Category: Events

including conferences and workshops

Code4lib Day 1 Morning: HTML5, Microdata and Schema.org (and other takeaways)

I did not take notes on everything in part because some of it was very technical and it can be hard to do notes, but here are some takeaways from the morning:

  • Versioning Control: Use it, Git or Mercurial. Doesn’t need to be code, can be data too. – Description and Slides
  • Take library data and make it available to users, can’t expect them to search for it.
  • Linked Data doesn’t need to be a huge project. Start small.
  • Why RDF? It’s flexible with easy addition of new attributes or classes, and works cleanly with an iterative approach.

HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org

by Jason Ronallo

Other than getting good ranking, we need to provide rich results, i.e. rich snippets. Some digital collection have been providing rich snippets already, such as NCSU Libraries.

How do we get this?

  • embedded semantic markup
  • HTML5 Semantics include nav, header, article, section, footer
  • HTML5 Microdata is a syntax for annotating content to communicate meaning of data to machines
  • similar to RDFA, other microdata
  • Microdata comes back as tree based JSON and allows for DOM API

For example:

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Organization” itemref=”logo”>
<a itemprop=”url” href=”http://code4lib.org/”>
<span itemprop=”name”>Code4Lib<\span>
</a>
</div>
where: scope = about something
type = type of item
prop = properties

For the user, there is no difference as display is the same. This provides a complete data model.

Schema.org  is a one-stop shop for vocabulary in describing items on the web.

Apologies, I did not take extensive notes on it, but to read more, check out the slides below or the Code4lib article he wrote.

Code4lib Day 1: Keynote on Code4libcon

Daniel Chudnov from George Washington University was the first Keynote of the conference.

Dan began with a bit of an introduction and then went into a very touching overview of the story of his family and his life. His life lesson was that

things fall apart.

We Blew It

We have turned away too many people: way more than 100 people. That was a terrible mistake. If we don’t address this mistake, this [conference] is not going to last.

Code4lib was inspired by Access, with some key aspects:

  • single track
  • participatory
  • social
  • beer
  • fun

The difference the organizers wanted was a (possibly) geekier version in the USA in Spring (so as not to compete with Access). What might have really pushed this discussion is that

we turned away more people in 2012 than attended in 2007.

Why? The most common answers revolved around the capacity of venue. There were of course, some other concerns about keeping it a small, informal, participatory conference that were expressed, especially in the backchannels (IRC and Twitter).

Nevertheless, Dan asked the key question “Why do you come?” He expressed how he comes to connect with people, and hang out with the attendees, and there are many others that wanted to join, but were turned away.

He went on to talk about how while there is a chasm of techies vs. non-techies, there shouldn’t be. Plenty of people want to learn what coders do, and as a group, we should want to help respond to change constructively. They want to code, and we should connect and work more closely with them. We have one choice to make:

HACK OR DIE

We Must Expand

Dan used PyCon as a possible a good mode to follow. They have:

  • 2 days of pre-conference tutorial days
  • up front training for all levels
  • 4 days post-conference sprint days
  • back-end collaboration for all levels
  • plenary talks, plenary lightning
  • multiple tracks

Dan was against multiple tracks for many years, but not anymore, because

we need to connect or this thing we have will fall out from under us.

His point is that next year people won’t even bother if there is no clear statement to make things work.

Challenges

  • break complacency
  • lack of proposals to host
  • too heavy a burden on local organizers

Possible Solutions

Committees need to be formalized, especially an advisory committee of former hosts to help future hosts. The work needs to be done through the year, and more open like it used to be. Dan also suggested a formal program committee to replace the “diebold-o-tron”, but there was some disagreement because it’s less participatory.

Some other ideas included a multi-core code4lib where each regional group would be 1 hour live streaming on the same day, and the BarCamp approach where there are no pre-planned presentations, which might work for regional code4lib conferences. However, concern was expressed with having too many small conferences organized, burning out possible hosts for the annual code4lib.

The next code4lib conference should aim for 500 people.

Chicago is ready. Are you?

Code4lib 2012 Pre-Conference: Digging into Metadata

The afternoon pre-conference session was Digging into Metadata: Context, Code, and Collaboration presented by:

  • Becky Yoose, Grinnell College
  • Corey Harper, New York University
  • Shana L. McDanold, University of Pennsylvania via Skype, and
  • Laura Smart, Caltech.

It was great seeing a big mix of people, many of them neither cataloguers or coders. I have put in below my annotated version of the slides (see presentation link for link to original slides).

I apologize that this is actually a set of images (WP doesn’t support embedding of PDFs and I didn’t want to put it on slideshare/issuu), but the PDF version is also available.

The links: History of ILSs and $judgement (warning, this may hurt your eyes).

Final Notes & Thoughts @ Access 2011

So I didn’t do a full post for all the sessions, but the live notes that were taken and presumably, video recordings will later be posted on the Access 2011 website.

Data Visualization

Jer Thorp gave a great talk on the data visualization work he’s done and has been working on at the New York Times. I couldn’t really take notes since so much of it was visual, but he blew a lot of minds with his work, so check out his blog.

My Lightning Talk

What really excited me beyond the work itself was the fact that he mentioned he was doing it all through Processing, so I decided to do a lightning talk to introduce everyone to Processing and more importantly Processing.js.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Processing is an open source programming language primarily used for dynamic and interactive graphing and data visualization. Processing.js is the sister project which brings processing to the web. What’s the greatest part of processing.js is that a developer can start doing the same sort of thing but from the JavaScript side.

Check out the demos to see what kind of things you can possible do. I am particularly interested in the educational applications, such as giving students interactive graphs to see how mathematical functions work (see the Bezier Curves tutorial).

Added value: web accessible, Drupal plug-in, WordPress plug-in, fun games like a remake of Asteroids on the exhibition page.

See Access Live Notes for Lightning Talks and talks about other tools.

Digital Preservation

  • what does digital preservation mean? preserving more than objects and items
  • think on scalability
  • preserve what matters
  • start with policy and practice, not a platform
  • library can’t do it alone, partner with IT, Archives, etc.
  • need to think strategically
  • no one answer
  • some good tools
  • get started
  • think about what we can do with partnership

Fail Panel

The fail panel was great, because there were a lot of great stories by the panelists and others. Here are some of the lessons learned from the fail stories.

  • bleeding edge is not always great
  • good escape clauses to get out of bad situations
  • make sure company is stable
  • don’t make thematic websites – not scalable
  • don’t be working on original records or have a backup
  • never trust a tech
  • if you think it’s a bad idea, speak up
  • don’t have a project driven by one person
  • sometimes there isn’t a tech solution
  • make sure you press the right button
  • need to make sure

Share your own stories at failbrary.org

Thoughts

This was actually my first conference, but I think (and I’m clearly not the only one) it’s been really well put together and the food has especially been awesome, many within great socials. There’s been some tech fail, but that’s expected at every place I think.

I have particularly liked this conference because rather than simply having speakers talk, everyone has been highly encouraged to participate in some way (i.e. hackfest + presentations, lightning talks). I never though I’d be speaker at a conference, especially my first, but with the nature of the talks and encouragement of people got me to do a lightning talk. I think that alone speaks loads to the community.

It’s been an awesome experience, I’ve learnt a lot, and met a lot of great people. I really hope to be able to attend the next one.

Access 2012

Sad to see Access 2011 end, but for next year, a  site will be set up to see who will host it, and the planning of the conference will be continued code4lib style.

Role of Vendors in Open Software Ecosystem @ Access 2011

Marty Tarle from Bibliocommons came to talk about a vendor’s perspective on the open source environment. From the chatter going on, not everyone agreed with everything he talked about, but that would almost be expected with a crowd that seems to have many very big open source supporters. Here are the major points that I jotted down.

Typical Library Software Ecosystem

  • lots of components
  • some open source software
  • lots of proprietary software
  • all needs to work together

Perception of Proprietary Software Vendors

  • perceived as closed and inflexible
  • lack of APIs, difficult to integrate with
  • long development cycles

If this is true for you, then you’re not working with the right vendors. Vendors should be committed to what the users need.

Focus is Often on the Wrong Things

  • open sourcing – think that any changes can be made, but inefficient and costly without vendor buy-in
  • standards support – but standards out of date and limited
  • direct access to data – think can do whatever want with data, but tremendous duplication of algorithms, infrastucture, operations

Focus Should be on Vendor Cooperation

  • interoperabililty is a two-way street
  • vendors need to
    • proactively enable integrations
    • proactively integrate other solutions into theirs

Vendor Development & Delivery Models

  • development
    • agility is critical
    • scrum and lean are now the norm
    • long development cycles are unacceptable
  • delivery
    • rapid deployment of new functionality
      • a lot of it is underlying architecture and a lot of testings
      • being open and flexible
    • rapid scaling of hardware
    • industry trend is towards “continuous deployment”: narrowing the gap between conception and production plus building the analytics to see whether it’s working

Vendor Culture

  • openness = part of company DNA i.e. being invested in client success
  • integration = core organizational capability
  • openness = proactive, continuous effort

What to Ask Your Vendors

  • pace of innovation
    • how many releases
    • how many notes
    • development model
    • delivery model
  • API
    • public
    • scalable
    • flexible
  • ask about attitude towards open source, whether used any, etc.

Best of Both Worlds

Best to use combinations from both worlds e.g. Evergreen + Bibliocommons

Partnership

Vendors and open source communities can work together. What makes a partnership successful?

  • communication
  • transparency
  • accountability on deliverables
  • shared success