Code4Lib 2010 – Day 1
Posted on 24. Feb, 2010 by matt in Collaboration, Conferences, Matt's Adventures and Musings
The first day of Code4Lib has drawn to a close. The irc channel was flooded with raucous banter and twitter was very active as well. In the evening, one person who had only followed the tweets commented to me that “people at this conference are very polite”. I jokingly assured her that all of the sideways comments must have been reserved for the irc channel.
The conference is off to a great start. Meanwhile, many people expressed intrigue at the prospect of Dev8D attendees remotely adding their noise to the mix tomorrow.
Keynote: Cathy Marshall on Personal Digital Information
The conference opened with an insightful and humorous keynote presentation by Cathy Marshall from Microsoft Research. The presentation delved into the technical, psychological, and sociological factors that impact management and retention of personal digital information.
Morning Sessions: Linked Data, Cloud Computing
After an impressive and RDF-laden linked data pep talk by Ross Singer, the morning’s presentations had a strong cloud computing bent, which swiftly gave rise to groans on the irc channel about cloud computing being over-hyped. The complaints were quickly challenged by others who pointed out that Code4Lib’s entire schedule was decided by popular vote. ”Where were your complaints when it was up for vote?”
Personally, in addition to watching the presentations and following the rapid-fire commentary on irc, I spent time exploring the commands that zoia the irc bot can respond to.
Afternoon Sessions: It all comes back to MARC Metadata.
The bread and butter for hackers in libraries inevitably revolves around MARC metadata and Integrated Library Systems (ILS). MARC records are notoriously troublesome and unreliable. It’s no surprise, then, that the afternoon’s presentations were almost exclusively about technologies and techniques for controlling, cleaning up, aggregating, de-duplicating, consolidating, and editing MARC metadata.
Lightning Talks & Breakout Sessions
The day closed with 14 Lightning Talks followed by 7 Breakout Sessions.
The Lightning Talks were:
- UW Forward – Steve Meyer
- MODS4Ruby & Opinionated XML – Matt Zumwalt
- The Digital Archaeological Record – Matt Cordial
- Hydra: Blacklight + ActiveFedora + Rails – Willy Mene
- Why CouchDB? – Benjamin Young
- Data integrity (cheap, fast, and easy) – Gwen Exner
- HathiTrust Large Scale Search update – Tom Burton-West
- EAD and MARC Sitting in a Tree: D-R-U-P-A-L – anarchivist
- EZproxy Wondertool – Paul Joseph
- HathiTrust APIs – Albert Bertram
- Repository of MARC Abominations – Simon Spero and J-Rock
- Mystery Meat – Joe Atzberger
- Fuwatto Search – Masao Takaku
The Breakout Sessions were:
- Code4Lib Journal open meeting/discussion
- Cloud4lib – next steps
- xC – Extensible Catalog
- VuFind
- Solr
- CouchDB
- MODS for Ruby & Opinionated XML
The lightning talks were, as always, diverse and energizing. The breakouts drew a fairly even spread of interest across all 7 topics, allowing everyone to dive deep into their chosen subject area with 8 to 20 people.