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

I’ve been bookmarking open source resources and articles for the last couple of years. If you’d like to keep up with what I’m bookmarking you can read my del.icio.us list or subscribe to it via RSS. If you’re interested in more than just open source, you can see my entire list of bookmarks.

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:

• store items and take notes

• bring in attachments
• drag and drop into the collection and tag things if you want
• archive entire webpages and highlight text and add sticky notes

Pages that support Zotero have an icon that appears in the address bar in Firefox (like the RSS icon)

State of the Community

• Hundreds of thousands of users

• 2288 discussion on Zotero forums
• 23 language locals all user contributed
• 80k views on quick start guide last month

Get Involved

• Make your tools play nice with Zotero (just a note - Koha does)

• Make your campus a Zotero campus — offer support and promote Zotero among students
• Get your hands dirty and extend Zotero
• Get things to work with Zotero by having them generate COinS
• See who’s recommending Zotero and tell people about it!!

Stats from the Room - and the Future

Trevor asked us a few questions to see how many people were aware of/using Zotero:

• How many people here have used Zotero - almost all hands

• How many are in institutions where Zotero is supported - not many hands at all
• How many are in institutions where other management tool is supported - lots of hands

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.

• Solr

• Universal feed parser – can take the worse rss and clean it up no matter what
• Eventlet — allows you to run tens of thousands of processes within a single thread
• django, ruby on rails, etc.

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

PLA is coming upon us very quickly! I just wanted to let you all know that I’ll be there probably at the booth most of the time - so stop by and see me. I also want to bring your attention to the Koha Interest Group meeting that we’re holding.

Time and Place
Date: Thursday, March 27, 2008
Time: 3:30pm - 5:00pm
Location: Hyatt Regency Minneapolis (Greenway Ballroom on the 2nd floor)
Street: 1300 Nicollet Mall
City/Town:Minneapolis, MN

You can join the event on Facebook or see more information on the LibLime site.

I hope to see some of you there and meet some new people

PS. I still have more Code4Lib summaries to write up - keep an eye out!!