code4lib, day 3 2006 March 1
The last day of the code4lib conference was actually just a half day. Besides breakout reports from Thursday’s break out sessions, we had 3 “regular” talks and some lightning talks that we didn’t get to on Thursday afternoon.
Aaron Krowne started the regular talks off with a talk about Quality Metrics. Aaron talked about using focus groups for user studies. Some of his findings that I found interesting included that users didn’t want to be told what was high quality, but they wanted to be given hints, users don’t want upfront complexity, but they do want the ability to access advanced features, and users want to know what is going on with their searches (i.e. how is ranking being done?). Some quality indices that Aaron identified included: text similarity, citations, hyperlinks, reviews, circulation, selection (i.e. did a professor put it on reserve), availability, and use rights.
The next talk was about the “Practical Aspects of Implementing Open Source in Armenia” by Tigran Zargaryan. It was interesting to see what challenges a country that has a different language has with implementing open source. However, Tirgan did note that a number of popular OSS programs have Armenian translations including OO.o 1.1, Thunderbird, Firefox, Moodle, and more.
The last talk was about “What Blog Applications Can Teach Us About Library Software Architecture” by Casey Bisson. Casey talked about a library OPAC, called WPopac, that was made using the blogging application WordPress. An interesting idea, but I don’t see it ever replacing an OPAC, but maybe it could supplement it. Anyway, I’m not sure that was Casey’s point. I think his main point was that libraries should, and need to, look outside of the library world for OSS solutions.
After the leftover lightning talks we said goodbye. Everyone I talked to though it was a great conference. In fact it may have been the most useful one that many of the attendees ever went to. I plan on adding this one to my yearly conference itinerary .