Category: Technology

Code4Lib Day 3: Lightning Talks

Mark Matienzo – Wielding the Whip: Affect, Archives, & Ontological Fusion

  • need to talk about emotion – a lot of things going on in my life
  • inspired by Archives by Emotion
  • why do we not acknowledge that archives are based on emotion, stories
  • facebook ‘like’ is not an emotion
  • losing connections to materials and history when not thinking about the platform and how that effects our stories
  • can we write stories about our collections?
  • should be using existing linked data to make those narratives
  • let’s build this
  • Slides
  • Full Write-up

Jason Casden and Cory Lown – My #HuntLibrary

  • student engagement platform
  • how do students use the space?
  • what do they choose to document? – using instagram
  • student-drive archival selection
  • making use, harvesting social media
  • Implemention:
  • moderated, responsive
  • use for public display, can interactive, including larger public display
  • inspired by kitten war: built image battle
  • calculate popularity score
  • also about preservation, collect images
  • go.ncsu.edu/MyHunt

Steven Anderson – JavaScript Streaming Clientside Checksumming w/ HTML5 file upload

Will Hicks – Metadata Entry Beyond Usability

  • think back to volunteering to donate blood, etc. what value did it give you?
  • ~300 individuals creating metadata
  • stats have bumped up with a new interface
  • but 10% of the stuff is hidden
  • “usable” forms are great, but little “ownership” and lack of domain expertise
  • what if we applied the ideas used in social media?
  • invite with openID, personalize projects, badges, stats, visualization, etc.

Kelly Lucas – Drupal OPAC Recipe

  • the poor man’s Blacklight or Vufind with Solr backend
  • process:
    • MARC record dump into Solr using SolrMARC
    • install search API, Search API Solr, Facet API, Sarnia and Views from Drupal.org
    • configure Sarnia + FacetAPI (boosts, enable facets)
    • create a view, add some fields, create an exposed filter (full text search box)
    • slap some facets to the side of the page
  • issues: new/updated records requires direct connection to ILS
  • Slides

Karen Coyle – Nerd Poetry

  • cowboy poetry – told around the camp fire

Mark Redar – Django Dublin Core App

  • plugin app
  • on Github
  • RecordExpress – lightweight, easy to use esp. for those not familiar with XML

James Stuart – Taming Email

  •  a really big problem
  • part of your job
  • here’s how to tame email
  • don’t organize: organizing your email is like alphabetizing your recycling
  • mailstrom.co
  • turn keyboard shortcuts on
  • shortcutFoo
  • don’t be distracting
  • bookmark
  • Also take a look at Making Thunderbird More Gmail-y

No Break! Have a Cute Animal Anyway

white ermine
Have a Cute White Ermine

Code4Lib Day 2: Lightning Talks

Demian Katz – gamebooks.org, Geeby-Deeby, and the Dime Novel Bibliography Project.

  • interactive fiction books
  • Made a really big bibliography
  • people sending in more
  • put it in a big database
  • open-source project to adapt backend
  • MySQL db that models various types of entities, relationships
  • backend system to edit entities, enter data, edit relationships

Rachel Frick – LODLAM Summit 2013 and Challenge

  • linked open data in library, archive, and museum
  • had challenge to win cash prize
  • can still submit, just fill out form and make/submit video

Kenny Ketner – Occam’s Reader

  • allow libraries to lend ebooks to each other using document delivery model
  • compatible with IILiad
  • no training, no workflow change
  • can add formats incrementally (started with PDF)
  • basic interface that discourages abuse
  • access previously unaccessible resources
  • in alpha testing
  • Slides

Al Cornish – Orbis Cascade Alliance Shared ILS Project

  • primary service is consortial services
  • move to new system beyond traditional ILS
  • single shared system (vs. currently 37)
  • explore collaborative technical services, collection development
  • Alma + Primo selected, migration in progress

Makoto Okamoto – Crowd Funding for Library in Japan

  • culture of donation changed a lot after 3.11
  • share experience and metrics
  • key to success is setting up appropriate ticket

William Denton – Code4Lib 2013 Augmented Reality View in Layar

  • picking points of interest from two spots
  • 1: Google Places map
  • 2: Twitter search API – of the ones that are geolocated
  • Web service in Ruby and Sinatra, hosted on Heroku
  • Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge – go read it.
  • Slides

Rosalyn Metz – What I learned while I was away

  • learned about planning, budget, and time
  • time is the most important thing
  • track your time, might be spending too much time on things e.g. don’t spend more than 10 mins on a single email
  • can demonstrate where need help
  • Slides

Nettie Lagace – Recent Cool Fun NISO Activities

  • ResourceSync Framework Specification
  • Bibligraphic Roadmap Initiative
  • Slides

Chuck Koscher – Fundref

  • list of funders
  • what articles given certain funding

Andromeda Yelton – Five Conversations About Coding

  • computer science majors in 1995: yardstick of who is cooler than who dependent on the most arcane knowledge
  • boston python workshop 2012: women friendly course. Expecting to be judged.
  • chad nelson, monday night. It’s not free
  • bess sadler, yesterday. We have a problem with insecurity
  • important to recognized our limitations, but have this imaginary yardstick
  • ever done coding? majority. think coder? 1/2

Jeremy Morse – mPach: Publishing directly into HathiTrust

  • sorry, didn’t quite get this one

Rob Dumas – Git in Five Minutes

That’s all for today.

sleeping owl
How I Feel

Code4Lib Day 2: Afternoon Notes

De-sucking the Library User Experience

  • Jeremy Prevost, Northwestern University

Libraries hate library users. If we didn’t, our websites wouldn’t suck.

Discovery

  • if a user can’t find it, why do you own it?
  • spend a lot of money on acquiring resources or access to them
  • want to allow them to find them
  • Good: works like Google from the user’s perspective
  • Bad: needs to know how it works to make it work e.g. need to know MARC; can only find known items
  • live examples: Ex Libris Voyager vs. Primo
  • Voyager: no relevant results even using boolean ‘AND’
  • Primo: can use boolean or not, relevant results – de-sucked!

Requesting Item

  • Request information/user experience also sucks
  • Prepopulated info, request item if not available – de-sucked!

Renew Item

  • consistency
  • made interfaces consistent – de-sucked!

Mobile

  • not going away
  • no mobile until mid-2007 for iPhone
  • jQuery mobile – Apr 2010 – but updating two sites sucks, no support for tablets
  • Mar 2013: responsive design, bootstrap

Libraries don’t hate library users!

  • start with something that you would enjoy using

Slides

Google Analytics, Event Tracking and Discovery Tools

  • Emily Lynema, North Carolina State University Libraries
  • Adam Constabaris, North Carolina State University Libraries

How to track in-page events. Decide which events to track, push to Google.

Event Tracking Use Cases

  • hidden or externally AJAX events e.g. facets, tabs
  • internal links that occur in multiple places e.g. request item
  • external links

Examples

  • Catalog: click on tabs twice as much as everything else; full text used a lot; browse graphical < text because of placement; about half request item even though in 2 different places
  • Summon: trying to track what they could track. Paging more popular than facets

Implementation

  • GA API script
  • jQuery API
  • HTML5 Data Attributes: data-* for use by scripts
  • decide what to track
  • basic technique
  • Summon gets harder. Have to get it in the code. more selectors

Debugging & Testing

  • set up safety net first
  • know the debugger
  • use the GA debug
  • test a lot

Actions speak louder than words: Analyzing large-scale query logs to improve the research experience

  • Raman Chandrasekar, Serials Solutions
  • Susan Price, Serials Solutions

Single unified index for all the items from all libraries’ collections.

RMF Goals

  • observe and log user actions e.g. queries, filters, click patterns
  • compute quality of search results e.g. user behaviour
  • analyze data to improve search results and enhance research experience

Data-Driven Documents: Visualizing library data with D3.js

  • Bret Davidson, North Carolina State University Libraries

Slides and resources

Why D3?

  • uses technologies that you already know
  • capable library – pre-built path generations, well maintained etc.
  • community – documentation, training available
  • might not because of learning curve, and don’t need something this complex

Examples

  • suma – space assessment toolkit
  • show visualization real time, tables, and CSV file

HTML5 Video Now!

  • Jason Ronallo, North Carolina State University Libraries

Yes! Also, slides/presentation.

Here’s Why

  • Flash video cannot be run on most mobile/tablets

How it Works

  • uses video HTML tag
  • use simple fallback – download if can’t view
  • problem: browsers cannot decide on single codec to use; codec war
  • solution: multiple sources: mp4, webm
  • use poster attribute as “screenshot” and don’t have to download video right away
  • add type attribute to say which format to use; can be very explicit
  • only one video per page please!
  • properties exposed in JavaScript
  • can add custom controls, more info for users
  • events that you can listen for e.g. timeupdate to update time in a video; update wording e.g. which floor
  • analytics: play, pause, seek, ended
  • can do visualization of engagement
  • can style with CSS
  • track for subtitles

Polyfills and Advantages

  • provide video controls
  • flash fallback
  • progressive download and range requests

Future of Media on the Web

  • DRM looks to be coming
  • Popcornjs – can do annotation
  • Web Audio API – mix audio, filters, etc.
baby and mother owl
Breakout Time