code4lib

I wasn't sure I'd ever see the day that the UVa library would, as an institution, agree to open source Blacklight. But they did! [A dirty little secret is that the bulk of it, including a basic example MARC indexer, was open sourced last year during the preparation for the Solr code4lib preconference.]

I'll be leading a Solr workshop this February, in Taiwan, for the EBTI/CBETA Conference. This is a synergy of several interests of mine: library-related findability, Asian culture, and Buddhist philosophy. I'm particularly encouraged by the Integrated Buddhist Archives (IBA) proposal - seems like a perfect fit for Collex.

I'm honored to be speaking at the upcoming OLA Super Conference 2008. I'm presenting "Collex: Collecting and exhibiting scholarly materials" (session #406, Thursday January 31, 10:40am) and " Blacklight: the University of Virginia's Catalog on Solr" (session #1203, Friday, February 1, 2:10pm). I'm looking forward to demonstrating these projects and sharing their latest news.

I gave a solr-ruby presentation at rubyconf this past weekend. My timing was off, didn't cover as much as I would have liked, and one of my demos flubbed and I punted on it (turns out all I did was forget to pass a command-line argument to the script *sigh*).

Here are the slides.

ObLibTopic: I'll be demonstrating and discussing Collex and Blacklight!

This self-marketing thing is hard. Thus far I've been blessed with word-of-mouth success for the reputation from the various open source communities in which I've participated. But it does take a little advertising so folks know what you're up to. With little fanfare, some friends of mine have put together an impressive lineup of courses and speakers, and a great venue, on several open source topics. I thought it was a good idea to have a longer course on Solr and Lucene, so I agreed to give it a shot.

I had the great pleasure of presenting at the Library of Congress recently. I'm honored to follow in some great footsteps, in the same series as recent and very related talks by Andrew Pace and Tim Spalding.

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Feedback from a Blacklight user during its 2-week trial period:

But can it also enable users to execute targeted multi-faceted searches directly?

For example, it is impossible with the current Virgo to perform the following search of the following type which our users would find useful: "retrieve all of the printed works in special collections relating to the Civil War that were published in New York between 1861-1863." This search is impossible for general users to precisely target because they are not given the ability to search publication location directly even under the advanced search options.

Time flies when you're having fun. The conference of the year, IMHO, is happening next week. I'm honored to keynote the second day of the conference. Thankfully they haven't pinned me down to specify a topic. The lead keynote speaker is K.G. Schneider, and she's been blogging her preparation. I'm looking forward to her talk as well as the entire conference of talks. I'm not used to 20 minute talks though. I could go on for hours! (see below)