If you weren’t able to make it to the conference, you can still see all the great talks!! Check out the videos from the conference at Archive.org.
Also all slides and videos are linked from the conference schedule.
Technorati Tags: code4lib2008, code4libcon2008
Last month in Portland, Oregon at the code4lib 2008 convention (a most impressive assemblage of library geekiness), a few of us broke out to the 24-hour bakery Voodoo Doughnut for this:
A donut, with bacon on it. A bacon donut.
I’d expected it to be strange, but the remarkable thing about the bacon donut is how unsurprising the taste is. The sweet maple and salty flavors are, as it turns out, very compatible. So it strikes me that the work I’ve been doing on Koha recently is a lot like the bacon donut: take two things people already like, we do the voodoo and make them work together in a new way.
For the OPAC, the place where this comes up most often is external content, like book cover images. Koha libraries have been using jacket images from Amazon for some time in production, internationally. It’s free and it’s broadly populated: a great feature, especially for small libraries who don’t have the advantage of a lot of subscription content services. Using their API, we can also pull and display content like user reviews, really fleshing out OPAC content.
I recently completed some commissioned Koha code for integrating Baker & Taylor images and content as an alternative to Amazon. Koha can now link to B&T ContentCafe excerpts, ratings, etc. and to their MyLibrary BookStore retail site. For design, my code followed the Amazon model, and certainly something similar could be crafted for other proprietary sources like Blackwell, Syndetics, etc. But upon reflection, I think that the entire model is already on it’s way out!
Enter Google Book Services. I’ll have more to say about GBS later, but suffice to say we now have a second, very widely available source of free book jacket images. (In fact, it may be enough to deflect calls some have been making for the Library of Congress to provide access to cover images like they do for other metadata.) The Google API is essentially javascript based and remarkably easy to integrate. How easy? Code4lib members were posting working example code back and forth within hours, and then within a day or two, other Koha users adapted their own servers to start using Google’s images. This is a great example of how OSS enables agility and adaptability.
So pretty soon we should expect that every current OPAC will have some images from somewhere, and that won’t be a distinguishing feature anymore. The next model to evolve will be to allow ajaxy failover from a ranked menu of many possible image sources (both free and subscription/keyed like B&T/syndetics). In fact, several coders have reported implementing this for their favorite sources already! I’m looking forward to seeing this code synthesized, providing the broadest possible coverage for images. Then we can start to get some abstraction around the other data in common, like reviews, ratings, etc.
Some of my colleagues have already started on LibraryThing and xISBN. If you have other external data sources you would like to see integrated in Koha, feel free to mention them here!
I attended my first Code4Lib Conference a few weeks ago and did a presentation on “Biblios”, the web-based cataloging software I’ve been working on here at LibLime. I will be posting slides of the presentation in the next few days.
I am very sorry to have missed the presentation at Code4LibCon 2008 on a MODS editor written in XFORMS (link to slides available here). This looks like a very promising approach for editing XML documents. XFORMS is an attractive technology I plan on looking into.
A web site for Biblios is in the works and should go live next week, with links to downloads, a demo, and documentation. As soon as it’s ready I will post links on this blog.
Last Wednesday I gave a lightning talk at Code4LibCon on some musings about Git qua distributed version control system and ideas for distributed cataloging. Check out my slides.
Slides from the other lightning talks are being posted here. Be sure to check out Andy Mullen’s presentation when his slides and the video are posted — making player piano MIDI files from OCRs of scanned scores is special enough, but his sense of dramatic timing during his presentation was marvelous.
Crossposted at Meta Interchange
Last week I went to my first Code4Lib conference. It was exciting, and also a bit overwhelming.
On Tuesday, Joshua, John Hauser from PALINET, and I presented at a Koha Camp, where I introduced a Koha 3 LiveCD (the first LiveCD I ever built!) and met one of the French Koha developers, Henri-Damien Laurent. It was Henri’s first time at a Code4Lib too, and he was inspired to blog for the first time. On Thursday, I gave a lightning talk on distributed cataloging, about which more anon.
There are already various good summaries of many of the presentations at Code4Lib, so I will focus on one session that particularly struck my interest, Karen Coyle’s keynote last Wednesday on RDA.