Code4lib 2007, Day 2, morning talks 2007 March 1
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.