code4lib, day 1 part 2 2006 February 16
Here are some of my notes from Wed, Feb 15 at code4lib:
The first session of the day was the keynote from the Georgia Pines people who are working on Evergreen – an OSS Library Management System. Their design philosophy is a lot different then the other systems out there because they started to design it to scale well from the ground up. They expect to have 300 libraries, 10 million holdings, 2 million patrons, and 25 million circulation transactions a year. That’s a big library system!They also went into the reasons why they decided to go OSS instead of purchasing a commercial system (or just making a home-grown non-OSS system in-house). Basically they did it this way because no commercial system could meet their needs and the support they would be paying for was nowhere near adequate. They went OSS in hopes that other people outside of Georgia could get involved. I really, really hope the succeed. They plan to go live over Labor Day weekend 2006. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for them.
The next session was by Art Rhyno who talked about ERPs. Basically an ERP spends a lot of time up front figuring out the work process and work-flow to help people work more efficiently — something not done in traditional library acquisition system designs (unfortunately). The key thing I got out of Art’s session though was when he talked about a toy called “Beep Beep Buggy” he used to sell. It was a simple and easy to use toy that looked nice. He said this is what users want. Another key point he made was that if we fixed the backend of the library system (acquisitions, cataloging, etc., the front end will work better too.
Dan Chudnov hen went on stage and talked about unAPI and OPA. Basically what Dan is working on is a way to copy data between web apps easily (his example was to think of it like the clipboard on a computer desktop). Seems like an interesting idea and the methodology he is using to create the OPA standard is very streamlined.
After Dan, Jeff Young talked about WikiD. WikiD is a tool to build collections using a wiki-based method. While it is an interesting concept, their is probably not much I could do with it in my current environment but I do want to look at it more.
At this point we broke for lunch. I’ll catch up on the post-lunch talks latter.