Conferences

Last month I had the pleasure of participating on a panel with Jason Griffey from University of Tennessee Chattanooga and Eliot Polak from Norwich University on Plugin and Play Apps. We talked about how the WorldShare Platform can enable libraries to build and share cool custom apps with one another. Jason talked provided an intro to the concepts of platforms and their power.

Headed to Computers in Libraries? Hope to see you there! There are some stellar session planned. Two to mark your calendars for:

If you're planning to go to Access (and who wouldn't want to hang out in awesome Vancouver, BC for a few days and soak up some tech?)--then plan to stay over on Sunday so you can come to the daylong program on Monday, October 24 for Cooperation and the Cloud: Web Scale, Workflows and Data.

If you're planning to attend ALA, put this meeting on your calendar. Or better yet, your calendar and your Director's calendar. You’re going to like what you see.

We'll also be videotaping the session--so no worries if you aren't heading to New Orleans next week. Watch this space for the video link after the conference.

So what’s the session? We went with a New Orleans-themed approach:

This week I'm attending ELAG (European Library Automation Group) in Prague, Czech Republic. My first two days at the conference have really been focused on Linked Data. The first day I attended a very informative preconference on implementing RDFa for library websites. I spent 10 years working on library websites and the idea of sharing data from library website with other systems has always been near and dear to my heart. So RDFa is of great interest to me because it enables libraries to share data from their website without having to get caught up in trying to produce full RDF.

Attending code4lib North last week was a lot of fun. It was terrific to see all the wonderful projects folks were working on in Ontario. I had some great conversations about web services for names and authority data, learned about new web services to play with from Canadiana and Scholar's Portal, and learn a little about R.

The two talks that stuck with me with most were

So I'm in Hamilton, ON attending code4lib North today and tomorrow. The conference is relatively small but in some respects (less than 50 people) but perfect for having a good hackfest. I've gotten to talk to 5 people about OCLC web services. Several are interested in name authority information or sharing non authority name information between libraries, particularly libraries working on digital collections. So I pointed out VIAF and WorldCat Identities as possible sources of name information.

As always code4lib was a terrific conference. There were too many great sessions to pick a favorite. Things kicked off for me with the unconference preconference in which I participated in two "sessions" on on web services and libraries and other other on Linked Data. The web services and libraries session left me thinking that OCLC Developer Network could do more to talk about the technologies and process behind how we're building the web services at OCLC.

If you're planning to be in San Diego for the ALA Midwinter 2011 meeting, you'll want to put a couple of dates on your calendars now for developer-related events:

Saturday, January 8
The Power of Data, Technology and Community: the OCLC Platform Strategy

Roy, Ralph and I traveled to Winnipeg for the Access conference this week. We all participated in the Hackfest and Ralph and I are presenting. My talk is on how OCLC Web Services can be used to improve library UIs. Ralph is giving a talk on the OCLC open source Linked Data framework that powers are services like VIAF. We're having a great time a the conference so far. We helped build cool things at the Hackfest. I worked on a project in which I had to take data from Solr and create charts with it using the Google Chart API. Roy helped with a project called "Mobile Death Hack". You can check out the prototype at http://mobiledeath.wallandbinkley.com/ . I had some favorite presentations from the first day of the conference as well. These included

• GIS & Open Access GeoSpatial Data
• iRoam
• Goin' Mobile

Dan Scott's talk on Standard Social Sharing and Aggregation on the Go, was also good and gave me new standards to check out and learn about. Today will be more great presentations and the rest of the Hackfest reports. I'm looking forward to seeing what folks have to show off and learning about interesting projects which libraries are doing.