2013 preconference proposals

Proposals close Friday, November 9 at 11:59pm ET.

Spaces available: 4+ Rooms

Please follow the formatting guidelines:

=== Talk Title ===
 
* Presenter/Leader, affiliation (optional), and email address (mandatory!)
* Second Presenter/Leader, affiliation, email address, if applicable

Description.

Drupal4lib Sub-con Barcamp

This will be a full day of self-selected barcamp style sessions. Anyone who wants to present can write down the topic on an index card and, after the keynote, we will vote to choose what we want to see. Attendees can also pick a topic and attempt to talk someone else into presenting on it.

If we run out of topics, we will pay homage to the project by testing patches for Drupal 8. It is easy, and we will show you how to do this invaluable task.

We will attempt to get one of the local Drupal uber-ninjas to do the keynote and give us some guidance.

• Contact Cary Gordon, cgordon@chillco.com or
• Charlie Morris, NCSU Libraries, cdmorris@ncsu.edu

Open space session

• Dan Chudnov, dchud at gwu edu

The rest of code4libcon is pretty well structured these days; come in the morning for a few hours of old-school open space technology unconference. Bring a rough talk or idea you want to share or questions you have or something you want to learn about or discuss with other people, and be ready to tell us about it. Use it as extra prep time for your upcoming prepared or lightning talk if you want. We'll plan the morning out a little bit at the beginning, but not too much. What we do will be up to the people there in the room.

If there's interest, we could start with a "welcome to code4lib" introductory session for newcomers.

Delivery services

• Ted Lawless, Brown University Library, tlawless at brown edu.

Are you interested in making it easier for users to obtain copies of known items? Do you feel your OpenURL and Interlibrary Loan software could be streamlined? This pre-conference workshop will focus on providing services that deliver content to users. Discovery systems are doing a better job of exposing library holdings but there's still a lot of work to do actually get the content in the users hands.

Possible topics/activities include:

• panel discussion of what some libraries have done in this area
• comparisons of different approaches to addressing delivery
• overview of tools available
• sharing of strategies and experiences
• time to work with and review open source code in this area

Resources and background information:

• What-is-Umlaut-anyway
• Hacking 360 Link: A hybrid approach
• Auto-Populating an ILL form with the Serial Solutions Link Resolver API
• Focusing on Delivery

Intro to Blacklight

• Bess Sadler, Stanford University Library (bess at stanford.edu)
• Justin Coyne, MediaShelf (justin.coyne at yourmediashelf.com)

Blacklight (http://projectblacklight.org) is a free and open source discovery interface built on solr and ruby on rails. It is used by institutions such as Stanford University, University of Virginia, WGBH, Johns Hopkins University, the Rock and Roll hall of fame, and an ever expanding community of adopters and contributors. Blacklight can be used as a front-end discovery solution for an ILS, or the contents of a digital repository, or to provide a unified discovery solution for many siloed collections. In this workshop we will cover the basics of solr indexing and searching, setting up and customizing Blacklight, and leave time for Q&A around local issues people might encounter.

• Note: this workshop can be a standalone intro, or attendees can follow up with the intro to hydra workshop in the afternoon.
• Duration: half-day, morning

RailsBridge Intro to Ruby on Rails

• Jason Ronallo, North Carolina State University Libraries, jnronall@ncsu.edu
• Anyone else want to come and help folks? Contact me.

RailsBridge comes to code4lib! We'll follow the RailsBridge curriculum (http://railsbridge.org) to provide a gentle introduction to Ruby on Rails. Topics covered include an introduction to the Ruby language, the Rails framework, and version control with git. Participants will build a working Rails application.

There will be some pre-preconference preparation needed so that we can effectively use our time. Details to come.

• Note: Attendees can follow up with the Intro to Blacklight afternoon session, which will be tailored for folks new to Ruby

Data Visualization Hackfest

• Description: Want to hack/design/plan/document on a team of people who enjoy learning by creating? Interested in data visualization? Well, this hackfest is for you. Not familiar with the concept of a hackfest? See Roy Tennant's "Where Librarians Go To Hack" and the page for the Access 2010 Hackfest. We propose a half-day hackfest with a focus on visualization library data -- think stuff like library catalog data, access/circulation statistics, etc. Here's how it works, roughly:

- we'll (you'll!) do lightning tutorials for some data visualization tools, toolkits (R? d3js? ?), datasets.
- we'll separate into groups and hack on stuff.
- at the end of the day, we'll present our progress.

Not a code hacker? No worries; all skill sets and backgrounds are valuable!

• Duration: half-day
• Contact: Chris Beer (cabeer at stanford.edu)

Intro to Hydra

• Adam Wead, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (amsterdamos at gmail.com)
• Mike Giarlo, Penn State Information Technology Services (michael at psu.edu)

Hydra (http://projecthydra.org) is a free and open source repository solution that is being used by institutions on both sides of the North Atlantic to provide access to their digital content. Hydra provides a versatile and feature rich environment for end-users and repository administrators alike. Leveraging Blacklight as its front end discovery interface, the hydra project provides a suite of software components, data models, and design patterns for building a robust and sustainable digital repository, as well as a community of support for ongoing development. This workshop will provide an introduction to the hydra project and its software components. Attendees will leave with enough knowledge to get started building their own local repository solutions. This workshop will be led by Adam Wead of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

• Duration: half-day, afternoon

Intro to Blacklight

• Bess Sadler, Stanford University Library (bess at stanford.edu)
• Justin Coyne, MediaShelf (justin.coyne at yourmediashelf.com)
• Jason Ronallo, NC State (jronallo at gmail.com)

Blacklight (http://projectblacklight.org) is a free and open source discovery interface built on solr and ruby on rails. It is used by institutions such as Stanford University, NC State, WGBH, Johns Hopkins University, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and an ever expanding community of adopters and contributors. Blacklight can be used as a front-end discovery solution for an ILS, or the contents of a digital repository, or to provide a unified discovery solution for many siloed collections. In this workshop we will cover the basics of solr indexing and searching, setting up and customizing Blacklight, and leave time for Q&A around local issues people might encounter.

• Note: this workshop will be tailored as a follow-on to the morning's RailsBridge Intro to Ruby on Rails workshop, but everyone is welcome
• Duration: half-day, afternoon

DPLA Intro/Hacking

• Presenter(s)/Leader(s): TBD
• Guy Who'd Be Interested in Helping: Jay Luker, Smithsonian Astrophysics Data System (jluker at cfa.harvard.edu)

This is a stub proposal entered solely to beat the submission deadline. I think there's be sufficient interest in this session, but only thought of it yesterday and haven't had time to coordinate with actual DPLA'ers and confirm that any of them are definitely coming.

Solr 4 In Depth

The long awaited and much anticipated Solr 4 has been released! It's a really big deal. There are so many improvements, it makes the head spin. This session will cover the major feature improvements from Lucene's flexible indexing and scoring API up through SolrCloud in a digestable half-day format.

• Duration: half-day
• Contact: Erik Hatcher (erik.hatcher at lucidworks.com)
• Note: I put this under "Half Day Evening" only because I didn't want to conflict with the other great half day sessions already proposed here. However it makes the most sense to arrange the sessions is fine with me though.