Barreraicus Maximus

The NYC regional code4lib is moving right along, with it’s third meeting occurring January 29th, 2009.  If only the darn Metro projector system would work properly.  For this meeting there were roughly 20 people in attendance, a few were new faces.   Here’s a quick rundown of the planned talks.  There was also a short discussion on Omeka.

FreERMS project – Touro College Libraries development of a Electronic Resource Management System – open source.

• uses PHP Symfony
• jQuery Theme Roller for dynamic Tabs and Accordion style link expansions

CakePHP – PHP Application Framework

• Columbia example

Mapping WorldCat Holdings

• Using a standard number via the API to find the closest holding library – Google Maps API, WorldCat Registry/Search, xOCLCNUM, SIMILE Exhibit
• Using Python – geopy, web.py

My colleagues at Princeton and I collaborated on a conference report for Code4Lib 2007 for Library Hi Tech News (vol 24, issue 6). Actually for the most part they wrote it and I compiled their work.

Here’s the link: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/07419050710823247

Thanks to Parmit Chilana, Kevin Clarke and Mike Giarlo for working on this.

Luggage in the rain

Originally uploaded by antonioG4.

“Look at that one soak up all the water, bet that guy is gonna be pissed. Hope he didn’t have a Wii in there.”

“If we are questioned about it, remember our story, the bag was ticking, and we weren’t sure if it was safe.”

I am actually surprised, we got out of Newark, only about 30 mins late, and landed about the same amount of time off. This was during the bad rain storm, April 15th, 2007. As a cynic, I think someone important was on the plane and he pulled some strings.

Code4lib – Wrap up (not gonna go crazy and rewrite the wheel) visit the code4lib site and read everyone elses blogs!

Solr - covered in detail during the pre-conference. High powered search interface for Lucene.

Villanova’s Web Portal – They were essentially building an “ILS Independent Search Tool” based on Solr. He informed us that he has approximately 500k records in his development system, and returns search results in about 0.1 seconds. Solr also has facet features, however they do decrease performance.

NCSU Site Search – Really a “mash up” of several components.� Currently using, Nutch, Swish-E and Web Services into their catalog.� � I will be following this model shortly.� Nutch is an indexing and searching interface to Lucene (isn’t everything), while Swish-e is a similar yet significantly less powerful tool.� It is a Perl application which allows spidering and indexing of pages.� We currently use it, but I’m very unhappy with it.

Just my synopsis of projects I plan on following up on.

P1050178.jpg

Originally uploaded by antonioG4.
Now, I’m not blaming this guy, but when your flight is delayed and you see this, it pretty much makes you wonder what an “Air Traffic Controller” delay is. Someone is going to have to convince me that the controllers are doing something other than having a coffee or lunch break.

Return trip from Atlanta (code4lib 2007)