code4lib, day 2 part 5 (lightning talks) 2006 March 1
Sorry for the long delay on getting these up. I’ve been a little too busy to write something up that would provide as much information as I wanted so I’ve been putting it off. However, it seems that I’m going to be busy for a while longer, so I guess I should just get something up now and stop dragging my feet. Anyway Thursday, Feb 16 ended with a marathon of lightning talks. While they were all interesting, there were something like 22 in a row. My poor little brain was overwhelmed with all of that content. It was great that people jumped on the lightning talk idea, but next time I think we need to limit the talks to 15 in a row with at least a 15 minute break so the little hamster in the wheel inside of my head can catch up.
As I mentioned all of the lightning talks were interesting, but there was too many to talk about each one. Also, I had trouble catching names and spellings, so I apologize if I got some wrong and/or are missing some. Some of the highlights included a session about how to encrypt patron circulation data so you can keep it without worrying that someone may be able to use (subpoena?) it.
Jim Robertson did a talk about repurposing syndicated feeds from Scopus. Basically what he was doing was using canned queries to make feeds of new faculty publications. The faculty at NJIT where Jim works are more focused, so I’m not sure how the concept would work for a liberal arts college like TCNJ, but I plan on looking into this some.
Jeff Davis talked about problems relating to LC call numbers.
Eric Hellman gave a nice short overview of COinS.
Kyle Banerjie stated that “MARC is undead” and that “MARC can’t die.” I liked his analogy he used that said “MARC is librarian for vi.”
Walter Lewis talked about ways to expose your data to Google. I liked how he described RSS as “Result Set Syndication.” While not a name in any of the standards, I think this is one of the best ways to look at it.
Terry Reese talked about his MarcEdit program. It is a GUI program that can edit MARC records and do a lot of other XML crosswalk stuff as well. I’ve used it before and it is a great Windows utility.
I hope to post a report on Friday morning @ code4lib latter on today.