It’s that time of year again! I got to attend my first Code4Lib conference because of this awesome scholarship so I always like to promote it so that others can benefit.
There are two scholarships for the 2009 Code4Lib conference.
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
I know it’s been a while since Code4Lib, but I wanted you all to see the videos that go with my summaries. I wrote about Andrew Nagy’s presentation when I came back from Code4Lib, but now you can see the presentation your self:
Technorati Tags: vufind, code4lib, code4lib2008, code4libcon2008
I posted about the new Library 2.0 Gang Podcast a little while ago only to find that I had jumped the gun. Now it is really really available - so check it out - subscribe - and listen often 
You can listen to it via Library Journal or the new Library 2.0 Gang page hosted by Talis.
In this issue, we spoke with Aaron Swartz about the Open Library and other Code4Lib conference topics. You can check out my blog post summarizing what Aaron spoke about at the conference if you want more information.
Technorati Tags: library 2.0 gang, talis, library journal, open library, code4libcon2008
I recently spoke with Aaron Swartz and other Library 2.0 Gang members about the Open Library and other Code4Lib conference topics.
You can listen to it via Library Journal or the new Library 2.0 Gang page hosted by Talis.
You can check out my blog post summarizing what Aaron spoke about at the conference if you want more information.
Technorati Tags: library 2.0 gang, code4libcon2008, open library
I mentioned a little while back that there were going to be a lot of great open-source presentations at Code4Lib. Among them was a pre-conference on LibraryFind. I was unable to attend this event, but the slides and summary are available online if you’re interested in this product.
This from the about page:
LibraryFind is an open source metasearch application developed by librarians for libraries, built with Ruby on Rails.
Technorati Tags: code4lib, code4lib2008, libraryfind, code4libcon2008
Trevor Owens talked to us about Zotero. The slides are already online and the video should be there soon.
What is it?
Zotero is a Firefox add on that lets you:
Pages that support Zotero have an icon that appears in the address bar in Firefox (like the RSS icon)
State of the Community
Get Involved
Stats from the Room - and the Future
Trevor asked us a few questions to see how many people were aware of/using Zotero:
After these results, Trevor stated: “Okay, this has to change!” He’d love to see more academic institutions using Zotero, the future of the tool hopefully includes moving from being just a client side app in your browser to being an entire suite of tools. They’d love to have a reliable set of syncing plugins for tools like del.icio.us, and plugins for MS Word and Open Office.
He pointed out the SIMILE page at MIT, a project that
seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, and metadata held in such stores.
Lastly, he mentioned that Zotero will be introducing something in collaboration with the Internet Archive entitled, Zotero Commons, in the opes of encouraging a new type of openness.
More can be found about this at Dan Cohen’s blog:
I’m pleased to announce a major alliance between the Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media and the Internet Archive. It’s really a match made in heaven—a project to provide free and open source software and services for scholars joining together with the leading open library. The vision and support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has made this possible, as they have made possible the major expansion of the Zotero project over the last year.
Conclusions
I have to admit that I don’t use Zotero that much - I have it installed, but never took the time to explore it. My cousin swears by it and can’t live without it - and others have said the same thing - maybe I should start poking at it. Trevor’s presentation was great and taught me a lot and made me want to learn more about Zotero and how I can use it to my advantage.
Technorati Tags: code4lib, code4lib2008, zotero, code4libcon2008
Casey Durfee from LibraryThing talked to us about MARCThing.
Casey started off by letting us know that LibraryThing cared about high quality data (something we could have all guessed just by using the tool and seeing all of the amazing updates that have been coming out recently). That said, he doesn’t think that anyone except for librarians should have to look at a MARC record (here he showed us a traditional MARC record). Casey feels that we should be able to work with MARC data in other formats like XML (here he showed us the XML version of the MARC record). This got a few giggles from the audience because the average non-programmer, non-librarian looking at those two screens sees gobbly-gook either way! The fact is that we want our patrons (most of whom are average folks) to be able to view our data in pretty easily readable interfaces.
Inspirations
Casey shared with us his inspirations for the creating the MARCThing app.
Other Info
Casey talked about the zen of standards. The more rules you have the more it’s going to get screwed up - the only standard that anyone will follow is the one with no rules! I love this. I actually was recording a podcast yesterday where we were talking about cataloging and the changes that need to be made - my comment was the same as it has always been - you need fewer and/or less convoluted rules! I’ve found that these rules lead to less quality data because people don’t want to waste the time referring back to the rules to see how to add special fields like provenance notes and the like.
Casey ended by saying “I’m not a librairan - but i play one on the internet.” He did remind us that LibraryThing does have several librarians on staff - and that their company is not a faceless corporation - they want to help everyone access their data because all of the data in the world doesn’t mean a thing if people can’t get at it!
Casey closed with a qoute that I cannot remember! The quote he showed us prompted him to alter it to read: “z39.50 is like the wind - we have plenty of it but it’s not where we need it when we need it - what we need is more fans” - I liked this so much I wrote it down - but forgot to write the other quote down! Maybe Casey is reading and can help me remember 
[update] The quote came from a Zen proverb! Thanks Joe for pointing it out to me [/update]
Conclusions
MARCThing is a step in the right direction and I can’t wait to see the code. Casey wrote on Thingology back in December that the code would be open source and would be available soon - so keep your eyes out for it.
Technorati Tags: code4lib, code4lib2008, librarything, code4libcon2008, marcthing
In his presentation, Building the Open Library, Aaron Swartz introduced us to his vision of an online library. In his vision, like Brewster’s, he sees a wiki with one page for every book. For this reason, the small group (6 people spread out around the world) is starting their project with monographs.
To achieve this feat, the team is using their own database framework called ThingDB:
ThingDB stores a collection of objects, called “things”. For example, on the Open Library site, each page, book, author, and user is a thing in the database. Each thing then has a series of arbitrary key-value pairs as properties. For example, a book thing may have the key “title” with the value “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and the key “genre” with the value “Memoir”. Each collection of key-value pairs is stored as a version, along with the time it was saved and the person who saved it. This allows us to store full semi-structured data, as well as travel back thru time to retrieve old versions of it.
Gathering Data
Obviously a library isn’t anything without data, so to start, the team contacted publishers for their ONIX data - surprisingly they were mostly receptive - they wanted their books to be findable.
Next, they contacted librarians to ask for data dumps for their catalogs - unsurprisingly they didn’t get the same kind of response that they got from the publishers. Librarians wanted to think about it for a while… Long story short, they have some library data, but would love more.
Now that they had book data, they wanted to enhance it with additional content like book reviews from the New York Times, Harper’s, Reader’s Catalog, and the New York Review of Books. These titles will all soon have their reviews integrated into the site!!
Lastly, they’re scanning books to get data. This is where the Internet Archive comes in. They are providing their scans and data for the Open Library project.
The Library
The library itself has to focus on display. When a user enters a search term you will get back a book page, each book page gives you more info about the book - buy, borrow, download. From each book page, each author has a page as well, this way they’ll be able to auto generate bibliography for author. This is very much like the LibraryThing author pages.
So, now that we have library with pages for books and authors, we need to organize data. Aaron was awfully funny here - he had librarians arguing - but what subjects should we use? Which classification scheme do we use? We’re going to have to think about this! Aaron says quite simply - there is no need to argue - it’s only we can use them all!! I love it - very Everything is Miscellaneous - we can organize things in any way we want on the web - we aren’t limited by the physical world!!
There is also a sort of FRBR where you can link books together.
So now we have an online library - how do we keep it updated? Each page (book, author, etc) is editable - it’s a wiki!! In addition to that, you can easily edit the templates for your own need or make fixes to bugs you find in the templates that the Open Library is using.
The Future
In the future, they want to provide scan on demand - for $20 or $30 they’ll go get a scanned copy of the book. Then the PDF is put online with a bookplate saying that you paid for that book to be digitized. Now, the PDF is available to everyone!!
Aaron’s dream is to have a web of books online - all the information about the book - all the people who reviewed it, all the libraries that have it - all the places you can buy it - all in one place - so that everyone can find any book and find out how to access the information it holds.
In order to fulfull Aaron’s dream, we have to share. “We want your data” - share your MARC data with the project (something that a few people at the conference did as a gift to Brewster for his keynote). If this is to be a open-source project you need to share. Also, as an open-source project, they need all the help they can get - so chip in!
Questions & Answers
Q: Can we scan on demand now?
A: Scan on demand is not available now - but it should be done in the next couple weeks - we’ll see
Q: Will we get a copy of the items to put in our catalogs if we pay for it to be scanned?
A: The idea is that the book will scanned then a URL will be provided that can be put in the 856 field in your catalog.
Q: What about books that are only published online?
A: Yes - any and all books - get as much in there as possible
Q: Is there an API?
A: They are planning an API - so that you can get any book page in the format they need
Q: Where are you getting cover art?
A: LibraryThing - user scanned covers, Publishers give covers and we got a dump of covers from Amazon. We want to let libraries use them so we got as many covers as possible.
Q: Plans for Internationalization?
A: It should be translatable in the future
More Info
Demo: demo.openlibrary.org
This article (subscription required) discusses the potential friction between Open Library and WorldCat. Will the success of the former spell doom for the latter? How will librarians respond to the invitation to send records to one or the other, or both? [via LISNews]
Find more press about Open Library.
Conclusions
There were no negatives out of this guy!!! The project sounds so much better than I had even realized from reading articles and blog posts. I love it - this is amazing and I can’t wait to see more!
Technorati Tags: code4lib, code4lib2008, open library, code4libcon2008
In Andrew Nagy’s presentation From Idea to Open Source, he took us through the process of creating VuFind, an open-source OPAC replacement/Library portal.
At Villanova, they wanted to develop a portal for library patrons that would let people search the catalog, the article databases and digital library all in one - and keep it separate from the ILS. The goal was one single interface for all library resources in order to minimize the learning curve associated with having many different interfaces.
After doing some asking around, they quickly found that many other academic libraries were having the same problem - so the question became - why don’t we do it together? Why not make this an open-source project so that others can participate and benefit from the work of others?
The Goal
At Villanova, they wanted to build a system that would work with any ILS (including Koha & Evergreen - which Andrew called “our open source cousins”) and needs to work on a variety of platforms (Linux, Windows, etc).
The goal was not to replace the ILS, keep the ILS to do what it does best - but change the web app our patrons use so that it better meets their needs and expectations. VuFind uses the ILS to pull live holdings data from and either harvest bib data (if the ILS doesn’t provide direct database access) or query existing index (mostly used on the open-source ILSes which provide a way to let you in to search directly).
By having this top layer in addition to your ILS, you can easily change ILSes in the future without disrupting your patrons or changing the way they’re used to working. All this, just by separating the OPAC from the ILS.
Making it Open Source
The next step is to take this open source and share it - Villanova is not the marketplace to sell/support software. Andrew made a call to the audience to help build a collaborative community around VuFind so that this project can take off and be successful. Since other institutions are interested in it it would be a shame for Villanova to keep it to themselves - this is why open source is the next logical stop for the project.
In order to do this decisions have to be made, the right tools need to chosen. Some options were Sourceforge and Google Code. Right now, the VuFind team chose Sourceforge - they don’t find that it has all of the tools they need, but it was a good first step in making the project shareable.
The future vision includes having a local SVN or CVS and using a tool like JIRA, TRAC, Bugzilla, etc. These options lead to true freedom, but require a hosting institution.
Positives of Open-sourcing
Negatives of Open-sourcing
Where VuFind is now
Most importantly, we need easy ways to install the software. Everyone knows about the famous Wordpress 1 minute install - this should be the goal. The product requires easy install and integration, strong user interface and strong functionality before it will be widely adopted (I’d argue that the interface is pretty strong already - just a few more tweaks and it’s there).
When open-sourcing a project you need a roadmap for organization, to keep the process agile and to communicate with the community so they know what you’re doing from time to time. The start to this is the VuFind site and Sourceforge, but as Andrew said, not everything needed can be found in Sourceforge.
Conclusions
I’ve seen Andrew talk a few times about VuFind and I think this was the best of all of the talks I saw. It showed me how I can help, it showed me that there is a plan and a pretty mapped out one for VuFind. I see this as a viable option for librarians looking for a way to to integrate searching of all of their collections in one easy to use, clean, interface.
Technorati Tags: vufind, code4lib, code4lib2008, code4libcon2008