Code4Lib 2010 Day 2: Afternoon Session
Posted on 25. Feb, 2010 by matt in Collaboration, Conferences, Matt's Adventures and Musings
It’s extremely gratifying to attend a conference where super smart presenters don’t shy away from showing real code. It’s even better to be at a conference where the presenters manage to show complex code while making it understandable even to people who don’t use the related systems. Every presenter today has managed to do that really well.
This is what happens when smart people people come together, communicate often (year round), and respect each other.
Building a Better Advanced Search
Naomi Dushay & Jessie Keck’s presentation on building a better advanced search for SearchWorks is a key example of this unabashedly technical yet clear and concise communication. They opened with a clear presentation of the real-world situation, including usability goals, etc. They followed this with a breakdown of the desirable features and the possible ways to implement them. Naomi then plunged into seriously complex solr config details that she managed to make intelligible step-by-step. Hint: she used screenshots of the code with the salient items circled.
Drupal 7: A more powerful platform for building library applications
Cary Gordon from the Cherry Hill Company showed us the new features in Drupal 7. I expected to be bored, since I don’t use Drupal and can’t stand the sight of PHP code. Instead, I was pleasantly impressed and intrigued by the features Cary walked through. I keep hearing that Drupal has matured substantially in recent years, but I didn’t believe it until now.
Enhancing Discoverability With Virtual Shelf Browse
Andreas Orphanides, Cory Lown, and Emily Lynema from NCSU showed us their snazzy virtual bookshelf with an “infinite shelf” allowing you to scroll through book covers five at a time ad infinitum. One wonderful idea is the use of “faux covers”, where they generated something that looks like a real book cover whenever a real cover image couldn’t be retrieved for a search result.
As with almost any Code4Lib presentation, this would have been intriguing if they only gave a demo of the software but they didn’t stop there. 80% of the time was spent explaining how they did it, what technologies they used, how they thought about the problem, what worked well and what went wrong. Gosh I love hackers who share.
How to Implement A Virtual Bookshelf With Solr
In their third presentation of the day (remember, presentations were chosen by open popular vote), Naomi Dushay and Jessie Keck showed us their work around implementing the much-desired support for browsing through digital collections using a virtual shelf organized by call number. This feature sounds simple, but the implementation proved more challenging. To start with, the librarians couldn’t come to a consensus about what constitutes “correct” ordering. Solution: ignore the arguing librarians and go straight to the users!
The real challenge lay in sorting out 8 million call numbers from numerous libraries using a variety of call number systems (ie. LC, Dewey, SUDOC, Thesis, etc.) Who knew that call numbers were so complex? Not I, until now.
I knew these guys were good – I’ve collaborated with them, I’ve seen their code – but wow. I didn’t realize how remarkably good they were until this third presentation.
Lightning Talks & Breakout Sessions
The day closed with 13 Lightning Talks followed by 6 Breakout Sessions.
Lightning Talks:
- LibX Update – Godmar Back
- How to build a Virtual Bookshelf Without Solr (or MySQL) – Maccabee Levine
- VIVO, an interdisciplinary national network – Paul Albert
- WolfWalk, two ways – Jason Casden
- Custom metasearch widgets – Alex Smith
- Node.js development – Gabriel Farrell
- Catalog Auto-suggest using SOLR – Jill Sexton
- EmeraldView, a PHP frontend for Greenstone – Yitzchak Schaffer
- Faceted browse on the cheap – Tom Keays
- EAD, APIs, and Cooliris: providing access to digitized archival materials. – Tim Shearer
- Kill the Search Button – Michael Nielsen, Jørn Thøgersen [facilitated by Roy Tennant]
- You Heard It Here First… – Roy Tennant
- File Information Tool Set (FITS) – Spencer McEwen
Breakout Sessions:
- Mobile Dev
- Blacklight – Bess Sadler
- Tools4Lib – the best tools used in your job – Devon Smith/decasm
- Let’s Link Our Data – If you have data, metadata, vocabularies, or just about anything else you want to link, show up and we’ll figure out what to do with it! – Ryan Scherle/ryscher
- Homebrew – building your own instead of using Fedora/DSpace/Blacklight/whatever – Esmé Cowles/escowles
- API queries to vocabularies – Ya’aqov Ziso