Obstacles to Agility, Joan Starr
1 Mar 07
Obstacles to Agility
Joan Starr
California Digital Library
“Agile”: see Agile Manifesto, 2001
What keeps us from agility?
– academic culture itself
– project management practices
– institutional hiring practices
– our own work practices
academic culture
– “non-participatory democracy”; don’t want to be involved, but want to say no at the end
– not representative; always want to be able to say no themselves
– difficult to identify a single subject-matter expert willing to represent a large base
– end up with large committees of members often representing other committees
project management
– typically do not have a single individual or committee with ownership
– major decisions often require input from very diffuse structure
– projects can drag on for years, sucking life. . .
– no one to adjuticate conflicts, meetings are widely spaced, lots of waiting, time passing
– solutions obsolete by the time they are delivered
hiring processes
– very slow
– bad fit for tech market
– some shops don’t have admin control over own openings
– grant-funded staff can’t be moved around
– project teams have difficulty getting help when and where needed, more time passes. . .
our own practices
– programmers value space and privacy over team work
– don’t want to share work in progress
– aren’t practised in time estimation
– don’t really measure progress
– lose time coordinating and communicating
– aim for perfection before getting feedback
– may not be working on what users need/expect
start small. . . with a new project. . . and introduce it as a pilot
Posted by pzed on March 1, 2007 at 12.15pm
The BibApp, Eric Larson and Nate Vack
1 Mar 07
The BibApp
Eric Larson and Nate Vack
Wendt Library, UW-Madison
Wendt serves College of Engineering
also Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing
– ad hoc assistance
– digital publishing
– copyright assistance
– fund for open access publishing
libraries don’t know a lot about where people are publishing
– capture campus bibl for UW faculty pubs
– Eric is liaison for engineering, can use that
– capture citations talking to faculty, through refworks, through IEEE etc
– create a BibApp that creates an identity for each faculty member, lists their pubs, archives (eventually)
– also adds their identities to one or more groups (dept, institute, etc)
. . . lovely demo. . .
– screen cast will be mounted on C4L page
– added a faculty member from UIUC from their LDAP server
– searched his work in Engineering Village
– export/import citations (does dedupe with bugs)
pilot project; not live, not even close
– tag clouds
– popular journals
– popular publishers
– “find an expert” : this is a feature that actually works; draws data from faculty member’s actual publications
– at individual level, can also see co-authors, journals, publishers, and specific citations
– rss feeds for people, groups
– funky keyword timeline tool: slider to scan through evolving keywords attached to a group by year
– visualization tool showing connections between co-authors
challenges
– sherpa data not ideal
– author name collisions
http://code.google.com/p/bibapp/
more stable by August, 2007
Posted by pzed on March 1, 2007 at 11.58am
code4lib: Erik Hatcher Keynote
1 Mar 07
“When I woke up this morning, I heard a disturbin’ sound!”
– jingle-jangle of a thousand lost books. . . .
EH is a card-carrying library geek – love’s books
Recommends Ambient Findability
– you can’t use what you can’t find
Timeline
Lucene in Action
Rossetti Archive Search
Collex
Windsor Lucene Summit
eIFL-FOSS
Solr Flare
Solr Flare
– all about sets; venn diagrams and data visualization
– tags/keywords create custom sets
facets: to show the entire universe (or subset thereof, same diff) of objects divided by attributes
Erik showed, live, a few examples of how totally Solr Flare rocks
– chinese collection from UVa
– his personal collection, scanned using Delicious Library
– pledges by the end of the day to write an import filter for iTunes library
Future is bright
– still proof of concept
– availability needs to be incorporated
– saved searches has been added at preconf
– facet visualizations of various types need developing (clouds, sortable lists, maps, timelines, set diagrams. . .)
Posted by pzed on March 1, 2007 at 11.06am
The XQuery Exposé, Kevin Clarke
28 Feb 07
The XQuery Exposé:Practical Experiences from a Digital Library
Kevin Clarke
Princeton University
http://diglib.princeton.edu/
XQuery
– an XML Query Language
– SQL of the XML world
– integrates XML data from a variety of sources
– focus on data, not dbs; higher level than SQL
– does not include fulltext searching or update
– not a full-fledged programming language
– currently working through Lucene; SOLR very enticing
XQuery is a functional language built entirely on expressions
uses native XML types and XPath
can be “loosely typed”, e.g. can omit declaration of data types
– Elsevier has done some work on code conventions
let 10,000 FLWORs bloom!
primarily an image-based site
some search, but mostly browsing
Posted by pzed on February 28, 2007 at 2.47pm
Forget the Lipstick, Fabien Tiburce, Peter Giansante, Beth Jefferson
28 Feb 07
Forget the Lipstick: This Pig Just Needs Social Skills
Fabien Tiburce, Peter Giansante, and Beth Jefferson
BiblioCommons
Beth Jefferson
extensive user research
BC, AB, ON provided proof of concept funding
today’s focus is on architecture and user experience
OPAC user’s not complaining, just going elsewhere
nextgen catalogue more than tech
social search is key
– discovery, relevance, connections to community and other users
Fabien Tiburce
tech – ajax widgets, rdbms mixed with xml repository
– object factories to aggregae representations of data
– decouple data in transit from data in storage
– rdbms to preserve most important data
Peter Giansante
data model
Beth Jefferson
personalized relevance (ratings, reviews, demographic filtering)
building trust in the social environment, adding other users to a network optionally based on a domain of expertise
Fabien Tiburce
social data coupled with the user
– user preference subsystem
– user generated data associated with bib record and other users
Peter Giansante
user prefs as part of data model
Beth Jefferson
thinking outside the box of the library
want to get away from “sorry, no match”
– opportunities to use ILL in local interface
– suggest to purchase
– suggest share from other user’s personal collection
– refer to community generated interests (groups, discussions, etc.)
engaging users to take us halfway
– use library metadata to structure discussions
– can then put community resources, events, etc. on the right pages
when a question is asked, discover who is likely to have the answer and present it to them
finally, offer an online answer service
– people in the OPAC
– users connecting with other users realtime in OPAC
Peter Giansante
more data model
Beth Jefferson
need critical mass of users
data must tie back to them
must engage a significant percentage of users
maximize breadth of implementation
– in the flow of existing activity
– approaching costless
– provide motivations to contribute
Fabien Tiburce
ILS integration with low footprint web services
will be open source
data flow diagram!
whew!
Posted by pzed on February 28, 2007 at 2.25pm
Library Data APIs Abound, Richard Wallis
28 Feb 07
Library Data APIs Abound!
Richard Wallis
Talis
http://www.talis.com/home/
libraries are used to obscure protocols, starting to use less obscure
all have an insular view of the world
– I have data, and you can have it if you use the right protocol
– mixing that data with other data is your problem
Talis platform uses Bigfoot
– easily queried
– can query bib data, pass search to augment search with holdings data, pass again to augment with deep linking to OPAC content and return results with links
– each “store” (bib, holdings, book jackets, etc.) has an API that can be search or used to augment
– can also augment XML data from other sources by transforming into a stream that can talk to API augmentation
Bigfoot APIs
– Items
– Augment
– Facet
– OAI-PMH (coming)
– Config (coming)
– On-demand stores (coming)
– transform service (built in to item query, coming for others)
Possibilities
– transform output to WordPress compatible output
c.f. the 20 minute union catalogue
Posted by pzed on February 28, 2007 at 2.10pm
Smart Subjects, Tito Sierra
28 Feb 07
Smart Subjects: Application Independent Subject Recommendations
Tito Sierra
NCSU Libraries
Input user search query and spit out a list of related library subjects
based on search log analysis done as part of QuickSearch development
– found lots of topical subject queries
NCSU also provides browsable subject portal
– locally developed classification, approx. 100 subject nodes in 12 top-level catagories
– nodes influenced by local curriculum
– subject specialist mapped resources to the subject page
also based on OpenSearch
started with data from course catalogues to gather terms for mapping; also used text snippets from papers in faculty publications archive
– text extracts used to create search indexes
– run keyword search on the index; return, rank, dedupe results
– crosswalk to classification map
strengths
– application and collection independent
– subject recommendations can be integrated into any library search application
– broader, serendipitous resource discovery
weaknesses
– false positives (bad recommendations)
– zero hits
future plans
– database advisor
– increase size of subject indices using article tables of contents and backlog of course descriptions
– guage interest in a less-specialized release to the community
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/smartsubjects
Posted by pzed on February 28, 2007 at 1.00pm
On the Herding of Cats, Mike Rylander
28 Feb 07
On the Herding of Cats
Mike Rylander
Georgia Public Library System
General overview of planning, etc.
Posted by pzed on February 28, 2007 at 12.40pm
Free the Data, Emily Lynema
28 Feb 07
Free the Data: Creating a Web Services Interface to the Online Catalog
Emily Lynema
NCSU Libraries
Architecture – front end web application to an Endeca back end; considered advantageous: a “freedom” feature that allowed the creation of an XML interface to the catalog
began as a web service to speak to other systems like WorldCat and return availability results
REST API for querying catalog
– looking for RSS feeds, particularly new books
– integrating catalogue results into website QuickSearch
. . . alphabet soup. . .
wanted search results and facets
OpenSearch add-on; c.f. A9 aggregator
also had to integrate with NCSU’s QuickSearch product
facet data
– used OpenSearch query role="subset" custom:facet="4617264627"
– using numbers for facet values makes for cleaner URLs
– do aggregators provide support for this query role? not sure
– multiple elements would slow down results
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/ws/
Posted by pzed on February 28, 2007 at 12.19pm
MyResearch Portal, Andrew Nagy
28 Feb 07
MyResearch Portal: An XML based Catalog-Independent OPAC
Andrew Nagy
Villanova University
completely ILS agnostic portal for research activities
– catalog, DBSs, digital library
– single search interface
most resources are in XML
– digital library: METS
– Metalib XServer: XML
– catalog: MARCXML
– web site: XHTML
data store advantages in XML
– native XML stores easily, easily entered
– no need for RDBMS
eXist
– open source XML dbs
– full-text searching available
– platform independent: java backend; API through REST or SOAP
– inherent directory structure
– LDAP support
– however, not really meant for a library search type of system
Berkeley DB XML
– proven
– wide range of platforms
– good performance
– commercial backing, decent help
– no full text extenstions, no inherent directories
commercial solutions? – too expensive, more complex
implementation challenges
– eXist innappropriate
– DB XML capable, but slow, even with some reconfigurationm
– MARCXML very complex, lots of unhelpful data, field names actually in attributes
moving MARC field number into tag improved response times considerably
technologies don’t tend to understand the complexity of library data
queries not well optimized, if at all
– needed to develop very basic query processing
SOLR/Lucene looks like the answer
Posted by pzed on February 28, 2007 at 12.03pm
