2015 Prepared Talk Proposals

DRAFT ONLY

Code4lib 2015 is a loosely-structured conference that provides people working at the intersection of libraries/archives/museums/cultural heritage and technology with a chance to share ideas, be inspired, and forge collaborations. For more information about the Code4lib community, please visit http://code4lib.org/about/. The conference will be held at the Portland Hilton & Executive Tower in Portland, Oregon, from February 9-12, 2015.

Proposals for Prepared Talks:

We encourage everyone to propose a talk.

Prepared talks are 20 minutes (including setup and questions), and should focus on one or more of the following areas:

• Projects you've worked on which incorporate innovative implementation of existing technologies and/or development of new software
• Tools and technologies – How to get the most out of existing tools, standards and protocols (and ideas on how to make them better)
• Technical issues - Big issues in library technology that should be addressed or better understood
• Relevant non-technical issues – Concerns of interest to the Code4Lib community which are not strictly technical in nature, e.g. collaboration, diversity, organizational challenges, etc.

Proposals can be submitted through Friday, November 7, 2014 at 5pm PST (GMT−8). Voting will start on November 11, 2014 and continue through November 25, 2014. The URL to submit votes will be announced on the Code4Lib website and mailing list and will require an active code4lib.org account to participate. The final list of presentations will be announced in early- to mid-December.

Proposals for Prepared Talks:

Log in to the Code4lib wiki and edit this wiki page using the prescribed format. If you are not already registered, follow the instructions to do so. Provide a title and brief (500 words or fewer) description of your proposed talk. If you so choose, you may also indicate when, if ever, you have presented at a prior Code4Lib conference. This information is completely optional, but it may assist voters in opening the conference to new presenters.

Please follow the formatting guidelines:

== Talk Title: ==
 
* Speaker's name,  email address, and (optional) affiliation
* Second speaker's name, email address, and affiliation, if second speaker

Abstract of no more than 500 words.

Talk Proposals

• Cary Gordon, The Cherry Hill Company, cgordon@chillco.com

Drupal 8 is in beta and nearing release. Among its many features, it notably has become more developer friendly through its adoption of the Symfony PHP framework along with Symfony's outstanding set of libraries (like Guzzle) and tools (like Composer). And, in implementing the Twig theming system, it is can begin to escape PHPtemplate. These moves also make it easier to create headless systems that uses Angular.js and other systems for presentation, or even forgo presentation entirely.

From the site-builder's perspective, Drupal 8 provides a much smother experience and makes it easier to build and implement site recipes.

• Stanislav 'Stan' Bogdanov, stan@stanrb.com, Adelphi University and Boglio LLC

GameSalad is a popular tool for developing mobile and desktop games with little actual programming. In this presentation, Stan Bogdanov breaks down the development process he followed while building mobiLit, a mobile app with the goal of being the first open-source gamified information literacy app to be used as part of a college-level information literacy curriculum. He will go through the basics of using GameSalad to create an app that can be easily customized by non-programmers and the instructional principles used to teach the material in a mobile medium. Stan will also go through two qualitative design studies he did on the app and discuss their results and the lessons learned from building mobiLit. The session will conclude with an overview of the next steps for the mobiLit project.

• Riley Childs, no official affiliation (currently a Senior in High School at Charlotte United Christian Academy), rchilds (AT) cucawarriors.com

It's easy to search data you know the structure of, but what if you need to pull in data from sources that don't have a standard structure. The ability to search community events along with your standard catalog search results is an example, but often the only way to pull these events is through XML, JSON, (Insert structured format here), or even just raw html. But how do you get that structure? That simple question is what makes this impossible. The process to define and process this structure takes a lot of manual labor, especially if the data you are pulling is just HTML, and then every time you add data to the index you have to run all the data through a script to pull in data in a format Solr or an other index can use. This talk will focus on Solr, but the principles explained will apply to many other indexes.

• Cary Gordon, The Cherry Hill Company, cgordon@chillco.com

Boring part: Docker[1] is a container system that provides benefits similar to virtualization with only a fraction of the overhead. Scintillating part: Docker can host between four to six times the number of service instances than systems such as Xen or VMWare on a given piece of hardware. But thats not all! Docker also makes it simple(r) to create transportable instances, so you can spin up development servers on your laptop.

• [1]https://www.docker.com/

• Jason Ronallo, jronallo@gmail.com, NCSU Libraries

Video on the Web presents new challenges and opportunities. How do you make your video more accessible to those with various disabilities and needs? I'll show you how. This presentation will focus on how to write and deliver captions, subtitles, audio descriptions, and timed metadata tracks for Web video using the WebVTT W3C standard. Encoding timed text tracks in this way opens up opportunities for new functionality on your websites beyond accessibility. The presentation will show some examples of the potential for using timed text tracks in creative ways. I'll cover all the HTML and JavaScript you will need to know as well as some of the CSS and other bits you could probably do without but are too fun to pass up.

• Geoffrey Boushey, geoffrey.boushey@ucsf.edu, UCSF Library

Academic libraries are increasingly responsible for providing ingest, search, discovery, and analysis for data sets. Emerging techniques from data science and machine learning can provide librarians and developers with an opportunity to generate new insights and services from these document collections. This presentation will provide a brief overview of common machine learning classification techniques, then dive into a more detailed example using a random forest to assign keywords to research data sets. The talk will emphasize the insight that can be gained from machine learning rather than the inner workings of the algorithms. The overall goal of this presentation is to provide librarians and developers with the context to recognize an opportunity to apply machine learning categorization techniques at their home campuses and organizations.

• Devon Smith, smithde@oclc.org, OCLC

Data Science is increasing in buzz and hype. I'll go over what it is, what it isn't, and how it fits in libraries.

• Kevin Savage, kevin.savage at mendeley.com, Mendeley
• Joyce Stack, joyce.stack at mendeley.com, Mendeley

Mendeley recently added a, "document from file," endpoint to its API which attempts to extract metadata such as title and authors directly from PDF files. This talk will describe at a high level the machine learning methods we used including how we measured and tuned our model. We will then delve more deeply into our stack, the tools we used, some of the things that didn't work and why PDFs are the worst thing ever to compute over.

• Mark Noble, mark@marmot.org, Marmot Library Network

In 2013, Marmot did extensive usability studies with patrons to determine what was difficult in the catalog. Many patrons had problems sifting through all of the various formats and editions of a title. In 2014 we developed a method for grouping records so only a single work is shown in search results and all formats and editions are listed under that work. We will discuss our definition of a 'work' based on FRBR principles; combining meta data from MARC records with metadata from other sources like OverDrive; the technical details of Record Grouping; the design decisions made during implementation; and the reaction from users and staff.

• Jim Hahn, jimhahn@illinois.edu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Topic Space module (http://minrvaproject.org/modules_topicspace.php ) was developed with an IMLS Sparks! Grant to investigate augmented reality technologies for in-library recommendations. The funding allowed for sustained university community collaboration by the University Library, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, as well as graduate student programmers sourced from the Department of Computer Science. Collaborators designed app functionality and identified relevant open source libraries that could power optical character recognition (OCR) functionality from within the mobile phone. Topic space allows a user to take a picture of an item's call number in the book stacks. The module will show the user other books that are relevant but that are not shelved nearby. It can also show users books that are normally shelved here but that are currently checked out.

Research questions included development of back end (server-side) pattern matching algorithms for recommendations, and a rapid formative evaluation (user testing in Undergrad Library) of interface design that would provide optimal user experience for receiving recommendations and navigation of the book stacks as a context to recommendations. Implications of research and development include best practice recommendations for interface development based on the formative user studies (e.g. communicating what works in this area, and what does not), further – based on the back end API developed for Topic Space, grant staff created web based recommendations that could serve as a new way of providing readers advisory and “more like this” recommendations from discovery interfaces library wide.

The recommender references both shelf locations of an item as well as other items circulation counts to provide recommendations. Outcomes of the grant include the availability of the Topic Spaces module on the Android Play store (select Undergrad library for Topic Space module: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.illinois.ugl.minrva ) and an experimental (Backbone.js) Topic Space web app: http://minrva-dev.library.illinois.edu

• Megan Kudzia, moneill@albion.edu, Albion College Library
• Kate Sears, eks11@albion.edu, Albion College Library

Have you started experimenting with Git on your own, but now you need to include others in your projects? Learn from our mistakes! Transitioning from a one-person git workflow and repo structure, to a structure that includes multiple people (including student workers), is not for the faint of heart. We'll talk about why we decided to work this way, our path to developing a git culture amongst ourselves, conceptual and technical difficulties we've faced, what we learned, and where we are now. Also with pretty pictures (aka workflow drawings).