2010 Preconference Proposals

Proposals will close Friday November 20 so we can finalize the list and add them to registration!

Please include a "Contact/Responsible Individual" name and email address so we know who is willing to put on the proposed precon.

This is a proposal for several pre-conference sessions that would fit together nicely for people interested in implementing a next-gen catalog system. Contact for organizing all of these: Bess Sadler -- bess@virginia.edu

1. Morning session - Solr White Belt Instructor: Bess Sadler (anyone else want to join me?) The journey of solr mastery begins with installation. We will then proceed to data types, indexing, querying, and inner harmony. You will leave this session with enough information to start running a solr service with your own data.

2. Morning session - Solr Black Belt Instructors: Erik Hatcher and Naomi Dushay Amaze your friends with your ability to combine boolean and weighted searching. Confound your enemies with your mastery of the secrets of dismax. Leave slow queries in the dust as you performance tune solr within an inch of its life.

3. Afternoon session - Blacklight Instructors: Naomi Dushay, Jessie Keck, and Bess Sadler Apply your solr skills to running Blacklight as a front end for your library catalog, institutional repository, or anything you can index into solr. We'll cover installation, source control with git, local modifications, test driving development, and writing object-specific behaviors. You'll leave this workshop ready to revolutionize discovery at your library. Solr white belts or black belts are welcome.

• Serials Solutions Hackathon (folks from Serials Solutions) - full day or half day - Connecting Serials Solutions Fed Search, Link resolver or Summon to almost anything (such as OCLC, ILS systems, Drupal, whatever)

• Hacker 101/102/201/202 (Dan Chudnov) - either just-morning, or 101/102 morning, 201/202 afternoon - a friendly session to help people still newish with the coding thing to get up to speed a little more

• OCLC Web Services Boot Camp and Lightning Talk Demos (Contact/Responsible person: Roy Tennant, tennantr@oclc.org) - full day thorough coverage of a suite of APIs and the essentials about the underlying technologies (e.g., SRU, CQL, Atom, OpenSearch, etc.) to get you going right away. Also time to show off what you've done to mashup library data in the past (not limited only to OCLC services), in a 5-10 minute presentation.

• Koha Hackfest/Best-practices meeting (Contact/Responsible person: who?)- full or half day - working on Koha bugs and enhancements, discussing best practices to solve common workflow and technical issues, developing helper scripts for data migration, connection to external systems, etc.

• Web Services & Widgets - Organizers: Godmar Back & Annette Bailey (Contact/Responsible person: Godmar Back (gback@cs.vt.edu) - a half day interactive workshop that explains how to create practical web services and widgets for libraries. The focus will be on creating web services for and integrating widgets into the services your library has already implemented and deployed (OPAC, Resolver, etc.). We will explain what is possible and how to do it, particularly for systems where librarians have limited or no control of the back-end. This workshop will be targeted at beginning-level programmers. Technologies covered will include advanced JavaScript/jQuery and JSON.