than one kind of diversity) and those people whose experience of gender in
Re: [CODE4LIB] Code4lib Chicago 2013 poster
LOVE the poster idea! +1 to removing the male/female symbols, though, I agree with Jonathan that a subtler message is more effective. Bess On Dec 6, 2012, at 3:39 PM, Jonathan Rochkind rochk...@jhu.edu wrote: I like the picture a lot, but I'd take the male/female symbols out of it, I think they're cheesy and the point is better made more subtly and implicitly just by the image itself, rather than beating people over the head with it with the gender symbols. But I also have no idea why open up the door is apropos. On 12/6/2012 6:24 PM, Doran, Michael D wrote: I have come up with an unofficial Code4lib 2013 conference poster. It was inspired by the recent discussions exploring ways to be more gender inclusive in our community, to open up the door. Although often unacknowledged, women have been coders since the beginning. The photo is from the Computer History Museum website, which states In 1952, mathematician Grace Hopper completed what is considered to be the first compiler, a program that allows a computer user to use English-like words instead of numbers. [1] Props there! The photo was actually taken in 1961 and shows Ms. Hopper in front of UNIVAC magnetic tape drives and holding a COBOL programming manual [2]. [cid:image002.jpg@01CDD3D6.93CD2690] Bonus points for knowing additional reasons why open up the door is apropos. -- Michael [1] http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1952 [2] http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102635875 Also see terms of use: http://www.computerhistory.org/terms/ # Michael Doran, Systems Librarian # University of Texas at Arlington # 817-272-5326 office # 817-688-1926 mobile # do...@uta.edu # http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
[CODE4LIB] code4lib online study group - GIS anyone?
There's an interesting thread going on around code4lib study groups for a given MOOC (or, presumably, other kinds of online training). I am currently attempting to educate myself in the subject of how to design, build, and maintain a spatial data infrastructure for a library[1]. This will serve out our local GIS resources, enabling them to be incorporated into online mapping programs. I know that this is something that many academic libraries are going to have to tackle eventually. Luckily there are some great open source tools out there for tackling this job, but unluckily there is not a lot of training that I have been able to find. I have uncovered one online course that looks pretty good: http://www.geospatialtraining.com/index.php?option=com_catalogview=nodeid=71%3Aopen-source-gis-bootcampItemid=108 I signed up, but I haven't got very far yet. I wonder if having code4lib collaborators would help? If anyone else is undertaking a project like this and would like to form a support / study group, please let me know. Cheers, Bess [1]We are also hiring a GIS developer: http://goo.gl/PURkZ
Re: [CODE4LIB] What is a coder?
On Nov 29, 2012, at 6:13 AM, Christie Peterson cpeter...@jhu.edu wrote: If this were training in the sense of a seminar or a formal class on the exact same topics, I would be eligible for full funding, but since it's a conference, it's funded at a significantly lower level. I'll gladly take suggestions anyone has for arguments about why attendance at these types of events is critical to successfully doing my work in a way that, say, attending ALA isn't -- and why, therefore, they should be supported at a higher funding rate than typical library conferences. Any non-coders successfully made this argument before? Cheers, Christie S. Peterson Christie you are not the only person who can get travel funding for training but not for conferences, and you are not the only person on the fence about whether you belong in code4lib. In my mind you are exactly the kind of person I would like to attract to code4lib, so I very much hope you'll join us. Archives in particular are facing significant technological challenges right now, and as someone who has been known to develop software for born digital archives[1] I have seen how vital it is to have a common language and vocabulary, and a common way of approaching problem solving, in order to create a system that will actually work according to archival principles. One option to consider would be signing up for one of the pre-conferences. Given the background you've described and the challenges you face in your career, I think you could make a very strong argument that having a basic introduction to programming concepts would be helpful for you. Luckily there is a free full-day of training to be had the day before the conference starts! Please consider joining us at the RailsBridge and/or Blacklight workshops or at any of the other workshops that look interesting to you that you think you could pitch as training. Even outside of the code4lib context, I strongly encourage others who face those kinds of travel funding constraints to get creative. Some of the best learning opportunities of my life and the best pivotal moments in my career happened because members of this community decided there was an unmet need and they were going to do something about it. CurateCAMP springs to mind. The many regional code4lib meetings are in this category. And also: one time when a few code4lib folks were trying to get open source discovery projects off the ground we just decided to create an Open Source Library Discovery Summit in Philadelphia, declared ourselves invited speakers, and attended. And it was a very successful meeting and a very good use of university funds! Christie, if there is training or skills development that, if it were offered at code4lib, would do you some good, you are certainly not the only person who could benefit from it. I strongly encourage you to think about what training opportunities are missing in your corner of the library / archives world, and then have some conversations with members of this community about how we could provide that training together. I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Best wishes, Bess [1] http://hypatia-demo.stanford.edu Tell your funders you have to go to code4lib because hydra is the future of born digital archives and this is the conference where the developers hang out and you need to talk to them about strategic directions for their project so that it will address your problems. :D
[CODE4LIB]
Dear Janice (and anyone else in a similar boat), You might also consider joining DevChix (http://www.devchix.com). There are many other women there in similar situations, who are supporting each others' learning. It's an additional option to finding a code4lib mentor. Bess On Nov 29, 2012, at 7:58 AM, Janice Childers jlchild...@gmail.com wrote: Long-time lurker here. Just chiming in to say that I think the idea of mentorship is great. Currently, I'm in a position (content editor for a database aggregator) somewhat outside my education and previous experience, and one that unfortunately, does not offer any opportunities for the kind of coding and back-end database work that I would like to do. In the past, I've worked in archives and libraries, most recently in a digital collections department, so I was able to get my feet wet in some tech-y stuff and developed a curiosity about what else was out there. Because it has zero to do with my current job, and I don't really have the discretionary cash, I won't be able to attend the conference, but the pre-conference lineup really piqued my interest. Hopefully, I'll be able to re-enter the library world soon and be a little more active in this community. At that time, the possibility of having someone to go to for a little guidance would be very appealing. In the meantime, I lurk, gather ideas, and do some self-directed study. :) On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Jason Ronallo jrona...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Bess Sadler bess.sad...@gmail.com wrote: On Nov 28, 2012, at 1:04 PM, Shaun Ellis sha...@princeton.edu wrote: In that respect, I would suggest the preconference hackfests/workshops that involve some kind of pair programming with experienced/inexperienced hackers, which could follow up into a mentor relationship outside of the conference. I do like the idea of mentor/mentee speed-dating to align interests, but in this sense, the workshop/hackfest you sign up for kind of does that for you (assuming all the preconference proposals[1] are actually going to happen). [1] http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2013_preconference_proposals -Shaun My understanding is that all of the pre-conference proposals are going to happen (note to self: ask Erik Hatcher whether the evening solr session could happen at a bar somewhere). The RailsBridge workshop in particular is aimed at folks who are new to Rails and perhaps new to programming in general, and RailsBridge as a thing was started as a way to bring more women into tech. If anyone is interested in helping out at the RailsBridge session, or at the Blacklight-tailored-for-RailsBridge session in the afternoon, please join us! Workshops like this can never have too many people walking the room to help out, and if we had enough experienced folks, this would be a great opportunity for pair programming and meeting potential mentors. Bess I'll just echo what Shaun and Bess have said. This is part of the reason I made the pre-conference proposal. Yes, I think the Ruby and Rails pre-conference using the RailsBridge curriculum is an excellent opportunity to make mentoring connections, grow the community, and encourage diversity. I'd love it if there was a low ratio of helpers to attendees. If you want to help grow the Code4Lib community, please add your name to the wiki as a helper and let me know. All that I'll ask of you to help is that you go through the curriculum in advance and come prepared to help folks. If you're new to programming or Ruby/Rails, please sign up to attend. I'm very excited to get a chance to offer this, especially in light of the recent threads on the list. Jason
[CODE4LIB] tech vs. nursing
The challenges around getting women into male-dominated professions is a little different from the challenges of getting men into women-dominated professions. For one thing, professions that are female-dominated are notoriously low-paying and low-status (think K-12 teachers, nursing, social workers, etc). These professions do have major recruiting problems, largely because they are low-paying, often considered to be undesirable, and they have high levels of stress burnout. When men choose to enter these fields, they often are promoted more quickly and paid more than women. There are many professions where this is true. Women outnumber men as K-12 teachers, but men outnumber women as K-12 principals and school superintendents. Women make up the majority of bank tellers, but men make up the majority of bank managers. Women make up the majority of librarians, but men make up the majority of the higher-paying technology jobs in libraries. Sensing a pattern yet? THAT is what we a! re trying to disrupt. Don't get me wrong, getting more men into nursing is a good thing too! The fact that men are less likely to put up with low wages, bad working conditions, or disrespectful colleagues can work in everyone's favor, and the field of nursing in particular has faced such problems with recruiting that they are trying to undergo a major cultural shift. Male nurses have been a part of that. Obviously I am not a nurse, but I do have a close relative who authored a study on this subject for a nursing school, so I have heard a bit about it. I highly recommend the book Women Don't Ask (http://www.womendontask.com), which is a great book for anyone who wants to know more about effective negotiating. (Read it before your next salary negotiation!) The book discusses why men tend to ask for better treatment, better salaries, more opportunities, etc, while women more often accept whatever they are given. This is learned behavior that we can learn to change, though. I think a place like code4lib, where there is so much opportunity to speak up or spark initiatives without any hierarchy or bureaucracy getting in the way, can be a fertile ground for women who want to develop their negotiation and leadership skills, as well as their technical capacity. My entire career has been shaped around stuff I learned in code4lib, and only some of it was about code. Bess On Nov 27, 2012, at 7:56 AM, Huwig,Steve huw...@oclc.org wrote: I'm just the peanut gallery (having never attended Code4Lib) but it seems to me that a useful analogue to programming/tech conferences -- which Code4Lib surely is -- would be conferences aimed at professional nurses. Do those conference organizers take measures to increase the number of male attendees? If so, what do they do? Just throwing ideas out there, Steve Huwig
Re: [CODE4LIB] Proposed Changes to Future Conference Program Choosing
Personally, I like the idea of being able to propose as many talks as you want but only give one of them. Many of us have several projects we're working on at any given time. Some of these might be of interest to the community and some not. This way I can let people know what I'm working on and allow the audience to tell me what they actually want to hear about. I hope it's okay to admit this, but it's also been my personal hedging strategy for making sure there are at least a few women on stage. Two of our tiny number of women speakers for 2013 will appear thanks to that policy. Bess On Nov 28, 2012, at 5:15 AM, Kevin S. Clarke kscla...@gmail.com wrote: Curious about the no limit on number of proposals per person. I know we've discussed this before, but I don't remember the reasoning for this decision. Is it just that we limit in the actual presentation (1 presentation max per person) so various proposals are okay? Why not just limit up front? Thanks, Kevin On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 9:30 PM, Cynthia Ng cynthia.s...@gmail.com wrote: I'm really glad to see this discussion continuing. It seems like there's a good amount of support for at least giving a certain amount of sessions over for the program committee to decide. At 15%, we'd be looking at 3-4 slots reserved for the program committee (whoever that might be next year) to do with as they wish. If there's no opposition, I'd still like to propose giving the committee the flexibility to use those slots to diversify the program, one major consideration being first time presenters, but not being an absolute requirement. Limits As of right now, we are still sticking to these limits, and I'd be in favour of keeping it * 1 presentation max per person (not including pre-conf) * 2 presenters max per presentation * No limit on number of proposals per person Agreed: presenter anonymity--
[CODE4LIB]
On Nov 28, 2012, at 1:04 PM, Shaun Ellis sha...@princeton.edu wrote: In that respect, I would suggest the preconference hackfests/workshops that involve some kind of pair programming with experienced/inexperienced hackers, which could follow up into a mentor relationship outside of the conference. I do like the idea of mentor/mentee speed-dating to align interests, but in this sense, the workshop/hackfest you sign up for kind of does that for you (assuming all the preconference proposals[1] are actually going to happen). [1] http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/2013_preconference_proposals -Shaun My understanding is that all of the pre-conference proposals are going to happen (note to self: ask Erik Hatcher whether the evening solr session could happen at a bar somewhere). The RailsBridge workshop in particular is aimed at folks who are new to Rails and perhaps new to programming in general, and RailsBridge as a thing was started as a way to bring more women into tech. If anyone is interested in helping out at the RailsBridge session, or at the Blacklight-tailored-for-RailsBridge session in the afternoon, please join us! Workshops like this can never have too many people walking the room to help out, and if we had enough experienced folks, this would be a great opportunity for pair programming and meeting potential mentors. Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] Beyond mentoring
kcoyle++ Well said. Bess On Nov 28, 2012, at 2:28 PM, Karen Coyle li...@kcoyle.net wrote: So I see it as my duty, and hope some will join me, to make sure that women's efforts are recognized, publicized, and, if necessary, made in-your-face until women in tech achieve the visibility they deserve.
Re: [CODE4LIB] What is a coder?
I also think that DevOps topics (e.g., puppet, chef, virtual machines) have always been of interest to this community, and that the line between sysadmin and systems librarian and software engineer and ARCHITECT can be a little arbitrary. Many of us work in jobs only loosely tied to our official job description, let alone the thing we studied. I recognize my fellow code4libber in every person who is trying to hold the information systems of a library together in some way. ESPECIALLY the ones who don't get recognized because that should only be x% of your job[1]. I don't think we can really afford to be snobs about anything around here. If you are interested in the depth and longevity of the problems that need to be addressed[2] by library software, and have concluded that our community's approach to that problem solving effort appeals to you and you would like to contribute to it in some way, you are welcome here. Many code4libbers do not write code (yet). They deploy it, or they maintain it, or they customize it, or they tweak it. It's okay, that counts too. Bess [1] Although I sure did talk on #code4lib irc more when I had a Friday afternoon reference shift! [2] How to Hack code4lib: http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/How_to_hack_code4lib On Nov 28, 2012, at 7:46 PM, Jonathan Rochkind rochk...@jhu.edu wrote: A coder is someone who writes code, naturally. :) code is something intended to be interpreted or executed by a computer or a computer program. I think everyone agrees that anyone is welcome at code4lib. However, many want to keep code4lib conference presentations and community focused on technical matters and matters of interest to coders. These things are not neccesarily contradictorily. From: Code for Libraries [CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] on behalf of Mark A. Matienzo [mark.matie...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 10:02 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] What is a coder? Some discussion (both on-list and otherwise) has referred to coders, and some discussion as such has raised the question whether non-coders are welcome at code4lib. What's a coder? I'm not trying to be difficult - I want to make code4lib as inclusive as possible. Mark A. Matienzo m...@matienzo.org Digital Archivist, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library Technical Architect, ArchivesSpace
[CODE4LIB] anti-harassment policy for code4lib!
YET AGAIN I am totally blown away by how amazing this community is. I am utterly sincere when I say that you people give me hope for the world. Because let me tell you, there are communities where that suggestion would not have been welcomed enthusiastically. And instead, in true code4lib style, we had a democratic decision making process, some proposed solutions which are emerging over time with input from many, swarmed tactical response (with version control! and resources for further study! see: github.com/code4lib), and witty commentary and signal boosting on irc and twitter. We have created a community of practice here that really works, in so many ways, and best yet has shown a willingness to get even better. I am so proud, and so happy, and so thankful to be a member of this community. Thank you, code4lib. Bess Begin forwarded message: From: lists...@listserv.nd.edu Date: November 26, 2012 2:16:24 PM PST To: Bess Sadler bess.sad...@gmail.com Subject: Your message dated Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:16:25 -0800 with subject Your message dated Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:16:25 -0800 with subject anti-harassment policy for code4lib? has been successfully distributed to the CODE4LIB list (2197 recipients).
[CODE4LIB] I 3 code4lib
sorry if I sent this twice, I think it got lost the first time. YET AGAIN I am totally blown away by how amazing this community is. I am utterly sincere when I say that you people give me hope for the world. Because let me tell you, there are communities where that suggestion would not have been welcomed enthusiastically. And instead, in true code4lib style, we had a democratic decision making process, some proposed solutions which are emerging over time with input from many, swarmed tactical response (with version control! and resources for further study! see: github.com/code4lib), and witty commentary and signal boosting on irc and twitter. We have created a community of practice here that really works, in so many ways, and best yet has shown a willingness to get even better. I am so proud, and so happy, and so thankful to be a member of this community. Thank you, code4lib. Bess Begin forwarded message: From: lists...@listserv.nd.edu Date: November 26, 2012 2:16:24 PM PST To: Bess Sadler bess.sad...@gmail.com Subject: Your message dated Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:16:25 -0800 with subject Your message dated Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:16:25 -0800 with subject anti-harassment policy for code4lib? has been successfully distributed to the CODE4LIB list (2197 recipients).
[CODE4LIB]
Anecdotal only, but there are a LOT more women (both in numbers and proportionally) in code4lib than there were in, say, 2004. We weren't counting back then, alas. Our community is clearly doing a lot to move in the direction of inclusiveness. A lot of that happens in one-on-one interactions, which is part of what can make conferences so amazing. Bess On Nov 27, 2012, at 9:38 AM, Corey A Harper corey.har...@nyu.edu wrote: I did back-of-envelope math last year, based on the attendees list, and my calculations showed that 54 out of 244 attendees were female, so about 22%. This # is surely off as there were about 25 names that I was unable to put a gender with. I counted these as male to get a conservative estimate. I believe this to be an increase from previous years, or perhaps comparable to 2011. I'd guess all 3 percentages (attendees, proposals, presenters) have been steadily increasing at pace since 2006. We can probably estimate that the 2012 conf was 22% women, 2013 proposers were 16% women, and presenters will be 12% women. It would be interesting to do a longitudinal study of all 3 numbers and some nifty data vis alongside results of the survey being discussed. In addition to increasingly all 3 numbers, our goal should also be reducing the (albeit slight) discrepancy across the ratios. -Corey On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 9:31 AM, Bohyun Kim k...@fiu.edu wrote: By any chance, do we have the numbers of the previous code4lib conference attendees by the female/male ratio? ~Bohyun By any chance, do we have the numbers of the previous code4lib conference attendees by the female/male ratio? From: Code for Libraries [CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] on behalf of Ross Singer [rossfsin...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 10:20 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] On Nov 27, 2012, at 10:03 AM, Chad Nelson chadbnel...@gmail.com wrote: Rosalyn, If we are only 17% women, when we are subset of the broader Library community, which is majority women, then we are doing something wrong. And that deeper question, what do we need to do to encourage more women to participate in the community, to make the community as a whole appealing and safe, is the question I am really asking. I'm not entirely sure I agree with this. The issue is less about where the number is now than where it's going (and how quickly). Is our (completely hypothetical) 17% up from 2006 (or whenever), when Code4lib started? If so, then I'm less inclined to panic about the statistics and just continue working towards making the community amenable to more groups. If it has plateaued or regressed, then, yes, we need to be extremely concerned. -Ross. Chad On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 9:57 AM, Rosalyn Metz rosalynm...@gmail.com wrote: I think first we would need to do a survey of how many women are in the community. if it turns out that this community is only 17% women then we're on target. who knows, maybe we're actually 10% women and we're way above target. in which case the real question might be how do we get more women in tech. On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 9:11 AM, Chad Nelson chadbnel...@gmail.com wrote: Ooops. Hit the wrong key. So, about our presenters... Is it a problem that only 4 of our 33 presenters are women? Or that only 16 of 95 proposers were women? Is there something this community needs to do to encourage more women to feel like they can and should speak / propose sessions? -- Corey A Harper Metadata Services Librarian New York University Libraries 20 Cooper Square, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10003-7112 212.998.2479 corey.har...@nyu.edu
[CODE4LIB]
I am not volunteering to write the voting mechanism for this, but what if we had two rounds of voting? 1. First round, anonymous (people who follow these things avidly would of course have read everyone's names on the wiki, but I think for most people not having the names listed means you have removed the names from consideration). We use the current system of assigning points. Once you've cast that ballot, then you get ballot 2: 2. The same ballot with the names present. You now have the opportunity to change your vote, if you want to. It might be because you didn't realize that person who secretly bores you was one of the speakers. It might be because what at first looked like just another talk about marc software sounds more compelling if its from someone who's never spoken before. I wonder if we might also set aside a separate competition for first time speakers? Say, 15% of the talks? Assuming that generally speaking, offering ways for early-career folks or those new to public speaking to participate is a good thing and would benefit diversity as a bonus. Bess On Nov 27, 2012, at 3:20 PM, Kelley McGrath kell...@uoregon.edu wrote: I'll second the idea of approaching people individually and explicitly asking them to participate. It worked on me. I never would have written my first article for the Code4Lib Journal or become a member of the editorial committee if someone hadn't encouraged me individually (Thanks Jonathan!). It would also be good to find a way to somehow target the pool of lurkers who maybe aren't already connected to someone and get them more involved. As far as anonymous proposals go, we recently had a very good workshop on implicit bias here. Someone brought up that found significant changes in the gender proportions in symphony orchestras after candidates started auditioning behind screens. There are also lots of studies about the different responses to the same resume/application depending on whether a stereotypically male/female or white/black name was used. Probably it's impossible to make proposals completely anonymous, but it would be an interesting experiment to leave off the names. Kelley PS Interestingly, I wouldn't instinctively self-identify as a member of the Code4Lib community, although my first thought is that that has more to do with not being a coder than with being a woman. ** Kelley McGrath Metadata Management Librarian University of Oregon Libraries 1299 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403 541-346-8232 kell...@uoregon.edu
[CODE4LIB]
+1 to this idea. I have benefited tremendously over the years from kind people taking me under their wings. Many of us try to do this one-on-one, but some kind of introduction service would be a huge benefit for the community, I would think. Mentorship is a great example of a robust solution - a solution that addresses more than one problem at once. I suspect that this would not only improve our diversity as a community, it might also solve some tech leadership / succession planning problems and maybe expose some training needs. Bess On Nov 27, 2012, at 4:20 PM, Nathan Tallman ntall...@gmail.com wrote: This is a slightly different topic, but relates to Kelley's post: Does code4lib have a mentor program where more inexperienced geeks can pair up with someone to guide their development? I don't have anyone like that in my network, but would really like to. I don't mean to discount the existing resources on code4lib or this list, which both have been very useful. I'm sure I could just start by attending some of the conferences, but for more inexperienced people they can be a bit intimidating, albeit inspiring. It would also be a way to directly engage minorities. Just a thought. Nathan On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 6:20 PM, Kelley McGrath kell...@uoregon.edu wrote: I'll second the idea of approaching people individually and explicitly asking them to participate. It worked on me. I never would have written my first article for the Code4Lib Journal or become a member of the editorial committee if someone hadn't encouraged me individually (Thanks Jonathan!). It would also be good to find a way to somehow target the pool of lurkers who maybe aren't already connected to someone and get them more involved. As far as anonymous proposals go, we recently had a very good workshop on implicit bias here. Someone brought up that found significant changes in the gender proportions in symphony orchestras after candidates started auditioning behind screens. There are also lots of studies about the different responses to the same resume/application depending on whether a stereotypically male/female or white/black name was used. Probably it's impossible to make proposals completely anonymous, but it would be an interesting experiment to leave off the names. Kelley PS Interestingly, I wouldn't instinctively self-identify as a member of the Code4Lib community, although my first thought is that that has more to do with not being a coder than with being a woman. ** Kelley McGrath Metadata Management Librarian University of Oregon Libraries 1299 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403 541-346-8232 kell...@uoregon.edu
[CODE4LIB] anti-harassment policy for code4lib?
Dear Fellow Code4libbers, I hope I am not about to get flamed. Please take as context that I have been a member of this community for almost a decade. I have contributed software, support, and volunteer labor to this community's events. I have also attended the majority of code4lib conferences, which have been amazing and life-changing, and have helped me do my job a lot better. But, and I've never really known how to talk about this, those conferences have also been problematic for me a couple of times. Nothing like what happened to Noirin Shirley at ApacheCon (see http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Noirin_Shirley_ApacheCon_incident if you're unfamiliar with the incident I mean) but enough to concern me that even in a wonderful community where we mostly share the same values, not everyone has the same definitions of acceptable behavior. I am watching the toxic fallout from the BritRuby conference cancellation with a heavy heart (go search for britruby conference cancelled if you want to catch up and/or get depressed). It has me wondering what more we could be doing to promote diversity and inclusiveness within code4lib. We have already had a couple of harassment incidents over the years, which I won't rehash here, which have driven away members of our community. We have also had other incidents that don't get talked about because sometimes one can feel that membership in a community is more important than one's personal boundaries or even safety. We should not be a community where people have to make that choice. I would like for us to consider adopting an anti-harassment policy for code4lib conferences. This is emerging as a best practice in the larger open source software community, and we would be joining the ranks of many other conferences: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassment/Adoption. The Ada Initiative has a great discussion of why adopting an Anti-Harrassment policy is a good choice for a conference to make, as well as some example policy statements, here: http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/conference-policies/ Here is a summary: Why have an official anti-harassment policy for your conference? First, it is necessary (unfortunately). Harassment at conferences is incredibly common - for example, see this timeline (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/index.php?title=Timeline_of_incidents) of sexist incidents in geek communities. Second, it sets expectations for behavior at the conference. Simply having an anti-harassment policy can prevent harassment all by itself. Third, it encourages people to attend who have had bad experiences at other conferences. Finally, it gives conference staff instructions on how to handle harassment quickly, with the minimum amount of disruption or bad press for your conference. If the conference already has something like this in place, and I'm just uninformed, please educate me and let's do a better job publicizing it. Thanks for considering this suggestion. If the answer is the usual code4lib answer (some variation on Great idea! How are you going to make that happen?) then I hereby nominate myself as a member of the Anti-Harrassment Policy Adoption committee for the code4lib conference. Would anyone else like to join me? Bess Sadler b...@stanford.edu Manager, Application Development Digital Library Systems Services Stanford University Library
[CODE4LIB] term co-occurrence analysis?
For a full-text search system we're prototyping, we are being asked to provide term co-occurrence analysis. I'm not very familiar with this concept, so maybe someone on the list can describe it better, but I believe that what is wanted is to be able to query a text corpus for a given word, and to receive in return a list of words that co-occur with the search term, along with some indication of how often those words co-occur. Something like this IBM Many Eyes demo: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/clint-eastwood-applause-lines-at-r (but we're not necessarily looking for a visualization, just a way to do the query). Some google searching gives me lots of scholarly articles from computational linguistics and humanities computing, but nothing like here's a recipe for how to do this in solr which is what I would really love. Has anyone done this? How did you approach it? Are there tools you can recommend? Articles or books I should read? Many thanks in advance, Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] term co-occurrence analysis?
Eric Lease Morgan, you are awesome. Thank you so much for your enlightening explanation, with source code, even! code4lib is the BEST! Bess On Oct 1, 2012, at 7:39 PM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote: On Oct 1, 2012, at 7:55 PM, Bess Sadler wrote: For a full-text search system we're prototyping, we are being asked to provide term co-occurrence analysis. I'm not very familiar with this concept, so maybe someone on the list can describe it better, but I believe that what is wanted is to be able to query a text corpus for a given word, and to receive in return a list of words that co-occur with the search term, along with some indication of how often those words co-occur. Something like this IBM Many Eyes demo: http://ibm.co/PT5N59 (but we're not necessarily looking for a visualization, just a way to do the query). Interesting, but alas, I do not have a Solr recipe. Yes, co-occurance -- along with ngram -- are terms used to denote and infer the distance between different tokens (usually words) in a text. Successful phrase searching assumes some sort of underlying co-occurance algorithm because the indexing process assigns positions to its indexed tokens (words). An algorithm creating a list co-occurances is an almost trivial: 1. read text 2. parse text into individual tokens (words) 3. read a token and the next token 4. update a list (hash or associative array) with the pair of tokens 5. update a list of the number of times this particular pair of tokens exist 6. go to step #3 for each token 7. done If one wants to read more than bigrams (two-word phrases), then change Step #3 to include the next token and the token after that one -- trigrams. Given a particular token, listing the co-occurances of that token and other words is simply a matter of searching the list for the token and returning it and its co-occurance. How to do this in Solr? After re-reading the documentation I believe the ord function may be of some use, but I'm not sure: ord(myfield) returns the ordinal of the indexed field value within the indexed list of terms for that field in lucene index order (lexicographically ordered by unicode value), starting at 1. In other words, for a given field, all values are ordered lexicographically; this function then returns the offset of a particular value in that ordering. The field must have a maximum of one value per document (not multiValued). 0 is returned for documents without a value in the field. * Example: If there were only three values for a particular field: apple,banana,pear, then ord(apple)=1, ord(banana)=2, ord(pear)=3 * Example Syntax: ord(myIndexedField) * Example SolrQuerySyntax: _val_:ord(myIndexedField) http://bit.ly/SiL8eM I have a hammer (Perl) and everything to me looks like a nail. Consequently I would use a module I wrote to do this sort of thing -- http://bit.ly/bgmhXM -- specifically the ngram method. -- HTH, ELM
Re: [CODE4LIB] Seeking examples of outstanding discovery layers
Hi, Tania. I think there are some amazing examples among these Blacklight interfaces: https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/wiki/Examples There are a bunch there, but I'll let the people who maintain them tout their own. Of course I'm particularly partial to SearchWorks, our instance here at Stanford: http://searchworks.stanford.edu You don't mention institutional repository interfaces, but I believe they successfully and elegantly integrate discovery of various resources, so maybe these examples of hydra will be of interest too: http://projecthydra.org/apps-demos-2-2-2/ Cheers, Bess On Sep 19, 2012, at 12:00 PM, Tania Fersenheim wrote: Got a favorite discovery interface? Send me the URL I am doing some quick dirty investigation into libraries that have successfully and elegantly integrated discovery of various resources, e.g.: - library catalog - federated indexing service such as Serials Solutions or Primo Central, or a federated search system like Metalib - ejournals - ebooks - libguides - library web site - worldcat local - that kind o' stuff I am looking for sites that are both nice to look at and seem easy to use. I will assume that if you're touting your own site it is technologically sophisticated. :-D Got any faves? Tania -- Tania Fersenheim Manager of Library Systems Brandeis University Library and Technology Services 415 South Street, (MS 017/P.O. Box 549110) Waltham, MA 02454-9110 Phone: 781.736.4698 Fax: 781.736.4577 email: tan...@brandeis.edu
Re: [CODE4LIB] whimsical homepage idea
We do have microclimates within the library, so while it may be hot on 3N, chances are good it's freezing on 4S. Given that actually fixing this is beyond the library's control, what if we put wireless temperature sensors throughout the building and displayed their readings on the library homepage? Very cool idea. Check out air quality egg: http://airqualityegg.wikispaces.com/ I ordered one already, from their kickstarter fundraiser (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edborden/air-quality-egg) just for personal exploration. I'd be happy to report on my experience, if anyone's interested. It looks like a vibrant development community, and they have a series of workshops planned in cities around the world. Cheers, Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] Project Gutenberg MARC
Nicely done, Bob! I hope you'll post the solrmarc import specs somewhere. Sounds like a writeup of your process would make a really interesting blog post I bet you're not the only person who's going to want to do that once you've got it working. Did you make any attempt at de-duping? Or do you know that UVa doesn't already have a catalog entry for any of the books? Or is it a different edition so it doesn't matter? Bess On Mar 16, 2012, at 2:56 PM, Robert Haschart wrote: That's pretty cool. I just downloaded those records, tweaked my solrmarc import specification, and added the 466 records to our blacklight solr index. Currently they are only in our dev index, but I plan to get the OK to add them to our production index sometime next week. -Bob Haschart On 3/14/2012 4:43 PM, Robin Dean wrote: Hi Matt, The Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC) has a free download of MARC records for the top 500 most popular ebooks from Project Gutenberg: http://www.clicweb.org/import-marc-records The records have been cleaned up/enhanced by catalogers, including the addition of an 856$z for all the ebook records: http://www.clicweb.org/images/stories/ediscover/history_of_record_enhancement_.pdf Hope this helps! Your friendly fan of Colorado consortia, Robin Dean Director, Alliance Digital Repository Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Matt Amory Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 1:42 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] NON-MARC ILS? Thanks for all the responses. Perhaps I woke up thos morning on the wrong side of MARC. What I'm really after is a way to display links to project Gutenberg titles in III Encore and not having MARC records is one technical hurdle, as is not having consistent display of URLs from field 856. Thanks in advance for your thoughts! Matt Sent from my iPhone
Re: [CODE4LIB] NON-MARC ILS?
Hi, Matt. Welcome to code4lib. Good question! Here's a quick summary of my understanding of what I think you're asking: Q1. Is there an ILS that is not based on MaRC records? A1. No, not to my knowledge. Yes, marc cataloging can seem tedious and arcane, but we have lots of tools for working with it at this point. All commercial ILS vendors that I am aware of use it, and the open source ILS products I know of also use MaRC. Q2. Is that what this Endeca based thing is about? A2. Kind of, a little. For most libraries, physical (and to some extent digital) inventory of collections is maintained by their ILS. Usually this is a commercial vendor solution, maybe even one with a six figure contract attached to it, but open source ILS solutions are increasingly viable and widespread. Migrating away from an ILS is an enormous undertaking, one that overhauls every workflow process in the library. Many libraries are in the position of not wanting to migrate their ILS, but disliking the public-facing interface provided by the ILS vendor. For years these interfaces were difficult to change and many of us felt that it was leading to stagnation in the library innovation space, because we were competing for attention with Internet based services that could respond to user desires quickly. The standard solution has been, not to switch away from MaRC or the ILS, but to index those records into a separate discovery interface, one which the library has control ove! r. That's what Endeca is, but it is very expensive. People who have implemented it are contractually prevented from saying exactly how expensive but I've never signed an NDA and I've heard numbers in the millions. There are several free open source library discovery solutions (Blacklight, VuFind, Kobald Chieftan (sp?) that you could play around with if you wanted. But these are for solving discovery problems, not for simplifying your internal metadata standards. I hope this helps. Welcome to the community and good luck to you. Bess On Mar 14, 2012, at 5:59 AM, Matt Amory wrote: Is there a full-featured ILS that is not based on MARC records? I know we love complexity, but it seems to me that my public library and its library network and maybe even every public library could probably do without 95% of MARC Fields and encoding, streamline workflows and save $ if there were a simpler standard. Is this what an Endeca-based system is about, or do those rare birds also use MARC in the background? Forgive me if the question has been hashed and rehashed over the years... -- Matt Amory (917) 771-4157 matt.am...@gmail.com http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matt-amory/8/515/239
Re: [CODE4LIB] NON-MARC ILS?
Matt, you also may want to explore the exciting world of batch Marc record editing. Pick a language with a well maintained Marc library and you can fix those records with data you harvest online. Bess On Mar 14, 2012, at 12:53 PM, Jon Gorman jonathan.gor...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Matt Amory matt.am...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for all the responses. Perhaps I woke up thos morning on the wrong side of MARC. What I'm really after is a way to display links to project Gutenberg titles in III Encore and not having MARC records is one technical hurdle, as is not having consistent display of URLs from field 856. Thanks in advance for your thoughts! I remember reading about a project to generate MARC records for Project Gutenberg. I can't find the details, but on the page http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Offline_Catalogs they have two types of MARC dumps. Haven't tried either of them yet though. Jon Gorman
[CODE4LIB] QA Engineer position at Stanford University Library
experience participating in relevant library open source efforts. In-depth knowledge of library policies and practice, metadata standards and the scholarly communication framework Prior, successful experience working as a professional in an academic and/or library environment. Qualifications Education: Four-year college degree or equivalent required Related Experience: 5-7 years required for 4P3 position; 7-10 years or more required for 4P4 position. Apply Now Bess Sadler b...@stanford.edu Manager for Application Development, DLSS
[CODE4LIB] two open positions at Stanford
We are looking for two software developers to work on a four year grant funded digital library project. The department, Digital Library Systems and Services (DLSS) is part of the Stanford Library, and it's a great place to work. Salaries are more in line with Silicon Valley than with academia, you'd be part of a team of whip smart library programmers, and you really cannot beat the weather out here. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or want to discuss the positions. To see more details on any of the positions, search for the Job ID at http://jobs.stanford.edu/find_a_job.html. Bess Sadler Manager for Application Development, Digital Library Systems and Services p.s. Resistance is futile. ;) Feel free to browse other great jobs at http://jobs.stanford.edu/find_a_job.html Digital Library Software Engineer, Stanford University Libraries Job ID 43757 Job Location University Libraries Job Category Library Salary 4P3 Date Posted Jul 29, 2011 Working Title: Revs Infrastructure Developer Job Classification: System Software Developer This position is double posted at the 4P3 and 4P4 levels. Job Objective: Stanford University Libraries is seeking a talented software engineer to support the digitization, collection delivery and collaboration components of the Revs Program at Stanford. This is a four-year, grant-funded position. This position is part of the Revs Program at Stanford (http://revs.stanford.edu). This program is dedicated to developing an understanding of the impact of the automobile on society, culture and technology. The Revs Program at Stanford was founded to inspire a new trans-disciplinary field connecting the past, present and future of the automobile. The Revs Program fosters an intellectual community bridging the humanities and fine arts, social sciences, design, science and engineering, and the professions. As a part of that effort, SULAIR will support the dissemination of scholarly research on the automobile; provide digital access to a collection of over two million items relating to automotive history, racing and technology; and, develop a system and service to develop and sustain an online automotive community. Members of the team will play a role in building the world’s leading center on the study of the impact of the automobile on the 20th and 21st century. The Repository Developer will primarily develop digital library software to enable management, preservation, and online discovery of Revs materials. This will involve deployment of a new repository and web application using the Hydra technology stack (http://projecthydra.org). The Repository Developer will be a core contributor to the open source Hydra project in the process of building the Revs digital repository. The Repository Developerwill be a member of a core team dedicated to the successful completion of this project, and will work closely with the project manager, Revs web developer, the information architect, digital library infrastructure developers, the user experience designer and other developers involved in digital library initiatives. This particular project is highly collaborative, and will involve interactions with developers, scholars and staff across Stanford and from other institutions. As a member of SULAIR’s digital library application development team, the Repository Developer will contribute to the overall development of the Stanford Library’s web and digital library infrastructure, and help plan, specify, and build the technologies needed to support the University’s goal of ubiquitous access to scholarly information. Primary Responsibilities: • Design and deploy a world class digital access system for the Revs collection. • Leverage and further develop SULAIR’s existing work on hydra (http://projecthydra.org/) to serve as a full text, image and media (audio/video) delivery environment. • Provide analysis and software engineering support for implementing and leveraging the open source Fedora framework, leveraging both XML and RDF-based metadata. • Enable cross-linking of Revs materials through persistent well-structured methods, allowing researchers to build associative graphs of related materials in a rigorous and machine-actionable manner. • Leverage and further develop existing infrastructure to create a text, image media file processing pipeline for digital Revs content; as materials are digitized by Revs and its agents, this infrastructure will ensure the orderly management of the files and their associated metadata; the processing of these files for activities such as optical character recognition (OCR), and the transfer of a copy of these files to SULAIR for long-term preservation and accessioning into Stanford’s digital library. • Leverage and further develop existing infrastructure to preserve Revs content in the Stanford Digital Repository. Required
Re: [CODE4LIB] Programmer Orientation to Library/Lib Sci
Hi, Laura. Great question, and one that I have asked myself many times. It is sparsely populated, but there is a wiki page about this here: http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed It would be a service to the community if you added any answers you find there. Bess On Jul 20, 2011, at 9:04 AM, Laura Smart wrote: Hi folks - What do you include in orientation when you hire a programmer (excellent, experienced, of course), who isn't familiar with library-land? MARC is a given, ditto the ILS, plus e-resource management back end (OpenURL parsers, proxies and the like). From those of you who came into libraries for other industries: what do you wish you knew about libraries, library/info science, and library operations when you began? I'm especially interested in anything which gave you an ah-ha! moment when you were working with library data -- the implicit things which didn't make sense until you knew why those crazy librarians did things the way they did. Also - which resources were particularly valuable to you as you gained familiarity with your new environment? Your insight is deeply appreciated, Laura J. Smart Metadata Services Manager, Caltech Library la...@library.caltech.edu/laura.j.sm...@gmail.com
[CODE4LIB] Job posting: GIS Software Developer at Stanford Libraries
Dear Code4Lib, Stanford Libraries is hiring a GIS Software Developer. This position will be part of my group in Meyer Library, and it's a fun and exciting position for the right person. Please feel free to ask me any questions, and please forward this to anyone you think might be interested. Thanks! Bess GIS Software Developer Job ID 42835 Job Location University Libraries Job Category Information Technology Services Salary 4P3 Date Posted May 26, 2011 Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) is building an increasingly rich and complex set of geospatial information services and resources to support research, teaching and learning. The GIS Software Developer will lead the technical effort to develop and support the GIS applications and infrastructure for SULAIR’s GIS programs, resources and patrons. The GIS developer will sit within and report to Digital Library Systems and Services unit within SULAIR, and work intimately with and directly support the programmatic activities of the Branner Earth Sciences Library, as well as closely related units within SULAIR and beyond. RESPONSIBILITIES Web Application Development (60%) - Adopt, adapt, develop and maintain software to provide a Web-based geospatial discovery and access portal, using open source technologies in an inter-institutional, community-based, development effort. - Help develop, enhance and maintain Map Gallery, a specialized discovery interface tailored to SULAIR’s public service and collection development program around maps; integrate this environment with the GIS discovery portal and/or SearchWorks, SULAIR’s overarching discovery layer. - Integrate (either directly or by supporting integration efforts of others on campus) additional services into SULAIR’s GIS environment, supporting mapping and georeferencing applications, novel spatial visualization tools, mashups, and integration of gazetteers and third party GIS-based API’s. GIS Infrastructure Management and Administration (30%) - Help implement and manage SULAIR’s GIS infrastructure; this includes administration of specialized GIS applications (currently a mix of open source and proprietary systems), as well as account management and data administration. It also entails working with SULAIR’s server, database and network administrators to provision the necessary computing systems to support GIS services. GIS database administration will be a significant component of this work. Community Participation, Leadership and Consulting (10%) - Play an active role in higher education and GIS researcher community; represent Stanford in this community and the development of open source and consortial service efforts. Consult with technologists on campus about the best method to realize their projects’ GIS technical goals, and adapt SULAIR’s GIS services and infrastructure accordingly. Demonstrated Expertise Required In: GIS applications, tools and resources through at least three years of hands-on management and development in a GIS environment. Familiarity includes direct experience with both raster and vector resources, as well as ESRI software (ArcGIS and ArcSDE), geodatabase configuration and management, and common API’s and tools (Geoserver, OpenLayers, WMS, WFS, KML, etc.). Software engineering in Web-, solr-lucene and database-backed application environments, and experience in contributing to and/or defining the technical architecture of complex systems. Ruby, and Ruby on Rails, both for application development and in engineering an enhanced framework, including plug-ins, engines and gems, for developing and deploying applications. • Scripting technologies such as Perl, PHP, Python, etc., or a demonstrated ability to learn them quickly. In-depth knowledge of HTML and related website development technologies and software (especially CSS and AJAX). Familiarity with Java and object-oriented programming and concepts is desired. • Relational database design and management. Experience both in the administration of and implementing database applications for SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, PostGIS and/or MySQL. • Networking and systems integration in a heterogeneous hardware (Linux, Windows) and software environment. • XML and related tools and technologies (e.g., XML schema, schema management and databases, XSLT, X-forms). Writing solid, simple, elegant code both independently and in a team-programming environment and within schedule limitations. Working collaboratively on a project from specification to launch and production operation; and working with multiple levels of staff, and colleagues at peer institutions and open source communities. • Agile software development practices and test driven development principles and methods, as well as best practices for software development
[CODE4LIB] hydra mailing list and download
Thanks to everyone who attended the hydra breakout session today. Since the breakout, people have been asking me how to join the mailing list and where to download and try out our software. Unfortunately this information isn't easy to find right now, although we'll be addressing that soon. In the meantime, for those who are interested: You want to install hydrangea: https://github.com/projecthydra/hydrangea And join this mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/hydra-tech Cheers! Bess
[CODE4LIB] Fwd: Reminder: Open Repositories 2011 Fedora Users' Group Proposals Due February 28, 2011
This year Open Repositories is going to be in Austin, Texas. Recognizing the ever-growing importance of social dynamics to repository success, the primary theme of this year's Open Repositories conference is Collaboration and Community: The Social Mechanics of Repository Systems. Please submit proposals for the Fedora users group track by February 28. We're looking for two- to four-page proposals (PDF preferred) for presentations or panels that focus on the use of Fedora. We welcome presentations from developers, researchers, repository managers, administrators and practitioners describing novel experiences or developments. Submission instructions are available at: https://conferences.tdl.org/0R2011/OR2011main/schedConf/cfp Thank you and please address any questions about the Fedora Users' Group meeting to me at bess [at] stanford [dot] edu. Cheers, Bess Sadler
[CODE4LIB] javascript testing?
Can anyone recommend a javascript testing framework? At Stanford, we know we need to test the js portions of our applications, but we haven't settled on a tool for that yet. I've heard good things about celerity (http://celerity.rubyforge.org/) but I believe it only works with jruby, which has been a barrier to getting started with it so far. Anyone have other tools to suggest? Is anyone doing javascript testing in a way they like? Feel like sharing? Thanks! Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] EAD in Blacklight (was: Re: [CODE4LIB] Batch loading in fedora)
Hi, Ethan. You can see another example of blacklight being used to search and display EAD guides at http://nwda.projectblacklight.org/?f%5Bformat_facet%5D%5B%5D=Archival+Collection+Guide I've used solr and/or lucene for EAD documents a few times, and here are some observations: I've also heard about scalability issues with Solr and large XML documents, but I've never seen benchmarks. Solr is incredibly scalable, so describing this as a solr scalability issue isn't really accurate. What might be more accurate would be to say that Solr is designed for searching, while most people looking for an EAD solution are trying to get it to do a lot more than that. The problem is that you want to be able to discover and view an EAD guide at several levels, right? You want to be able to discover at the collection level, and at the item level, and presumably at the level of some section of the EAD document (e.g., biographical history or whatever). Solr and lucene really just know how to tell you whether a given document in the index matches a query you've entered, though, so if you want to be able to discover on each of those levels, you have to index your document once to represent the collection, then again for each section you want to be independently discoverable, then again for each item you want to be discoverable. Creating a UI that is going to represent a sing! le EAD, which has now been transformed into potentially hundreds or thousands of independently discoverable items and EAD sections is quite challenging. I liked what Matt Mitchell and I did for the Northwest Digital Archives, but I'm always interested in other ways one might approach this. We indexed each EAD guide into separate lucene documents for each EAD section, then collapsed them under the main EAD title in the search results, so that when you search for an archival collection you only see the EAD guide represented once, but each section of it is still independently viewable and bookmarkable: Here is the guide for the Bing Crosby Historical Society in a search result: http://nwda.projectblacklight.org/catalog?q=crosbyqt=searchper_page=10f%5Bformat_facet%5D%5B%5D=Archival+Collection+Guidecommit=search But in order to look at the guide, you have to look at a specific part of it: http://nwda.projectblacklight.org/catalog/bcc_1-summary Additionally, we treated each item as a first class independently discoverable object, but still linked them all to the section of the EAD document where they came from: http://nwda.projectblacklight.org/catalog/bcc_1-v Matt and I were thinking it would be nice to allow blacklight to handle all of the display of the EAD too, which is why we stored a lot of EAD markup in the solr document, and that can potentially have scalability problems, because lucene is not a database but we were treating it like one. This works, but it's a bit of a hack. Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] EAD in Blacklight (was: Re: [CODE4LIB] Batch loading in fedora)
On Aug 6, 2010, at 9:10 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: We indexed each EAD guide into separate lucene documents for each EAD section, then collapsed them under the main EAD title in the search results, Curious how you impelemented that: Did you use the Solr field collapsing patch that's not yet part of a standard distro? Yes, exactly. Matt and I were thinking it would be nice to allow blacklight to handle all of the display of the EAD too, which is why we stored a lot of EAD markup in the solr document, and that can potentially have scalability problems, because lucene is not a database but we were treating it like one. This works, but it's a bit of a hack. You can definitely have Blacklight handle the display while still keeping the EAD out of solr stored fields. There's no reason Blacklight can't fetch the EAD from some external store, keyed by Solr document ID (or by some other value in a solr document stored field). That's my current thinking (informed by y'alls experience) of how I'm going to handle future large object stuff in BL, if/when I get around to developing it. Yeah, that's a good point. We were trying to self-contain the whole thing for ease of deployment, but I'm not sure that's a good approach. It's better if your EAD is in a real repository and Blacklight just presents it. Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] EAD in Blacklight (was: Re: [CODE4LIB] Batch loading in fedora)
On Aug 6, 2010, at 10:53 AM, Mark A. Matienzo wrote: On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Bess Sadler bess.sad...@gmail.com wrote: On Aug 6, 2010, at 9:10 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: We indexed each EAD guide into separate lucene documents for each EAD section, then collapsed them under the main EAD title in the search results, Curious how you impelemented that: Did you use the Solr field collapsing patch that's not yet part of a standard distro? Yes, exactly. Bess - would you be willing to share code or brief notes about how to set this up? Gladly. I will write it as a separate message though, for ease of future reference. Yeah, that's a good point. We were trying to self-contain the whole thing for ease of deployment, but I'm not sure that's a good approach. It's better if your EAD is in a real repository and Blacklight just presents it. +1. Potential options could include using an XML database like eXist, or using our approach at Yale (where EAD finding aids are stored as datastreams in Fedora objects). I've been eager to look at rethinking our approach, especially given the availability of the Hydra codebase. Absolutely. Also, this is one example i can think of where fedora disseminators make perfect sense. Fedora can serve as your repository, and then each guide can be accessed as http://your.repository.edu/fedora/get/YOUR_EAD_IDENTIFIER and each section can be grabbed via http://your.repository.edu/fedora/get/YOUR_EAD_IDENTIFIER/bioghist (or whatever naming scheme makes sense to those with stronger opinions about EAD than I do) What I'd love to see is each item represented and described independently in the repository, and then a full XML serialization of the EAD would just be constructed on the fly, bringing in as serialization time any objects that belong in a given section of the document. Institutionally, the biggest problem with EAD is version control and workflow for keeping the documents up to date. I think splitting things up into separate objects and only contructing the full EAD document as needed is a good potential solution to this. Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] EAD in Blacklight (was: Re: [CODE4LIB] Batch loading in fedora)
On Aug 6, 2010, at 8:07 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: I've been brainstorming other weird ways to do this. This one is totally wacky and possibly a bad idea, but I'll throw it out there anyway. What if you only indexed the entire EAD as one document, BUT threw the entire EAD in a stored field, and used solr highlightning on that field. NOT to show the highlighter results to the user, but to sort of trick the highlighter, using hl.fragmenter/fragmentsBuilder (possibly with a custom component in a jar) to telling you _which_ sub-sections of the EAD matched, and your software could then display the matching sub-sections (possibly with direct links to display) in the search results, under the actual document hit. Hi, Jonathan. I don't think this is a crazy idea, and in fact it is one of the approaches that Matt M. and I tried during our NWDA project. However, we found that it wasn't scalable. The highlighter was way too slow with the number of documents and fragments we were throwing at it. It wasn't even a huge number of documents, so we abandoned that idea. However, it's still a really elegant solution if only it were performant. Let me know if you decide to give it a try. Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] preconference proposals - solr
Hey, how about this? I've been discussing this off list with Erik and Naomi and this is what we came up with (I also added it to the wiki): This is a proposal for several pre-conference sessions that would fit together nicely for people interested in implementing a next-gen catalog system. 1. Morning session - solr white belt Instructor: Bess Sadler (anyone else want to join me?) The journey of solr mastery begins with installation. We will then proceed to data types, indexing, querying, and inner harmony. You will leave this session with enough information to start running a solr service with your own data. 2. Morning session - solr black belt Instructors: Erik Hatcher (and Naomi Dushay? she has offered to help, if that's of interest) Amaze your friends with your ability to combine boolean and weighted searching. Confound your enemies with your mastery of the secrets of dismax. Leave slow queries in the dust as you performance tune solr within an inch of its life. [We should probably add more specific advanced topics here... suggestions welcome] 3. Afternoon session - Blacklight Instructors: Naomi Dushay, Jessie Keck, and Bess Sadler Apply your solr skills to running Blacklight as a front end for your library catalog, institutional repository, or anything you can index into solr. We'll cover installation, source control with git, local modifications, test driving development, and writing object-specific behaviors. You'll leave this workshop ready to revolutionize discovery at your library. Solr white belts or black belts are welcome. And then anyone else who had a topic that built on solr (e.g., vufind?) could add it in the afternoon. Obviously I'm biased, but I really do think the topic of implementing a next gen catalog is meaty enough for a half day and I know people are asking me about it and eager to attend such a thing. What do you think, folks? Bess On 12-Nov-09, at 4:10 PM, Gabriel Farrell wrote: On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 02:47:42PM +, Jodi Schneider wrote: If you'd be up for it Erik, I'd envision a basic session in the morning. Some of us (like me) have never gotten Solr up and running. Then the afternoon could break off for an advanced session. Though I like Bess's idea, too! Would that be suitable for a conference breakout? Not sure I'd want to pit it against Solr advanced session! The preconfs should be as inclusive as possible, but I'm wondering if the Solr session might be more beneficial if we dive into the particulars right off the bat in the morning. There are only a few steps to get Solr up and running -- it's in the configuration for our custom needs that the advice of a certain Mr. Hatcher can really be helpful. You're right, though, that the NGC thing sounds more like a BOF session. I'd support that in order to attend a full preconf day of Solr. Gabriel Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Chief Architect for the Online Library Environment Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 b...@virginia.edu (434) 243-2305 smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: [CODE4LIB] preconference proposals - solr
Cary, that would be great! I'll contact you off-list so we can make our lesson plan. Anyone else want to join us? Bess On 13-Nov-09, at 10:29 AM, Cary Gordon wrote: I might be able to help with the white belt. Do I get to wear one of those padded suits? Cary smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
[CODE4LIB] Pinyin (Romanized Chinese) searching
By sending this here I hope I'm going to hit everyone on the blacklight, vufind, and solrmarc mailing lists, and maybe some other interested parties. Our East Asian Languages Librarian has approached me with a problem he wants to see solved. According to him, the typical North American library cataloging rules for constructing Pinyin transliterations are different from the rules that are used in China. What this means is that native Chinese speakers have a lot of trouble searching our catalog (it is practically unusable was his exact quote). His proposal, and I think it's a good one, is that since we're re-indexing our records into solr anyway, we could apply at index time an algorithm to convert North American Pinyin to Chinese rules Pinyin, index both values, and thus make the catalog much more useful to an under-served population. This seems like a great suggestion to me, but before I start devoting development cycles to it I wanted to poll the community... is there a more obvious answer that I'm not seeing? Has anyone solved this already? What's the right place for such a piece of code? Solrmarc seems the obvious place to me. As it has been described to me so far, this doesn't seem like an issue affecting people outside the library realm, which makes it seem too niche and community-specific to get it built into the lucene codebase, but I could be wrong about that. Maybe it would be better as a lucene contrib library? So, thoughts? Anyone know more about this than I do and want to speak up? Thanks! Bess smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: [CODE4LIB] NYC Carpool?
If it isn't full by the time you drive through Virginia, I'm in. Actually, we might have quite a few people wanting to carpool from the Virginia / DC area, so if we have too many it might need to be a separate car. For people who hadn't considered this previously, give it some thought. I was part of the 2007 road trip and it was awesome, I can highly recommend this as a way to save money and also have a good time with kindred spirits. Bess On 14-Oct-09, at 12:19 PM, Yitzchak Schaffer wrote: Mark A. Matienzo wrote: Hi Yitzchak - I might be interested. A few code4lib folks and I did this for code4lib 2007 in Athens, Georgia; our carpool started in Philadelphia, went through DC, and picked up a few folks along the way in Virginia. Even if you can't get a whole lot of people from New York proper, you may be able to snag some others along the way. Hi Mark, Good point. Aside from the direct route through Allentown and along I-81 to Harrisburg PA and through VA, the route could alternately follow I-95 through Philly, Balto/DC and Richmond, then cut west through NC without too much extra mileage. -- Yitzchak Schaffer Systems Manager Touro College Libraries 33 West 23rd Street New York, NY 10010 Tel (212) 463-0400 x5230 Fax (212) 627-3197 Email yitzchak.schaf...@gmx.com Access Problems? Contact systems.libr...@touro.edu smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: [CODE4LIB] Who is working on METS Viewer applications
Hi, Repke,
Many of the digital objects [1] visible through VirgoBeta [2], which
is an installation of Blacklight [3], are stored as METS. For each
METS file we index the relevant parts in solr, and we have a
middleware application that can easily grab relevant bits of it for re-
purposing, so that we can use our METS data in many places without
having many places where METS must be understood and interpreted. This
middleware app is just a set of XSL transformations, held together by
cocoon, of the form:
http://{URL FOR APP}/{ID OF METS FILE}/{descMeta | adminMeta |
technicalMeta | rightsMeta | MIX | getParts } (This is from memory, so
I know I'm leaving out some of our metadata streams and mis-naming
others.)
We also create a Fedora object for each METS file with externally
managed datastreams that reference each of the metadata datastreams.
This is sort of a belt-and-suspenders approach, I realize, and I plan
to re-examine it as this project progresses.
Then Blacklight has object-class specific views that know how to
display these various parts (data is drawn from solr for the search
results, and from the metadata streams for the full record display).
One of the views we're particularly interested in, which we haven't
yet tackled, is a viewer for our digitized manuscripts. We have
digitized manuscripts represented as METS files, in the system I've
described above, but we're still working on displaying these to end
users. I love what you've created with the DFG Viewer! I hope you
don't mind if I borrow some of your UI ideas. Nicely done.
Bess
[1] e.g., http://virgobeta.lib.virginia.edu/catalog/uva-lib:414860
[2] http://virgobeta.lib.virginia.edu
[3] http://projectblacklight.org
On 17-Sep-09, at 4:05 AM, Repke de Vries wrote:
Dear Code4Lib Community
read the METS based OpenMIC - OpenWMS announcement (July 9th) with
great interest.
It points at a need beyond METS creation and that is METS Viewers for
end users:
who in the CODE4LIB community is working on METS Viewer applications ?
Here is an example of what we mean by that - the DFGViewer:
http://dfg-viewer.de/en/regarding-the-project/
Anyone else ?
Background: the International Institute for Social History [ http://
www.iisg.nl ] has such collections that we are involved with both
the archiving and library communities. Metadata issues therefore are
a mixed bag. Added to that are Permanent Access issues. We are
looking at METS to tie it all together and at METS Viewers for our
users to easily navigate and negotiate what 's pulled together in
these METS containers.
Thanks, Repke de Vries
Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler
Chief Architect for the Online Library Environment
Box 400129
Alderman Library
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904
b...@virginia.edu
(434) 243-2305
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Re: [CODE4LIB] Book recommendation
Hi, Robert. I highly recommend both The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/tpp/the-pragmatic-programmer) and Practices of an Agile Developer (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/pad/practices-of-an-agile-developer ). I found both of these books to be the best distilled wisdom about best practices, problem solving, good habits, and developer mindset I've ever encountered. Bess Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Chief Architect for the Online Library Environment Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 b...@virginia.edu (434) 243-2305 On 9-Sep-09, at 12:12 PM, Robert Fox wrote: Since this list has librarians, hard core programmers and hybrid librarian programmers on it, this is probably a good place to ask this sort of question. I'm looking for some book recommendations. I've read a lot of technical books on how to work with specific kinds of technology, read a lot of online technical how tos and that has been good as far as it goes. But, technology changes too fast to be wed to one particular programming language, database technology, metadata standard, etc. I'm interested in finding books that speak to the issues of programming methodology, design principles, lessons learned, etc. that transcend any particular programming technology. Are there good books that distill the wisdom and experience of veteran developers and /or communicate best practices for things like design patterns, overall software architecture, learning from mistakes, the developer mindset and such things? Could you recommend perhaps the top three or four books you've read in these areas? Rob Fox Hesburgh Libraries University of Notre Dame smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: [CODE4LIB] Suggest a keynote speaker for Code4Lib 2010!
I nominate Paul Jones, the director of ibiblio.org. He's a poet, teaches at a journalism school and a library school, he's a part of internet and open source history (how many of you downloaded your first linux distro from sunsite.unc.edu?) and he's a fantastic public speaker. Here's an extract from his website (http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/): Although often mistaken for other unreconstructed relics of the failed social policies of the Sixties, Paul Jones is the Director of ibiblio.org, a project that includes the Site Formerly Known as MetaLab and SunSITE, The Public's Library -- a large contributor-run digital library. Besides speaking at several conferences world-wide, Paul teaches on the faculties of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Information and Library Science. He can be found many places on the Internet. He was the original manager of SunSITE.unc.edu, one of the first WWW sites in North America and is co-author of The Web Server Book (Ventana, 1995) (rereleased as The Unix Web Server Book, Second Edition Ventana, 1997). Jones has an additional on-going research interest in Open Source and Sharing Communities and Information policy issues as well as being an actively publishing poet. Paul is the editor of the Internet Poetry Archives, published with UNC Press. Paul is a founding board member of the American Open Technology Consortium, a member of the Board of Trustees of Chapel Hill Public Library, and a board member of the Linux Documentation Project. But he is most pleased to have been admitted into the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists and to have been selected in April 2003 as Best Geek in the Research Triangle by the Independent Weekly. Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Chief Architect for the Online Library Environment Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 b...@virginia.edu (434) 243-2305
Re: [CODE4LIB] virtual conference thunder lightning
+1 Birkin, this is a cool idea and the only additional request I'd make is can we have a page on the code4lib wiki that lists all the submissions? This seems like it could be a great resource for the community. We've been using peepcode (http://peepcode.com/) for training more and more often, and it would be great to have a similar resource for library-specific topics. Also, this would provide a forum for useful videos that don't meet the 10-minute rule. Bess On Jan 15, 2009, at 8:56 AM, Birkin James Diana wrote: Folk, A while back Karen Schneider raised the issue of virtual lightning talks [1]. We at Brown discussed the idea in one of our planning meetings, but felt that trying this at the conference would be teasing the gods of guaranteed-point-to-point-internet-access far too much. Shortly thereafter there was a great discussion sparked by Karen Coyle that started out focusing on COinS [2]. It then took a turn with a comment by Gabriel Farrell about unAPI [3]. I had always wanted to educate myself about unAPI, and this thread did that. The proximity of these two threads made me think it would be cool to see a 'blog-in-10-minutes' type video on unAPI, or on any number of code4lib-related issues. But there are already good blog-posts out there! Yes, there are. But anyone who's seen a (good) blog-in-10- minutes video knows how inspiring these things can be. [4] So... THE IDEA... Here's a call to find existing internet videos on code4lib type issues -- or CREATE YOUR OWN. They can range from 'blog-in-10-minutes' type tutorials to pure talking-head rants about how SOA will save the world. At some point we'll invite you to submit your favorites (can be your own or others'), and during one of the two open 20-minute slots we have in the conference, we'll show one or two depending on time. One wildly artificial rule for this particular exercise (aside from the requirement that it be code4lib-related): length under 10 minutes. Admittedly this leaves out amazing content. But full throttle forward. This can be a way for folk who can't attend the conference to contribute; it can expand the great existing code4lib-tagged video content (mostly at videos.google.com); and it'll help disseminate to a wider community information and ideas our community finds compelling. -Birkin --- Birkin James Diana Programmer, Integrated Technology Services Brown University Library birkin_di...@brown.edu [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/code4lib@listserv.nd.edu/msg04304.html [2] http://www.mail-archive.com/code4lib@listserv.nd.edu/msg04308.html [3] http://www.mail-archive.com/code4lib@listserv.nd.edu/msg04321.html [4] The original: http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=rubyWeblogIn15MinsfromSeriesID=29
[CODE4LIB] notes from Open Source Discovery Portal Camp
Dear Code4Lib Community, Some of us met today at the Palinet offices in Philadelphia for Open Source Discovery Portal Camp. You can read more about the meeting here: http://opensourcediscovery.pbwiki.com/ and I've posted a first draft of the notes from the meeting here: http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Notes_from_Open_Source_Discovery_Portal_Camp It was a fun and productive meeting, and many of us left with lists of tasks we plan to work on in the next several months. If you were there, please expand on the notes. Thanks! Bess
[CODE4LIB] marc4j 2.4 released
Dear Code4Libbers, I'm very pleased to announce that for the first time in almost two years there has been a new release of marc4j. Release 2.4 is a minor release in the sense that it shouldn't break any existing code, but it's a major release in the sense that it represents an influx of new people into the development of this project, and a significant improvement in marc4j's ability to handle malformed or mis-encoded marc records. Release notes are here: http://marc4j.tigris.org/files/documents/ 220/44060/changes.txt And the project website, including download links, is here: http:// marc4j.tigris.org/ We've been using this new marc4j code in solrmarc since solrmarc started, so if you're using Blacklight or VuFind, you're probably using it already, just in an unreleased form. Bravo to Bob Haschart, Wayne Graham, and Bas Peters for making these improvements to marc4j and getting this release out the door. Bess Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Research and Development Librarian Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
Re: [CODE4LIB] marc4j 2.4 released
Hi, Mike. I don't know of any off-the-shelf software that does de-duplication of the kind you're describing, but it would be pretty useful. That would be awesome if someone wanted to build something like that into marc4j. Has anyone published any good algorithms for de-duping? As I understand it, if you have two records that are 100% identical except for holdings information, that's pretty easy. It gets harder when one record is more complete than the other, and very hard when one record has even slightly different information than the other, to tell whether they are the same record and decide whose information to privilege. Are there any good de-duping guidelines out there? When a library contracts out the de-duping of their catalog, what kind of specific guidelines are they expected to provide? Anyone know? I remember the open library folks were very interested in this question. Any open library folks on this list? Did that effort to de- dupe all those contributed marc records ever go anywhere? Bess On Oct 20, 2008, at 1:12 PM, Michael Beccaria wrote: Very cool! I noticed that a feature, MarcDirStreamReader, is capable of iterating over all marc record files in a given directory. Does anyone know of any de-duplicating efforts done with marc4j? For example, libraries that have similar holdings would have their records merged into one record with a location tag somewhere. I know places do it (consortia etc.) but I haven't been able to find a good open program that handles stuff like that. Mike Beccaria Systems Librarian Head of Digital Initiatives Paul Smith's College 518.327.6376 [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- This message may contain confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bess Sadler Sent: Monday, October 20, 2008 11:12 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] marc4j 2.4 released Dear Code4Libbers, I'm very pleased to announce that for the first time in almost two years there has been a new release of marc4j. Release 2.4 is a minor release in the sense that it shouldn't break any existing code, but it's a major release in the sense that it represents an influx of new people into the development of this project, and a significant improvement in marc4j's ability to handle malformed or mis-encoded marc records. Release notes are here: http://marc4j.tigris.org/files/documents/ 220/44060/changes.txt And the project website, including download links, is here: http:// marc4j.tigris.org/ We've been using this new marc4j code in solrmarc since solrmarc started, so if you're using Blacklight or VuFind, you're probably using it already, just in an unreleased form. Bravo to Bob Haschart, Wayne Graham, and Bas Peters for making these improvements to marc4j and getting this release out the door. Bess Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Research and Development Librarian Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
Re: [CODE4LIB] Open Source Institutional Repository Software?
Good point, Peter. Edward, it's also worth considering your institution's overall user experience goals. Here at UVA, we want to give users a single place to go, instead of having to search the repository and the library catalog, so the front end for our Fedora repository is going to be Blacklight (also open source: http:// blacklight.rubyforge.org), the same as the front end for our library catalog. You can see an example here (still in development, so be kind), of a search that has retrieved both a book from the catalog and images from our repository: http://blacklightdev.lib.virginia.edu/catalog?q%5B%5D=Radburn Bess Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Research and Development Librarian Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305 On Aug 22, 2008, at 11:21 AM, Binkley, Peter wrote: Note that having said Fedora, you're only half-way there: you still need a front end. Fez is popular, but Muradora was very well spoken of at RIRI last week (http://vre.upei.ca/riri/), and UPEI is doing very interesting work putting Drupal in front of Fedora (they're planning to release code shortly, having been distracted over the summer by an impromptu ILS migration that cost them 5 whole weeks - honestly, you wonder what these people do all day). Muradora's future was in doubt for a while due to reorganization of the development team, but the most recent word is that it will continue to be developed. You'll end up with very different beasts depending on what you choose, so you really need to list Fedora+Fez, Fedora+Muradora, etc. as separate options. Peter -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Edward M. Corrado Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 2:25 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: [CODE4LIB] Open Source Institutional Repository Software? Hello all, I've been investigating possible solutions for the beginnings of a repository of electronic documents [1]. At this point, we have no budget, so I am only looking at Open Source options. I've identified a number of options that may meet our needs that are either advertised as institutional repository software or digital library software. Basically what I am wonder is am I missing some OSS programs that in these categories that might work for us. Software that I have identified so far that looks promising are: DSpace: http://www.dspace.org/ Fedora: http://www.fedora-commons.org/ E-prints: http://www.eprints.org/ Greenstone: www.*greenstone*.org/ Kete: http://kete.net.nz/ Rescarta: http://www.rescarta.org/ I have identified some others, but rejected them because they were either experimental or appear not to be in current development. At this point we haven't really narrowed down our focus, so almost any digital library or institutional repository program would be under consideration, providing it is 1) somewhat fully developed (again, no budget), 2) somewhat easy to use and install, 3) has some level of user base, and 4) is actively being maintained. Does anyone have any suggestions for other software to investigate Edward [1] I'm not going to call this an institutional repository, because what I am envision is more of a hybrid of a digital library and institutional repository. I'd be less vague, but I only have a vague idea of what we want.
Re: [CODE4LIB] Solr for Internal Searching
Hi, David. I think solr is great, and I use it all the time and can highly recommend it. However, if what you have is mostly HTML pages, you might want to consider nutch (http://lucene.apache.org/nutch) instead. Both solr and nutch are based on lucene, but nutch will give you more built-in tools for crawling your website. Use the right tool for the job and all that. :) Bess On 5-Aug-08, at 7:03 PM, Cloutman, David wrote: Today my boss asked me to come up with a solution that would let us index and search our intranet. I was already thinking of using Solr on our public Web site we are building, and thought this might be a good opportunity to knock two items off the to-do list with the same technology. I know there was a preconference session on Solr this year, and I have the sense that this is gaining traction in the library community. Is there any reason why I shouldn't do this? Thanks, - David --- David Cloutman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Electronic Services Librarian Marin County Free Library Email Disclaimer: http://www.co.marin.ca.us/nav/misc/EmailDisclaimer.cfm
Re: [CODE4LIB] marc records sample set
On May 9, 2008, at 1:42 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: The Blacklight code is not currently using XML or XSLT. It's indexing binary MARC files. I don't know it's speed, but I hear it's pretty fast. Right, I'm talking about the java indexer we're working on, which we're hoping to turn into a plugin contrib module for solr. It processes binary marc files. We're getting times of about 150 records / second, but that's on an unfortunately throttled server and we're munging each record significantly (replacing musical instrument and language codes with their English language equivalents, calculating composition era, etc). Casey, you say you're getting indexing times of 1000 records / second? That's amazing! I really have to take a closer look at MarcThing. Could pymarc really be that much faster than marc4j? Or are we comparing apples to oranges since we haven't normalized for the kinds of mapping we're doing and the hardware it's running on? Bess Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Research and Development Librarian Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
[CODE4LIB] jquery plugin to grab book covers from Google and link to Google books
Matt Mitchell here at UVa just wrote a jquery plugin to access google
book covers and link to google books. I wrote up how to use it here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/bess/?p=107
We’re using it as part of Blacklight, and we’re making it
available through the Blacklight source code repository under an
Apache 2.0 license.
First, grab the plugin here: http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/svn/
javascript/gbsv-jquery.js, and download jquery here: http://
code.google.com/p/jqueryjs/downloads/detail?name=jquery-1.2.3.min.js.
Now make yourself some HTML that looks like this:
html
head
script type=“text/javascript”
src=“jquery-1.2.3.min.js”/script
script type=“text/javascript” src=“gbsv-jquery.js”/
script
script type=“text/javascript”
$(function(){
$.GBSV.init();
});
/script
/head
body
span title=“ISBN:0743226720″ class=“gbsv-link-to-
preview”/span
span title=“ISBN:0743226720″ class=“gbsv-link-to-
info”/span
span title=“ISBN:0743226720″ class=“gbsv-
thumbnail”/span
span title=“ISBN:0743226720″ class=“gbsv-link-to-
preview-with-thumbnail”/span
/body
/html
Now load your page and you should see something like this: http://
blacklight.rubyforge.org/gbsv.html
If you link to a non-existent ISBN it will be silently ignored.
Give it a shot and give us some feedback!
Bess
Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler
Research and Development Librarian
Digital Scholarship Services
Box 400129
Alderman Library
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(434) 243-2305
Re: [CODE4LIB] musing on oca apiRe: [CODE4LIB] oca api?
Tim, I think this is a fantastic idea and the only suggestion I would make is to make sure you get on the Open Library developers list (I'm looking for the URL... I'll email when I find it unless someone else beats me to it) and discuss this there. (You may already have done this, I don't know.) They may be interested in hosting such a project, and of course it would be helpful to have their knowledge of the collections and apis on call. They seem to be keen on involving developers from outside the Internet Archives staff, and this seems like a perfect opportunity. I would be very interested in helping you test such a service, though, and I would definitely put links into our library catalogue. Bess Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Research and Development Librarian Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305 On Mar 6, 2008, at 8:47 AM, Tim Shearer wrote: Howdy folks, I've been playing and thinking. I'd like to have what amounts to a unique identifier index to oca digitized texts. I want to be able to pull all the records that have oclc numbers, issns, isbns, etc. I want it to be lightweight, fast, searchable. Would anyone else want/use such a thing? I'm thinking about building something like this. If I do, it would be ideal if wouldn't be a duplication of effort, so anyone got this in the works? And if it would meet the needs of others. My basic notion is to crawl the site (starting with americana, the American Libraries. Pull the oca unique identifier (e.g. northcarolinayea1910rale) and associate it with unique identifiers (oclc numbers, issns, isbns, lc numbers) contributing institution's alias and unique catalog identifier upload date That's all I was thinking of. Then there's what you might be able to do with it: Give me all the oca unique identifiers that have oclc numbers Give me all the oca unique identifiers with isbns that were uploaded between x and y date Give me the oca unique identifier for this oclc number Planning to do: keep crawling it and keep it up to date. Things I wasn't planning to do: worry about other unique ids (you'd have to go to xISBN or ThingISBN yourself) worry about storing anything else from oca. It would be good for being able to add an 856 to matches in your catalog. It would not be good for grabbing all marc records for all of oca. Anyhow, is this duplication of effort? Would you like something like this? What else would you like it to do (keeping in mind this is an unfunded pet project)? How would you want to talk to it? I was thinking of a web service, but hadn't thought too much about how to query it or how I'd deliver results. Of course I'm being an idiot and trying out new tools at the same time (python to see what the buzz is all about, sqlite just to learn it (it may not work out)). Thoughts? Vicious criticism? -t
Re: [CODE4LIB] presentation files
On Mar 4, 2008, at 9:44 AM, Dan Scott wrote: There seemed to be general support on IRC for using the Internet Archive as the destination of choice for the code4lib videos, but perhaps this is a good time to call for broader discussion. Dan +1 I think this is a great idea. Bess
[CODE4LIB] Blacklight released - ruby on rails and solr open source OPAC
Dear Code4Lib community, People may have seen this on planet code4lib already, but I thought I should do a mailing list post, too. Blacklight, an open source OPAC using ruby on rails and solr, has now been released under an Apache 2.0 license. There is a brief (but soon to expand) website about the project here: http://blacklight.rubyforge.org/ Releases are available here: https://rubyforge.org/projects/blacklight/ Svn access is available here: https://rubyforge.org/scm/?group_id=5235 And you can join a mailing list about the project here: https:// rubyforge.org/mail/?group_id=5235 You can also see Blacklight in action here: http:// blacklight.betech.virginia.edu/ The code4lib community has been very supportive of this project, so thank you! I hope that some of you who have expressed interest in the past will consider joining us as developers, testers, documenters, or just by making suggestions for how to improve. With love from a code4lib fangirl, Bess Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Research and Development Librarian Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
Re: [CODE4LIB] open source search engines
Hi, Alberto. We haven't rolled it out yet, but at University of Virginia we've had great success with solr/lucene. You can take a look at what we've done here: http://blacklight.betech.virginia.edu/ Solr itself meets all the criteria you just listed, and Erik Hatcher wrote some very nice code for us (and it's open source, although I'm not sure if it's actually in a publicly accessible repository right now.) to import our Marc records. We currently have about 4 million marc records, plus EAD, TEI, and GDMS XML files, plus some HTML files that Erik indexed as a proof of concept. The front end is Ruby on Rails, and the mapping files for cross-walking the XML or Marc into solr is very easy to configure, even for a non-programmer. In fact, we are planning to just hand these files to our cataloguers and letting them hash things out themselves. I'm currently working on a formal deployment plan that we have to have before we can make this a production service, and this will include workflows for syncing the data with our Sirsi ILS. If this is interesting and you want more info, I or other folks at UVa would be happy to talk with you about it. Or if you need to roll your own system, I would highly recommend solr. It makes lucene very easy to work with and provides all kinds of added functionality. Bess On Jul 18, 2007, at 10:45 AM, Alberto Accomazzi wrote: Our project is looking to transition to a new search engine to handle our bibliographic databases (5.5M records of bibliographic article metadata + 0.6M fulltext articles). What we are looking for is something easily tweakable, which offers fielded searches, boolean/simple search logic, customizable relevance ranking, proximity, highlighting, synonym/stemming matching. Needs to run on a linux 64-bit box. The packages I am aware of are: 1. lucene/clucene/lucy 2. kinosearch 3. xapian 4. zebra 5. invenio Am I missing any from the list? Are any of these to be excluded based on our requirements? I'd like to hear experiences from people who are using or have used these packages. TIA -- Alberto Dr. Alberto Accomazzi aaccomazzi(at)cfa harvard edu NASA Astrophysics Data Systemads.harvard.edu Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics www.cfa.harvard.edu 60 Garden St, MS 67, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Head, Technical and Metadata Services Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
Re: [CODE4LIB] Preconference
Could we post them on the code4lib.org page about the pre-conference? http://code4lib.org/node/139 Bess On Feb 13, 2007, at 12:03 PM, Binkley, Peter wrote: That would be great. I've got a MODS-to-Solr xsl to share as well. Where would be a good place to post these, along with relevant Solr schemas? Peter -Original Message- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Nagy Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 9:18 AM To: CODE4LIB@listserv.nd.edu Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Preconference I have an XSLT doc for transforming MARCXML to SOLR XML that I can share around. Andrew Jonathan Rochkind wrote: If we bring MARCXML and/or MODS, can we assume that there will be people who can help us process that data into something useable by Solr? That would be a nice, at any rate. Jonathan Erik Hatcher wrote: On Feb 13, 2007, at 9:47 AM, Susan E Teague Rector/FS/VCU wrote: Are we supposed to be using a predefined set of data for the preconference or can we use our own data? Susan - I'm going to package up a lot of stuff (Solr, sample datasets, Luke, etc) to help everyone get started, but bringing your own data is encouraged as long as you also bring along the necessary tools and know-how to process that data into something usable by Solr (either XSLT to .xml files, or via code that speaks to Solr directly). So by all means bring your data. Erik -- Jonathan Rochkind Sr. Programmer/Analyst The Sheridan Libraries Johns Hopkins University 410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Head, Technical and Metadata Services Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
Re: [CODE4LIB] Preconference
Jonathan, I think it's safe to assume that there will be lots of people around to answer questions. I'm in the XSLT / cocoon group, and I know we'll be doing XSL transformations of MARCXML and/or MODS into SOLR. Bess On Feb 13, 2007, at 10:58 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: If we bring MARCXML and/or MODS, can we assume that there will be people who can help us process that data into something useable by Solr? That would be a nice, at any rate. Jonathan Erik Hatcher wrote: On Feb 13, 2007, at 9:47 AM, Susan E Teague Rector/FS/VCU wrote: Are we supposed to be using a predefined set of data for the preconference or can we use our own data? Susan - I'm going to package up a lot of stuff (Solr, sample datasets, Luke, etc) to help everyone get started, but bringing your own data is encouraged as long as you also bring along the necessary tools and know-how to process that data into something usable by Solr (either XSLT to .xml files, or via code that speaks to Solr directly). So by all means bring your data. Erik -- Jonathan Rochkind Sr. Programmer/Analyst The Sheridan Libraries Johns Hopkins University 410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Head, Technical and Metadata Services Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
[CODE4LIB] the pre-conference is full
Hi, everyone. The Lucene / Solr pre-conference has been incredibly popular. It is full (in fact, a little over-full) and we are closing registrations. If you are registered, you can still go to http://www.code4lib.org/ node/139 and sign up for a team, but no new registrations after this point. Erik and I are getting together this week to put together a preparation plan (software to download and install, tutorials to try) for people attending the workshop. Watch your email for that in the next couple of weeks. Bess Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Head, Technical and Metadata Services Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
Re: [CODE4LIB] RE: [CODE4LIB] RE: [CODE4LIB] Polls open for Code4Lib 2007 T-Shirt design
On Jan 26, 2007, at 11:00 AM, Edward Summers wrote: On Jan 26, 2007, at 10:45 AM, Ben Ostrowsky wrote: It was hopeless. Maude and Agnes had cracked top-secret messages during World War II, but even Bletchley Park's finest cryptographers were mystified by the enigmatic 008. +1 //Ed +1 Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] Getting data from Voyager into XML?
On Jan 17, 2007, at 3:26 PM, Andrew Nagy wrote: One thing I am hoping that can come out of the preconference is a standard XSLT doc. I sat down with my metadata librarian to develop our XSLT doc -- determining what fields are to be searchable what fields should be left out to help speed up results, etc. It's pretty easy, I think you will be amazed how fast you can have a functioning system with very little effort. Andrew As long as we're on the subject, does anyone want to share strategies for syncing circulation data? It sounds like we're all talking about the parallel systems á la NCSU's Endeca system, which I think is a great idea. It's the circ data that keeps nagging at me, though. Is there an elegant way to use your fancy new faceted browser to search against circ data w/out re-dumping the whole thing every night? Bess
Re: [CODE4LIB] Getting data from Voyager into XML?
Very cool, Andrew. I can't wait for your talk. Bess On Jan 17, 2007, at 5:10 PM, Andrew Nagy wrote: Bess Sadler wrote: As long as we're on the subject, does anyone want to share strategies for syncing circulation data? It sounds like we're all talking about the parallel systems á la NCSU's Endeca system, which I think is a great idea. It's the circ data that keeps nagging at me, though. Is there an elegant way to use your fancy new faceted browser to search against circ data w/out re-dumping the whole thing every night? I will talk about this in my presenation at the conference. Syncing every night is too infrequent if you ask me. I considered syncing like every 15 mintues, until I stepped back and looked at that idea from a reality concept and laughed at myself. Our system (going into beta next week!) is using realtime SQL calls for location, status, etc. to our Voyager DB. Andrew
[CODE4LIB] join a team for the lucene / solr pre-conference
Hi, everyone. The lucene / solr pre-conference is turning out to be very popular. We have over sixty people, and more people are joining all the time. That is a lot of people to handle for a hands on workshop. In order to handle this, we're going to divide into teams based on what language you feel most comfortable using with solr. I'd also like to ask that a couple of people volunteer to be the coordinator of each team. If you're a coordinator, your job is to make sure you have downloaded all the software, you have a good data set to work with, and you've at least run through the tutorial and been able to get some data into solr. Also, you should probably be pretty comfortable working with your chosen programming language, and willing to help the other folks in the group if they get stuck. If you're attending the workshop (make sure you've registered, please!) please visit http://www.code4lib.org/node/139 and sign up for a team, and please indicate whether you'd be willing to act as a coordinator. The purpose of this is to make sure we know before the event whether we have enough coordinators for each language, and to make sure we don't spend all our time the day of the event trying to form groups. Here is what we have as of the writing of this message: Java, Perl, PHP: No one signed up yet Team XSLT / Cocoon: 1. Bess Sadler (coordinator) Team Ruby / Flare: 1. Ross Singer (coordinator) 2. Erik Hatcher (coordinator) Team Python: 1. Gabe (coordinator) Thanks! Your friendly neighborhood ad-hoc pre-conference organizing committee
[CODE4LIB] lucene pre-conference - reminder
Hey, code4libbers, If you are attending code4lib con 2007, you might also want to attend the one day pre-conference workshop about lucene and solr (and how to use them to index / search / browse library collections). It will be taught by the incomparable Erik Hatcher (author of _Java Development with Ant_ and _Lucene in Action_). Registration is free, but seats are limited, so if you want to attend please make sure to reserve a spot. Registration consists of sending me an email and telling me you plan to attend. The following list are the people who have registered. If you're not on this list, then I haven't reserved you a spot. Please let me know asap if you plan to come so we can plan our seating and space needs. Thanks! Bess Sadler People who have registered for the pre-conference: Adam Soroka Andrea Goethals Andrew Darby Andrew Nagy Antonio Barrera Art Rhyno Bess Sadler Dan Scott Ed Summers Edwin Sperr Emily Lynema Jonathan Gorman Jonathan Rochkind Kevin S. Clarke Kristina Long Michael Doran Michael Witt Mike Beccaria Parmit Chilana Peter Binkley Ross Singer Spencer McEwen Steve Toub Tito Sierra Tom Keays Winona Salesky Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Head, Technical and Metadata Services Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
[CODE4LIB] when does the pre-conference start?
Hi, Andrew. I'll reply-to-all in case anyone else needs this info, too. The pre-conference will start at 9am on Tuesday, February 27. Thanks! Bess On Dec 19, 2006, at 3:42 PM, Andrew Nagy wrote: Bess, do you have a set time for the pre-conference? I need to change my air flight reservations so I can make it. Thanks Andrew Bess Sadler wrote: Hey, code4libbers, If you are attending code4lib con 2007, you might also want to attend the one day pre-conference workshop about lucene and solr (and how to use them to index / search / browse library collections). It will be taught by the incomparable Erik Hatcher (author of _Java Development with Ant_ and _Lucene in Action_). Registration is free, but seats are limited, so if you want to attend please make sure to reserve a spot. Registration consists of sending me an email and telling me you plan to attend. The following list are the people who have registered. If you're not on this list, then I haven't reserved you a spot. Please let me know asap if you plan to come so we can plan our seating and space needs. Thanks! Bess Sadler People who have registered for the pre-conference: Adam Soroka Andrea Goethals Andrew Darby Andrew Nagy Antonio Barrera Art Rhyno Bess Sadler Dan Scott Ed Summers Edwin Sperr Emily Lynema Jonathan Gorman Jonathan Rochkind Kevin S. Clarke Kristina Long Michael Doran Michael Witt Mike Beccaria Parmit Chilana Peter Binkley Ross Singer Spencer McEwen Steve Toub Tito Sierra Tom Keays Winona Salesky Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Head, Technical and Metadata Services Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305 Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Head, Technical and Metadata Services Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
[CODE4LIB] JOB: Digital Media Editor/Encyclopedia Virginia
Not the usual code4lib job posting, but I thought there might be some interested folks on this list. Matt Gibson is the editor of this project and I used to work with him, he's a good guy and fun to work with. Plus, Charlottesville sure is beautiful. Bess ENCYCLOPEDIA VIRGINIA, MEDIA EDITOR The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities seeks an experienced editor of digital media with intimate knowledge of digital licensing and permissions to support Encyclopedia Virginia (EV). The preferred candidate will have demonstrated a wide range of competencies that include: o the intellectual abilities to select appropriate media to contextualize entries in an online reference work o understand and implement the process of licensing and obtaining permissions for media not owned by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities o create new and convert legacy audio, image, and moving image material at appropriate standards for both preservation and online delivery o edit digital audio/video files and create image derivatives for online publication. In order to accomplish these goals, the candidate must have an intellectual understanding of digital media as an educational resource and be capable of making independent decisions about appropriate material for Encyclopedia Virginia entries; understand copyright issues related to digital media and rely on that knowledge in obtaining permissions for media resources; and be proficient with multimedia hardware and software applications as well as long-term storage strategies for images, video and audio. To be competitive, applicants must have a Bachelor's degree in a humanities discipline, media, communications, or computer science; a Master's degree is preferred. Considerable experience in project management, digital media production, and content selection and licensing is required. To apply to this position a completed State of Virginia Application form is required. Apply to: University Human Resources 914 Emmet Street P.O. Box 400127 Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4127 or access an application from our Website at http:// www.hrs.virginia.edu. Applications may be faxed to 434-924-6911 or emailed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The University of Virginia is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Head, Technical and Metadata Services Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
[CODE4LIB] code4lib lucene pre-conference
Since the request I sent out last week, I've received quite a lot of email expressing interest in a lucene pre-conference, but it hasn't been an overwhelming amount. Based on this, I think it's safe to reserve the smaller, wi-fi enabled room that we've been discussing, and to plan for a max of 40 - 50 people. The group consensus seems to be that we do not need to charge a registration fee, although there have been requests for refreshments during the afternoon session, so maybe during lunch we can take up a collection and send someone out for donuts. Here is my proposal for a pre-conference format: A full day event devoted to lucene and solr, led by Erik Hatcher. The morning will be devoted to background and theory, and the afternoon will be an opportunity to try some hands-on projects. Participants should either bring a wi-fi enabled laptop or be prepared to look over someone else's shoulder. So that we can get as much accomplished in the workshop as possible, we will provide a list of software and documentation to be downloaded before the workshop. If you are interested in working with a specific data set, please bring the data set with you, preferably on a sharable media format (e.g., CDROM, USB Flash Drive) so that we can exchange data sets quickly and easily. To save time at the event, please get your data into XML before the conference. Enough people are interested in ILS related topics that it might be worth forming groups around specific ILS products. If you are one of these people, email the list if you're interested in setting up such a thing. To keep things simple, maybe registration can consist of just an email to me? But we will need to put something on the conference registration website, and send a message to everyone who has already registered in case they are not also on the code4lib mailing list. This would be the day before the conference proper, so that's Feb 27, right? Comments? Suggestions? Bess Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Head, Technical and Metadata Services Digital Scholarship Services Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
[CODE4LIB] University of Virginia library job posting
Hi, everyone. I'm on a search committee to hire an operations manager for the University of Virginia digital repository. The job looks pretty cool... we're a (mostly) open source shop, doing a lot of RD work, especially with the Fedora digital repository system. The salary is pretty decent, but unfortunately we can't pay relocation costs. However, we would be happy to consider recent graduates, and there is lots of room for advancement around here. Plus, the weather is beautiful, the winters are mild, and Charlottesville is a great place to live! MLIS not required, CS degree not required, hacker mentality definitely required. So, if you or someone you know fits the bill, please apply or forward this message. If you have any questions about the position, feel free to email me. Thanks! Bess Sadler [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://as400.hrs.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/db2www/jobs/ucdet.mac/details? jobcode=J05DCjva=LB%20INFO%20J05DC%20003 Title: Information Technology Specialist II (Advanced Programmer/ Analyst) Working Title: Digital Library Repository Specialist Posting #: LB INFO J05DC 003 Code: J05DC Position #: C4119 Salary Range: $ 37869.00 to $ 77720.00 Pay Band: 5 Date Posted: 2006-02-08 Closing Date: Open Until Filled Consideration: Applicants Who Applied 2005-11-08 Through the Posting Period Will Be Considered for This Position Job Type: Salaried Full TimeShift: Day Department: University of Virginia Library Location: Charlottesville Notes: Job Open to the General Public Criteria: The purpose of this position is to coordinate the development of organizational procedures and tools and perform regular tasks needed to prepare, ingest, and deliver new and existing digital collections online through the Library's Digital Library Repository. The successful candidate shall have experience in the use of the Unix environment; experience with XML markup language; possess a good sense of priorities and the ability to manage multiple projects, tasks, and deadlines; and the ability to work well as a member of a team. Experience with Perl is a plus. Experience in technical writing and training is a plus. Familiarity with the Fedora repository system is a plus. Description: Design, develop, maintain and enhance complex computer and related manual systems. Exercise wide latitude in assessing needs and determining alternatives. May supervise subordinate programmers as project leader. To be competitive, applicants should have Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent and considerable programming experience. Some project leader, or supervisory experience. Software Test Requirements (if any) Typing: Wordperfect: Lotus: Word: Excel: Competency Listing 5527 Operate Mainframe Computers 4056 Use Microcomputer/PC 5717 Write XML 5539 Write Technical Documents 5766 Provide Technical Training 5725 Write Perl 1024 Manage Projects A State of Virginia application form is required. Specify job code J05DC. Apply to University Human Resources, 914 Emmet Street, P.O. Box 400127, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4127, or access an application from our Website at http://www.hrs.virginia.edu. Applications may be faxed to 434-924-6911 or emailed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The University of Virginia is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer.
Re: [CODE4LIB] A code4lib journal proposal
On Feb 23, 2006, at 9:09 AM, Ross Singer wrote: I think a more important question, however, is What is it about Code4Lib that attracts you/makes you desire a published output of it? I believe that Code4Lib serves an otherwise under-served audience: The growing numbers of librarians who are also sys-admins / programmers / general geeks. I rarely find anything in the library journals that applies to what I do. I try to keep up with the open source press as well, but almost never do I see anything there that directly addresses libraries. My main source of information directly relevant to my job is reading the blogs of code4lib members. Unfortunately, when I need to make a budget request or ask my library to think about trying something new this guy's blog said it was cool doesn't carry as much weight as I might wish. Librarians are increasingly being asked to be hackers. We don't have the budget to call in a consultant... see if you can get it working anyway. Or ... People are asking for RSS feeds from our OPAC, but the upgrade that provides that won't be out for a year / doesn't work with our system / costs too much... can you get it working anyway? Or, best of all... Here' s a project that could easily consume a full-time software engineering design team. But we really need it! Can you give it a shot? This is not a complaint. I love my job, and I love what I do. But I, and the people I work with, rely almost entirely on informal information networks at this point: book recommendations, blog postings, the occasional conference. I can't help but think that I'm missing a lot, that many people are missing even more, and that we need some sort of systematized information distribution that addresses all the things that have been raised in this forum, as well as: 1. Is it worth it to pick up a new programming language like Ruby / flavor of the month? 2. How do I trick my OPAC into doing cool stuff? 3. How do I hire a library geek? 4. How do I mentor non-geeks into becoming geeks? 5. How can I pick up a crash course in software engineering, for those times when I need to design an application from scratch? Are there some design tools that might help this process? I can come up with many other questions, but you get the idea. I think blogs are fantastic, and I love #code4lib even though I rarely participate anymore, but I think we have more than enough material, and more than enough audience, to justify a journal. More than that, I think the emerging field of hacker librarianship needs such a journal if it is going to grow. Bess Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Metadata Specialist for User Projects Digital Research and Instructional Services (DRIS) Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
Re: [CODE4LIB] brainstorming: code4lib as a school
On Feb 23, 2006, at 5:03 PM, Raymond Yee wrote: * Do you perceive a need for mechanisms beyond what we already have for the code4lib community for learning/teaching each other or those outside the community? Yes! The code4lib community as it exists is great for people who already have a hacker mentality, (i.e. aren't afraid to try new things, and already have enough context and infrastructure to be able to jump in) but it isn't really approachable for newbie accidental- geek types, or people who want to pick up skills but aren't sure how. I think that this kind of education could fill a critical need in many libraries. I hear so often from people who want to go open source, but can't hire new staff and can't find ways to train their existing staff in open source, so they end up going with pay-ware simply because the company can offer training. * What mechanisms might we employ? The workshop model came to many people's minds. What do you think of the workshop model? What other mechanisms might work? I think the workshop model works very well for some things, but we also might want to think about online tutorials, or some kind of hybrid. IRC taught hands-on workshops, maybe? * What specifically would you like to learn from this community? What would you like to teach? Who would you like to teach a course/lead a workshop and on what topics? I would like to see a course about designing XML/XSL applications - something that goes beyond the intro to XSL tutorials that are out there. What does an XSL based application look like? What are some approaches to handling huge files? What are some ways to manage data? What are your indexing and searching options? Personally, I'd like to see it taught using cocoon. And, as long as I'm daydreaming, I'd like to see it taught by Peter Binkley, although I suspect he is too busy to do such a thing. I would be interested in teaching a very introductory cocoon class, and this is something I am already starting to develop for my home library. * What are organizational frameworks we can already work within to make code4lib as a school as bureaucratically lightweight as possible w/o too many downsides? Well, the code4lib conference is an obvious partner, as is the Access conference. You could have a pre- or post- conference workshop. In the past I've also attended summer institutes like those hosted by the Electronic Text Center at the University of New Brunswick (http:// www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SGML_course/2005/) These would all mean travel, though, which isn't an option for everyone. The traveling trainer is an other option -- if someone develops a course, they can fly to a place where a group of people want to take it. It costs less to fly one person that a whole group. I also like the idea of hooking into #code4lib and having kind of a seminar. People interested in a topic could agree to meet in #code4lib-classroom or something and either follow along with a tutorial together, or else do something more free-form where they can ask questions and engage with each other. This would eliminate travel costs, and everyone can work in their own environments (yay! no one will make me use a windows machine like they usually do in workshops!) I'm very interested to hear what other people propose, too. Bess Sadler Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler Metadata Specialist for User Projects Digital Research and Instructional Services (DRIS) Box 400129 Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (434) 243-2305
