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According to this press release, the King County (Washington) Library system has hired Equinox Software to install the Evergreen Integrated Library System (ILS) for evaluation. This is exciting news for fans of Evergreen and Open Source in Libraries! While the contract is for testing purposes at this point, it is reasonable to assume that if they like it, another large public library system will be using an Open Source ILS in the near future! (The other, large public library system being Georgia’s PINES, which developed Evergreen).

On Saturday, March 3 it was off to three Golden Isles Speedway near Brunswick Georgia for some dirt track racing. This track is about 40 miles North of Jacksonville not far from the Georgia Coast. Before the racing I took in some of the sites along the Atlantic by visiting Jekyll Island. I also stopped in GA Pig for some BBQ. While I’m sure Georgia has many fine BBQ places and some have chopped pork sandwiches as good as GA Pig, I doubt many have any better. If you are ever driving past Exit 29 on I-95 in Georgia and are hungry for BBQ, I’d highly recommend it.

This was the regular season opener for Golden Isles Speedway. They had a few nights of racing pre-Daytona Speedweeks about a month ago, but this was the first points show. They announced that next year they will have 10 nights of racing over 11 days for their Speedweeks. Combine all of the racing in Florida during Speedweeks and you can wrack up some serious numbers for the Racechaser in you! Golden Isles Speedway is currently 5/8th miles long and used to be an “oiled dirt track” and was known for being wicked fast. In fact, I remember hearing that a few of the big-name national dirt track drivers went there once t practice and left because it was too fast! I don’t know if it is true or not, but it makes a good story. I wish I made it to the track while it still had an oiled dirt surface. Anyway, the EPA (and probably a bunch of the drivers), made the track dig up all of that oil-soaked dirt a few years back and put in a regular red clay surface. This slowed the speeds down a bunch, but apparently not enough, as this June they are cutting the track down to 3/8th a mile. So, you better get there soon if you want to see the bigger track. The racing was rather good and they had decent car counts in most of the classes. A couple were pretty low (one of the three street stock classes had about 10 cars and another 3). The stands were pretty empty though. The racing was quite enjoyable and like the South Alabama Speedway show the night before, I got out of there happy and content at a reasonable hour. I skipped the last race of the evening (for the 3 pure stocks) and made it to my car just about 10:30 PM. This was my first race in the state of Georgia, and my first new dirt track of the year.

My 2007 Stats after Golden Isle Speedway are:
Races: 8
Tracks: 4 (2 new) (152 lifetime)
States: 4 (2 new) (37 lifetime)

On Friday. March 2, I visited the South Alabama Speedway in Opp, Alabama. This was the first night of a weekend of racing at the 4/10th mile paved oval. Talking about firsts, this was the first race I have ever seen in Alabama. The big race of the weekend was the Rattler 250 on Sunday for the super late models. However, I didn’t get to see any super late models, as only the local classes were on the agenda for Friday evening. These consisted of street stocks and a modified class. The track was repaved over the winter and the place seen a fresh coat of paint. You could tell the owners wanted to make the place look like a nice place to visit. Although the stands and buildings weren’t the newest, the place looked well cared for and it is amazing how much nicer a racetrack can be when the owners take care of the little things like putting a fresh coat of paint on the stands, mowing the grass, etc. The owners were well rewarded for having a nice facility despite the chilly weather and two more days of admission prices, a good crowd was on hand for the races. While tracks located in the Southeast US are known by Trackchasers to start late and run the show long, I didn’t encounter this problem at South Alabama Speedway or the other two tracks I went to this weekend. The racing was pretty good and the track surface was pretty fast. I bet the asphalt super late models would really fly around the track! All-in-all, a good night of racing for only ten dollars.

My 2007 Stats after South Alabama Speedway are:
Races: 7
Tracks: 3 (1 new) (151 lifetime)
States: 3 (1 new) (36 lifetime)

Lightning talks:

Andrew Darby: Adopting Orphanware. Andrew talked about how he adopted the pirate source subject guide software that ECU originally released.

Ryan Wick: EAD PDF generator.

Tim Donohue: Format conversion in DSpace using OpenOffice.org. Tim talked about his basic javascript automatic format convertor that uses an OpenOffice.org API to convert documents to PDF.

Ralph LeVan: Worldcat identities. Talked about the OCLC Worldcat Identies project and how it works.

Tito Sierra: Improving search to high demand resources with “Best Bets.” Tito talked about how NCSU looked at web search logs to see what people where looking for and how to provide better results to people based on what are “high demand” resources.

Nicole Engard: Intranet 2.. Nicole showed off her Intranet. It was interesting that she had a message board that failed miserably, but when she implemented a blog that was really a message board, it was successful.

Terry Reese: OSU Metadata translation service. Terry talked about a Web service that accepts metadata streams and urls, and then transforms them to one of nine metadata types.

Terry Reese: LibraryFind

The development team is Jeremy Frumkin and Terry Reese and two offsite hackers Dan Chudnov and Tami Herlocker. LibraryFind is a Ruby on Rails application. LibraryFind is a metasearch tool(where items are harvested and federated), openURL resolver, openURL server, Web-service, Open Source and “one component of OSU’s vision of the library as a platform.” Some of the unique things about Library Find is that it has integrates OpenURL resolution both harvested and federated, utilizes a metadata-based knowledge base system, and has caching to make the federated search appear faster than it really is. Currently OSU’s instance of Library Find is harvesting and indexing 65 databases ever 5 days.

Michael Doran: The Intellectual Property Disclosure Process: Releasing Open Source Software in Academia.

Michael discussed the issues of creating OSS in Academia. Intellectual Property in aunt shell is basically “Intellectual property… blah blah blah…. belongs to the University” and “The exceptions that you thought belonged to you, don’t.” Michael said you need to use some common sense to see if it is relevant to your software. Nobody cares about your 50 line bash backup script, but if it is something bigger such as LibraryFind, you need to go through the process. Michael went on to describe the whole process of doing this at UTA. He described the issues he had with releasing software. You need to explain how the OSS model works and why it is useful for the Library (and the university as a whole).

Casey Durfee: Open-source Endeca in 250 lines or less.

Casey discussed the idea that the number of bugs increase exponentially with the number of lines of code. He keeps the programs short by using building blocks that others have put together. The building blocks he used are Solr, django, and other open source tools.This program looks pretty neat, but isn’t in production yet. It still needs more work.

Karen Combs: CMS on Steroids.
Karen showed her CMS at the University of Houston. It has some wiki-like feature that allow any librarian to edit pages, however they most be approved from the person in that area.

Aaron Krowne: SouthComb: Turning a “Meta-DL” into a sustainable ™ humanities community.: SouthComb is a “capstone” Mellon project that covers the American South.

Winonna Saleskey: XForms
XForms is an XML application that represents the next generation of forms. It splits forms into 3 parts. It is basically the next generation of HTML forms. Xforms have a Model-View-Controller approach. More info can be found on Wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XForms. There is also a code4lib wiki page about XForms.

Mark Matienzo (anarchivist): How to Create unmanageable indexing workflow.

Birkin Diana: Simplifying our ILL: Birkin is a programmer at Brown University. They are rolling out a new ILL system at the end of March. He talked about how the functionality worked in this new system.

Gabriel Farrell: Simple Dspace Submission with The Item Importer Gabe talked about how he created an API that used the DSpace item importer to make it as simple as possible for a professor to submit something into DSpace. This project is still in the works.

Kyle ?: Stone age repository : Kyle talked about the lowest tech repository in the world. Apparently they didn’t have much funding, so they had no way to do a lot of development and had to use their existing web server. Also, they didn’t want to change existing workflow. It wasn’t fancy, but seemed to work OK, even though it is rather basic.

Rob Styles (mmmmmRob): The Outlook of the future (abridged): Rob talked about his outlook of the future information services and attitudes. “The content is all mine!” vs. “The content can be shared.”

Jonathan Rochkind: SFX link resolver info in the OPAC: Jonathan talked about the problem of searching in his local catalog and it not including local holdings. He uses the SFX API to load the electronic holdings, however it doesn’t include dates, so he had to write a query to get that info. The hardest part, however, was getting the OPAC to display this information. It didn’t take all that long. Jonathan talked about getting the “Most bang for the buck”

Mark Phillips: Metadata analysis ooh. Mark discussed how he analysis data. They used some fun word clouds and other interesting views.

Stephen Hedges: OPLIN4CAST: Stephen discussed OPLIN4CAST. It uses WordPress and supplies Podcasts. The website has lots of info about how they do this: http://oplin.org.4cast

Mike Beccarin: Facets in Flamenco: Mike found something that is easy to do and filled a need. He used Flamenco (from UC Berkeley). Mike exports stuff from an Access database and wrote a script that places the data in Flamenco format. Once it is in Flamenco, people can browse it using Facets. It works really well for small collections. It can work on many different databases, but he is using it on MySQL.

Tom Wood: Public interface to ERM data: Tom talked about the University of Connecticut s interface to their ERM data.

Alexis Rossi: Internet Archive: Alexis discussed some of the projects at the Internet Archive. They have over 85 billion Web pages in their archive.

Dan Chudnov: Fun with ZeroConfMetaOpenSearch

Dan subtitled his talk “ZeroMetaOpenHuh? ” What he wants to do is make the library work like *iTunes*. ZeroConf relies on Five DNS record for each service, so we will need to work with the network people.

iTunes works on a Apple protocol (daap) and allows people to see music on other peoples machines. Basically a user joins a network, runs iTunes, daap protocols, and they advertise what services they are running. and people can connect.

Dan asked where does things like this happen today in Libraries. Simply put, it doesn’t. We need to make these things just work simply without people needing to do anything. Dan demoed how he is working on this with the Canary Project at Yale. This is nice, but it is not on a large scale.

Dan talked about what OpenMetaSearch. It is basically MetaSearch plus openURL.

ZeroConfMetaSearch is combining ZeroConf with OpenMetaSearch. With this everything coming in to the network can find your MetaSearch, and conversely when you go out somewhere, they can tell where your metasearch is.

This works neat, but is inefficient in large scales. We need to look at distributed search. Th e real important thing Dan wants us to think about if it isn’t as easy as iTunes,we are losing.

Atom Publishing Protocol Primer — Ed Summers

Ed Summers gave an introduction to the Atom Publishing Protocol. the Atom Publishing Protocol . One of the things Atom does is RSS-type service. The Atom publishing protocol is Atom+REST. APP is still in draft form. There is a working group and discussion list. The APP has 4 main parts 1) services, 2) workspaces, 3) collections (feed), and 4) resources (entries and media entries). APP can allow people to post items. In the example Ed showed, the service was configured to only allow items of Th. images MIME type. Some of the services using APP includes Google Data (used by blogger, google calendar, and many other Google services).

Bess Sadler: Library-in-a-box

She is representing wIFL-FOSS and came to talk about the library in box. eIFL is a library consortium represents many different countries around the world (none in North America). Most of these countries are “third world” countries. There are al lot of barriers in the developing world. They can be technical, legal, monetary, and political. Bess talked a little bit about how eIFL works to try to address some of these issues. The negotiate “consortia” contracts for materials, advocate for open access, knowledge sharing, and Open Source Software for libraries.

One of the goals of Library-in-a-box is an ILS that can work in many different (less popular around the world) languages. The people looking into library-in-a-box was the NGO-in-a-box software the apical Technology Collective. They want to create an ILS that not only helps the language issue, is an easy to distribute and install ILS that is fully internationalized interface and documentation. They want to use the source-camp model is being used to plan migration and build a community of expertise and support. They want to leap frog to a next generation system. They feel they go to all of this trouble, it should be modern.

Some of the benefits of this for eIFL libraries include: 1)license fees., 2)Building in-house, in-country expertise, 3) Strengthening collaboration, 4) language support, 5) this is their only option.

Currently they are doing an analysis of kohl, evergreen, and a commercial ILS system using “Open Business Readiness Rating.” They are not going after the libraries that have limited resources such as those in sub-saharan Africa.. They are more looking at larger university and national libraries.

The BibApp — Eric Larson and Nate Vack

Eric and Nate talked about a project they did ay Wisconsin. Some of the features include a “find an expert” piece that shows what someone has published and who they have published with. This has a lot of benefits, but getting the data may be a challenge. They are demo-ing by retrieving information from commercial databases and other resources . Some major challenges are de-duping the data and their are also issues with common names (like D. Gorman). The URL is: http://code.google.com/p/binbapp

Obstacles to Agility — Joan Starr

Joan Starr is from et California Digital Library. Joan defined agile per the “Agile Manifesto, 2001″ definition. The key aspects include 1)software is developed in short time boxes (”iterations”), 2) each iteration results in functioning build, value real time face to face communication (over documentation), 4) team includes programmers and subject specialist collocated, and 5) you measure progress with complete iterations. In this environment, you meet very often, even if just short periods of time. This methodology helps solve problems quickly for your costumers.
Some things that keep academics from being agile is the academic culture. these include the academic culture is “a non-participatory democracy, ” and individuals don’t want others to represent them (academic culture is not a representative democracy). People don’t want to participate, but want to be able to say “no.”

Another problem is it is often hard to find a single owner (whether and individual or committee) of a project. The result is these things just go on and on and on and on and on…. The hiring practices in academia also is a hindrance. It takes very long to hire someone and sometimes you can’t move folks around as needed.

There are also issues with programmers. Often they value space and privacy over team collaboration, often don’t want to share work in progress (aim for perfection before getting feedback), not good at predicting time lines.

Joan went on to discuss about what we can do about this. Since almost none of us are in charge of our institutions, we can only change what we can control. Thus, we need to look at what we can change. Joan described some work arounds to the hiring process such as working with independent contractors. The other thing we can do is learn (and adopt) agile programming techniques.

Get Groovy at Your Public Library — Amy Begg De Groff and Luis Salazar

Luis ended up presenting this session solo because Amy was, unfortunately, not feeling well. He said that he asked AMy what he should get across, and he said that she wanted hi to get across that putting Linux on their public workstations was one of the best things they could have done. The y first rolled out Linux to the public workstations in 2003 and never had a problem. They called their linux distro Lumix. However, people wanted more features (such as IM), so they found the Groovix distro which they now use. They pay the maker of Groovix for a support contract. As part of that, the maker of Groovix will make any changes, etc. they wanted.

Sarnowski: Digital Disaster Recovery: This session provided an overview of ResCarte.

Walter Lewis: Location, Location, Location: Walter is from the OurOntario.ca and he discussed the challenges of using facets based on location. They have a interesting Google Maps mashup based on location facets.

Mark Dehl and Jeremy ___: Breaking the III black box with Apache mod_filter: They talked about using Apache mod_filter to “scrape” III records. Unlike some ILS, III doesn’t really allow you to get to the MARC records.

Andrew Nagy: Sneak Peak at MyResearch Portal: Andrew showed off Villanova’s new open source OPAC based on Solr. Villanova hopes to put this in production this summer. Villanova uses Voyager and it should be real easy for another Voyager library (i.e. TCNJ )to take his code and do this!

Edward M. Corrado http://library2.0/del.icio.us:Hey that’s me! I talked about using de.licio.us to add websites to subject guides. To see the end product, go to : http://www.tcnj.edu/~library/moulaison/ItalianStudies.html

Martin Haye: Spelling 2.0 – beyond single words : Martin talked about a spelling engine he created for the California Digital Library.

Tricia Williams: Peel Prairie Provinces: Another Solr Project: Tricia talked about the faceted browsing features of the Peel Prairie Project i Canada. Some interesting features included the date facet graph and a google maps mashup.

LXiming: xISBN update: Discussed recent developments with OCLC’s xISBN service.

Dan Scott: File_MARC under PHP. Dan talked about a php Marc tool he wrote. File_MARC is a Pear library that is currently in Alpha. It builds upon emilda.org’s php_marc module and has an object oriented interface and unit tests. I reads in both MARC21 and MARCXML and can return MARC21 or MARCXML (As long as the data is UTF-8).

Brad Baker: Faceting in the DLG: Brad talked about adding faceting displays to the digital library of Georgia . One of the neat things about there facets is how they can be used for browsing. No need to search, just browse.

Karen Combs: AWstats for log analysis: Karen talked about AWstats, an open source tool written in Perl for dealing with Web server logs. The tool allows you to easily build different sets of reports. An interesting thing about AWstats is that it stores the data in XML files., that you can access using other tools.

Eric started off we a Southern preacher-type monologue which was pretty funny. Eric said his mission at his job is based on the fact that “you can’t use what you can’t find.” Eric discussed Solr Flare. Eric defined the basic idea with facets is to show the entire universe (or some subset) of object divided into subsets based on attributes. Really, when it comes to it, facets are really just basic set theory. The Flare part of Solr Flare is only a small bit of code that runs on top of Solr.

Eric showed of f Delicious Library (An OS X application to keep track of your books). He then exported the content for Delicious library and placed it into Solr. The results were pretty neat. I think this would be a great way to put your personal library on the Web. It may also work well with a LUG library . He mentioned he is working at doing this with iTunes data as well.

The URL for Flare is: http://wiki.apache.org.solr.Flare

At this point they still have a lot of work to do to increase scalability. They are still at a “proof on concept” stage, however the future is bright.