Tag: code4lib

non-conference c4l posts

Code4Lib Day 1: Morning Notes

Was trying to do too many things this morning, so sorry if the notes are not complete.

ARCHITECTING ScholarSphere: How We Built a Repository App That Doesn’t Feel Like Yet Another Janky Old Repository App

  • Dan Coughlin, Penn State University
  • Mike Giarlo, Penn State University

Presentation Slides

Trying to make it less confusing without exposing what system it’s using.

Simple Metadata Management

  • building metadata widgets
  • required: title, creator, keyword, rights
  • hide most non-required, have ‘more’ link for rest
  • limited to a set numbers, with tooltip
  • use jQuery autocomplete to suggest authority vocabulary

Dashboard

  • list of uploaded files
  • list of files have access to

Background Jobs

  • I got lost here talking about rescue jobs, sorry
  • has tracebacks for

Permissions Widget

  • set visibility
  • share with specific people

Version Control

  • can restore previous versions

Social Features

  • not in initial requirements
  • profile
  • contributions – “trophies”
  • activity – follow/following

8 months to develop, but spent 2 months just doing usability and responding to feedback.

Available on GitHub.

Pitfall! Working with Legacy Born Digital Materials in Special Collections

  • Donald Mennerich, The New York Public Library
  • Mark A. Matienzo, Yale University Library

Presentation Slides

Disk Images Process

  • process
  • stream – digitized analog magnetic signal
  • sector – stream decoded using algorithm(s)
  • object
  • physical – entirety of device
  • logical

Pitfalls

  • formats mean different things
  • communities of practice use different kinds of container formats
  • no single solution

Quest for Access

  • delivery format
  • what allowed to be done with material
  • need usability testing

Pitfalls

  • no ideal single model
  • decisions through the life cycle have an impact on access
  • capacities of institution

Collection

  • faculty papers – 162 floppies
  • goal: “recover” backup into something useful with minimal changes, repeatable process
  • Vita Russo Papers
  • goal: preserve original, describe and arrange, access

Conclusions

  • Time consuming
  • acknowledge researchers
  • need to work on communities of practice

Hacking the DPLA

  • Nate Hill, Chattanooga Public Library, nathanielhill AT gmail.com
  • Sam Klein, Wikipedia

A rally to get involved.

It’s an API, and a community.

Examples

  • Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • Minnesota Digital

Events

  • Digital Public Library of America Appfest
  • Launch at Boston Public Library April 18-19

Documentation and API Creator is on GitHub.

EAD without XSLT: A Practical New Approach to Web-Based Finding Aids

  • Trevor Thornton, New York Public Library

Side note: EAD = Encoded Archival Description — a way of describing archival collection.

Project Goals

  • enable multiple presentations of the same data
  • support dynamic web apps
  • cross-collection search with component-level specificity in results, and faceting on common access points

Archives Data Management Application

  • system using Ruby on Rails + MySQL + Solr
  • based on existing infrastructure
  • stick with what they know
  • didn’t need to do anything more complex
  • key functionality: data import, search index, API

Core Models

  • collection: collection as we know it, may also be single volume
  • component: some collections at item level, some not
  • description: some data has descriptive attributes
  • access term

I just felt like I was copying the slides at this point, so I’ll try to get a link to the presentation slides instead.

The Avalon Media System: A Next Generation Hydra Head For Audio and Video Delivery

  • Michael Klein, Senior Software Developer, Northwestern University LIbrary, michael.klein AT northwestern DOT edu
  • Nathan Rogers, Programmer/Analyst, Indiana University

Demo!

  • can upload from computer, but also shared dropbox
  • forced to enter some metadata

Avalon

  • is a stack
  • media streaming server

Content Processing

  • with Matterhorn
  • workflow pipeline – batch/unattended ingest – uploading one delimited file with names of files that should be related
  • pingbacks for status updates
  • caching of key metadata/images

Stream Security

  • support different types of streaming (for desktop & mobile) and authentication
  • use authentication tokens
  • half is media ID, add another half, whole thing is auth token

Lunch Time

I'm Hungry
‘Nuff Said

Code4Lib Day 1: Opening Keynote – Leslie Johnston

Want to talk about communities and community building. It was a partial contextual shift as to her place in a number of communities.

Thought a lot about where she fits in. Have had a lot of identities, and thinks of herself as: nerd, geek, wonk, curator, archivist, woman, leader. Originally thought of herself as just another person, but everyone in this room should take on the role of leader.

Everything we do is part of the community, everywhere. Everyone in code4lib is part of a

community that succeeds through relationships.

Take the ethos of code4lib back to each organization.

leslie johnston doing the opening keynote

Software Development

Every software requires a community. Each person is part of it cares. Sustaining software requires a community of people who really care. We need to think about who uses our software. This

community is not just about people who write code,

it’s also about people use the software.

The most important thing is to work with those groups of users.

Communications

These communities are built using communication, inclusiveness, consideration, even more communication, and sense of ownership.

Need to think about users, stakeholders, researchers.

Everyone should read this blog post on backchannel conference talk.

Seen projects fail because they’re shared with the world but no one really takes ownership. Ownership goes both ways. Owning what you release, but also helping other projects be a success. Not everything fails, but it needs a community to thrive.

This is what we’re looking for in our communities and in our projects.

That they thrive.

You want a community that participates, looks out for each other.

What Defines a Successful Community or Project?

Participation. One project was a massive failure because no one participated.

Enthusiasm. Who would even want to fund it?

A sense of pride. ‘I’m part of that, made it happen, succeeded in part because of me.’

Learn from the history and the people who can be your mentors. Look at what you’re doing and what came before. Part of inclusiveness is acknowledging that you’re not the only person who has ever worked on the problem, who can work on the problem.

Adoption. A sign of success is that they’ve take it, use it, and contribute to it.

Now we will discuss.

Q&A Session

This supposedly not shy group, but is actually shy a lot of time.

Do we not think we’re not ‘real’ coders? Have the self imposter syndrome. But actually, she is a coder too.

Why does this community has to self-organize? Actually, awesome that this community has self-organized. Used to think every collection is unique and not doing the same thing, but we’re seeing emergence of communities that are realizing this is not true. For example, linked data community cross-fertilizing regardless of the type of collections they had. We self-organized was a sense of shared problem and shared passion.

No one organization can do it alone. We all need to work on it together.

Two most attributes to fail projects. One person thought it was a good idea, but no one else knew they were working on it. It didn’t succeed because there was no sense of participation, because no one was invited to participate. No one should work alone. We fail because we don’t collaborate.

How do you convince someone that they are a leader? Tell them that they are a success.

How do you adopt something when the leaders are not on board? ‘But everyone else is doing it, dad.’ Adoption by others. It’s really hard to be the first one though, we know.

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

Bret Davidson, North Carolina State University Libraries

Code4Lib Pre-Conference: Fail4lib

Being a smaller session, there was a lot of tangents and what not, so apologies if the notes seem a little disorganized.

—

Slides

How do you measure “value” or success of projects in library setting where ROI is not measure in the amount of money?

Some Flavours of Failure

  • technical failure
  • failure to effectively address a real user need
  • overinvestment
  • outreach/promotion failure
  • design/UX failure
  • project team communication failure
  • failure to start
  • launch failure
  • no usage
  • missed opportunities (risk-averse failure)

Most of these issues boil down to a break down of communications of some sort.

What does a Project Manager Do?

Sometimes the problem is not knowing what a project manager does. The person who comes up with the idea thinks they run the project; think that they know everything to make the decisions. Or, they become the one dictating all the requirements.

A lot of the issues are political. No way to move it over to having systems oversight.

Making the Distinction?

Project manager is in charge of day to day operations. Project lead is thinking about high level requirement, more strategically, and becomes liaison between systems and the rest of the library. (e.g. public services project, would have public services librarian) Decisions are made collaboratively.

Once it settles in, make an oversight team for maintenance purposes.

The Culture of Process

Product is the reflection of the process? But, want to see evidence of process. Without ‘evidence’ of the process, what about accountability and transparency? The evidence can also be a good reference so that you don’t have to explain.

Get people to meet to discuss what they’re going to do. Can cut down a lot in the amount of time spend doing things that aren’t needed, and waiting for dependencies.

Staff frequently also think they know what users want better than users.

Project FUBAR Lightning Talk

Slides

Major Projects

  • Islandora + digital repository initiative on campus
  • Sierra – ILS
  • EZProxy

Timeline

  • Islandora: lots of delays in development
  • ILS: had to go beta early

Option for Failure?

  • mission critical projects, must be salvaged
  • how to deal with other people’s projects failure – vendors didn’t deliver
  • plan for the worst before the worst happens

How to Successfully Survive a Mandated Project

  • practice good communication
  • know the political ramifications of your actions to yourself and the chain of command
  • work to manage expectations
  • be prepared to clean up any messes and make any changes
  • Souce: Ellern, Jill. “How to Successfully Survive a Mandated Project,” Computers in Libraries 31, no. 9 (Nov 2011): 16-20.

The Right Approach

Baby Porcupine

This is a reference to the Dilbert comic called “The Right Approach”, which a porcupine says that “we must stick them with quills – it’s the only way!”, because the ‘correct’ approach in any situation is the only approach you know.

While the project I worked on wasn’t quite like this, it was more the ‘the status quo’ is the best approach.

Project Failures

Slides

Seagull failure

  • “seagull manager flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything then flies off again leaving a big mess behind” -urbandictionary

Examples – Fail Projects

Never went live

  • statistics dashboard for collections and services
  • web app to add photo information to specific photo collection

Fail by Bloat

  • Instruction workshop scheduler – supports weird business rules

Managing Risk

  • building diverse teams
  • expecting dead ends
  • having fall-back plans
  • learn to say ‘no’ (preventing project creep), list features and possibly impact and complexity
  • fault-tolerant schedules
  • establishing flexible goals at the start
  • communicate
  • making sure it fits in the strategic plan (helps with funding)
  • prototype/drafting to make sure it’s feasible
  • make product resilient, assuming someone will try to break it
  • launch checklist by VCU

It’s All About Communications

Need to communicate with the staff. Present and allow feedback. Need to give people an outlet to provide feedback and response to feedback. You don’t need to implement most of it.

Don’t assume that the person is ignorant, dumb, or just out to get you. You’re not always right, and sometimes ideas are tossed in just to make people think.

When a Project has Failed

Do a post-project review and go over the failure points. Post-mortem meetings can be very cathartic (even if it ends up being a rant).

Learn from your mistakes. You should always do this even if the project didn’t actually fail.

Cold

Now it’s back to braving the cold at the end of the pre-conference day.

kitty in snow

code4libTO December Meetup Talks

BagIt Profiles – @ruebot

  • directory of data
  • bag has what you’re bagging, data, contact email/name, organization information, profile identifier (JSON via a URI)
  • pull in all the field values
  • validate
  • wrote a spec and send it to digital curation community
  • can look up profiles in the registry

Okay, I got a little lost, but you can see more on github.

Internet Archive Torrent Collections (iaTorrent) – @ruebot

Bookfinder – @TheRealArty & Steven

  • I will write this up later probably as a separate blog post, or maybe journal article

TPL’s Web Services Architecture: Understanding the Big Picture – @waharnum

  • many different systems that don’t easily communicate, which needs specialized knowledge even to do basic tasks
  • address the challenges by translation, simplication, standardization
  • Three tiers: Front End Systems (requests to back end) / TPL Web Services (REST) / Back End Systems (responds to front end)
  • Example: TPL Website -> Account Web Services -> Symphony Web Services (Symphony) – and back
  • can add new features and functions
  • helps to solve the challenges mentioned
  • also helps with reusability e.g. in addition to website, build mobile-friendly website, iPhone App
  • Might end up with:
    • Front End (Website, mobile, App)
    • Middle Tier (Account Web Services, ebook Web Services, online payment web services)
    • Back End (symphony, overdrive, payment gateway, accounting systems)
  • other benefits:
    • increase ease of knowledge transfer about how our systems work
    • follow modern best practice approach to building interoperating systems
    • reduce cost and integration time
  • reduce learning time for new staff or consultants
  • metrics: wish had resources
  • bolting together a lot of things, not using a lot of custom code

Ladder (aka MyTPL 2) – @mjsuhonos

  • wanted to solve problem: discovery layers suck
  • problems:
    • not scalable
    • inflexible
    • read-only
    • expensive
  • goals:
    • better than open source options (VuFind, Blacklight)
    • cheaper (than proprietary)
  • scalable as WorldCat
  • design:
    • schema-free/multi-schema (e.g. Dublin Core)
    • horizontally scalable (multi-node)
    • modern OSS components
  • simple data model (RDF)
  • Features:
    • hierarchical relations
    • clustering/de-duplication
    • versioning
    • real-time import & indexing
    • multi-thread/process
    • responsive UI
    • fully multilingual (18/10)
    • dynamic faceting
    • dynamic mapping modification
    • digital content storage (coming soon)
  • built on a linked data
  • not a discovery layer; it’s an integration platform

Heritage U of T – @ajmcalorum

  • News Announcement and Promotional Video
  • previously not centralized: hard drives, flickr, etc.
  • need central repository for tri-campus initiative with search & discovery, preservation, long-term access to content and metadata, support for multiple formats (e.g. images, books, documents, video, exhibits)
  • Drupal + Solr (search) + Fedora Commons (collection management, batch ingesting, metadata crosswalk, digital preservation) == islandora (digital asset management system)
  • pilot: 8 parent collections (by format, by campus)
  • exhibits in Drupal, not through islandora/fedora commons
  • modules: internet archive book reader (OCR on the fly), galleria, colorbox
  • official launch: 2 weeks ago

That’s it! Food and drinks time!

code4lib Cool Tool Day

So inspired by the ASIS&T Cool Tool Day, I thought it’d be neat to do one of these since there weren’t many volunteers to do lightning talks/presentations at the code4lib Toronto meetup this time around. Our attendance was a little… paltry, but we had some great presentations! Here are my notes from the session.

Presented by @waharnum

soapUI

  • working with REST based web services
  • testing automation tool for web services
  • best for building with other API
  • autogenerate stubs using WSDL
  • interface between internal systems
  • good for documenting web services, code style with examples
  • normally, mostly used for unit testing

Trello

  • virtual card based whiteboard
  • flexible for planning based
  • collaborative
  • great usability/UI
  • even has mobile apps

Mustache Templates

  • maintaining HTML email templates
  • also works as a crazy text editor for nerds

XSL Transforms plugin in Firefox

  • local reporting
  • anything XSLT with just a few security restrictions
  • e.g. SVN reporting

Presented by @adr

ShowOff

  • cross platform presentation
  • push from laptop to another computer

Sidenote: Other Presentation Tools

Presented by @ruebot

VIM Plugins

  • pathogen – linking for VIM plugins to automatically load VIM plugins
  • nerdtree – pull files quickly by displaying directory/tree

Presented by Pomax

Thimble HTML/CSS Live Web editor

  • teach anyone (kids, adults) HTML and CSS
  • use existing projects to make it fun!

FlickrFindr

  • easy inline flickr search of CC images
  • attribution in alt text

Presented by me

F.lux

  • monitor hue changer, supposedly to help people sleep better by telling your body what time of day it is

That’s it! Hope to do another one of these or lightning talks next time.