Code4Lib 2014: Day 3 Lightning Talks

Lightning talks on Day 3 of Code4Lib.

Bplgeo: A Geocoding Gem – Steven Anderson

Why?
* geographic data is neat, but unstructured and lacks standardization
* names are great for faceting
* great for plugins with coordinates
Steps
* just clone
* mapquest not so great
* bundle install
* just added
Code

Boiling a Frog: A Responsive Update – Charlie Morris @cdmo & Angie Fullington @afullington

  • Starting with a good site, but was fixed width and needed more flat, responsive, brand/style standards
  • Turn up the heat up slowly, won’t jump out
  • doing a series of incremental changes e.g. increased font size, remove borders, remove drop-shadows, replacing icons
  • Magic Escalator of Acquired Knowledge – need to fill knowledge gap between current knowledge to target knowledge
  • wanted to avoid redesign because might fall back on escalator
  • Sneak Peek – will launch end of semester
  • Code

Dev-Ops at Penn State University – Justin Patterson

  • bridge between sys admin and developers
  • incorporated Capistrano (remove multi-server automation tool) – routine actions across multiple servers
  • has many recipes e.g. Passenger upgrade
  • server automation using Chef (server automation framework for deploying servers and apps)
  • Gemnasium checks for vulnerabilities on all dependencies
  • Repo Security use GPG encryption, have everything in public but secure
  • Github

How to be a part of an Open Source Community – Jennie Rose Halperin

  • we’re all using open source tools
  • lots of benefits to contributing, particularly interacting with the community itself
  • can contribute to lots of open source projects in lots of different ways, but don’t have to be a “coder”
  • outreach for women program
  • http://www.whaticandoformozilla.org
  • Teach with webmaker
  • bring open source to your campus
  • open badges

Putting Things in Finding Aids – Tim Shearer

  • discovery of finding aids using HTML version, had minimal metadata, Contentdm, support variable rates of ingest, flexible for volume, work independently
  • did have consistent metadata, tight workflow and policies, easy to use for ingest, unique IDs for collections and containers
  • Solution: XML -> XSLT -> .html / .xls (for Contentdm)
  • Loose systems: Tight data (finding aid digitized content)
  • Web API on top of Contentdm
  • robust and extensible, because lets Contentdm handle content types
  • sustainable: workflow well defined, integrates, simple to train
  • problem: it was slow
  • solution: caching shim, updated nightly
  • UX updated

Schema.org and Google Custom Search for Finding Aids – Sean Aery @seanaery

  • embed schema.org data into our HTML (using RDFa Lite)
  • power our search with Google’s index
  • powered by custom search, but built own rich snippets
  • digital collections was a little more complicated (vs. finding aids) but using Google XML API instead
  • good: DIY snippets (possible in free CSE), relevance, speed, non-roman characters
  • gotchas: results/query limits, unstable, imprecise results count, quirky structured data omissions via APIs
  • See also the blog article about schema & CSE

Chicago Collections Consortium

About
* 12 Chicago area institutions
* looking to build portal to integrated access to Chicago focused collections across members
* a lot of similar stuff across collections
* include digital images and fully searchable finding aids
Problems
* everyone has different metadata “standards”, differences even within
* no two EAD implementations are the same
* “descriptive standards” are very different
Technology Choice
* XTF from California Libraries
* flexible metadata processing
* no editing of the original metadata needed to tame subject madness
* lexicon in separate file
* will be making code and documentation available online

Contrary Technologies: Stuff you’re not using and probably won’t – Ian Walls

  • CMS: Open Source, PHP, MVC = SilverStripe, already using it, capable, fewer developers and modules, but have local skillset
  • responsive design framework = open source, gridbase = Zurb’s Foundation, easier to customize, great documentation and training, lower barrier to contribution
  • search engine: open source, Lucene = elasticsearch, incredibly scaleable, JSON instead of XML, mix and match schemas, nested documents, baked in geospatial support, pluggable scoring scripts, rivers (slurp things in e.g. from Twitter)

Browse-Everything for Rails – Michael Klein

  • Rails Gem
  • developed for hydra, but not hydra specific
  • everything: server-side directory, dropbox, skydrive, google drive, box.com, extendable = just add drivers

No Break but Have Cute Piglets

cute piglets