Professional Development

Sebastian Hammer started out the second full day of Code4Lib with a discussion f the origin of open source software. After talking for a few minutes about the growing challenge for libraries to remain relevant in a changing informaiton economy, he bridged to the concept of builidng things not through api use but rather by standards based data and development approaches.

This keyed in to the ongoing discussion of linked data at this conference and what happens when the information is encoded using open standards rather than being made available through regulated APIs. The demos in freebase yesterday began to hint at this capability and it will be intersting to see how this theme develops during the rest of the conference.

Following the keynote, tim McGeary from the OLE project updated the room on the progress of OLE. In covering the timeline Tim talked a bit about the OLE reference model and took the time to pitch the development aspect to the room. In the last pre-break session of the morning, the folks from Blacklight discussed the development of their discovery platform. During their presentation they mentioned a service that they use to retrieve data on music for incorporation into their catalog.

The first full day at code4lib included a slew of 20 minute talks on various library and coding topics today. The opening speaker stefano mazzocchi pushed on the idea about how the change to digital will impact how we encode and transport information. The interesting angle on this discussion was the representation of the reduction in marginal costs o/f additional works and copies. His demo section included several examples from an open database paltform called freebase in which he showed some on the fly data mapping and re-use applications.

The day included lots of presentation on interesting ideas including

• Dashboard data services - http://library.brown.edu/dashboard/info/
• AtomPub - a low-barrier extensible xml data model
• http://enjoysthin.gs/ - a social site that bookmarks primary textual and digital objects within their original context.
• E-matrix from NCSU

and a host of other neat topics.

The themes of linked data, rdf formatted data, and automated processing of information continue to be popular discussion topics. “Unified discovery” and “local indexing” were very popular products.

This morning kicked off code4lib 2009 with a series of pre-conferences. Both Kevin and I attended the Vufind preconference session which included an overview of vufind, install exercise, and a q&a session on vufind features and issues.

I documented lots of notes & tips on our Vufind project page in the library wiki and once we get back to WS we will be able to make some good progress on ironing out some of the features that we are interested in implementing.

Following an interesting lunch with some folks from Equinox (and a cold walk back to the hotel) I am getting ready for the Linked Data session. . .