Portland, OR
Oregon State University Libraries is submitting itself as a candidate to
host the 2008 Code4lib conference, in Portland, Oregon.

We believe that OSU Libraries would be a good candidate to host the 2007
Code4lib conference. We have experience in hosting the conference, having
had the honor of being the host for the first code4libcon. Additionally, we
have been a major sponsor of the conference for the first two years of its
existence. We are proposing to host the conference in Portland, Oregon -
although Portland is a larger city, it has a small city feel, and Portland
is fairly easy to fly into (and easier to get to than Corvallis). Portland
also has a number of evening venues that would suit code4lib, and has good
ties with the open source community (The OSDL is located in Portland, and
the O'Reilly Open Source Conference is now held every year in Portland.
Additionally, the Powell's Technical Bookstore would be a very fun field
trip for many of the code4lib attendees).

Hosting code4lib 2008 in Portland would also help bring the conference back
to the west coast, which is in the spirit of moving the conference from
year-to-year. We believe that our success in running the first code4lib,
combined with what we learned from doing so, would enable us to successfully
host code4lib 2008.

NINES, has announced its formal release. Collex is the technology driving NINES, developed with Bethany Nowviskie's leadership and elegant sense of design. Thanks to the others on our team that made this happen: Jerome McGann for believing in and funding our vision, Jamie Orchard-Hays for rapid Rails magic, and Duane Gran for keeping the machinery running.

Collex is the basis, idea-wise, of Solr Flare, a generalized faceted browser.

Call for nominations! We hope to put out an annual Code4Lib Blog Anthology, containing all that is most worth preserving from the Code4Lib blogosphere each year. It will be published by a print-on-demand outfit such as lulu.com in time for the Code4Lib conference each year.

IF

we get enough nominations and editorial help. Come to the Anthology page of the wiki and review/comment on/change the criteria, then post your nominations for the 2006 and 2007 volumes.

Following up on discussion over on #code4lib and the code4libcon Google group, I've set up a short survey. The survey polls respondents to see what interest there is in a European event, and to assess whether such an event should be as well as or instead of a North American code4libcon.

Please register your views, and raise awareness of this survey ahead of the closing date, 15 February.

As noted in the survey itself, neither the code4lib community nor Talis are bound to hold an event at a time or in a place solely on the basis of this survey. The results are freely available, during and after the survey.

Proposals to host the 2008 Code4Lib Conference will be accepted through Friday, February 16, 2007. A decision will be made the following week by popular vote. See the hosting information page for more information.

Oregon State University Libraries is proud to announce the recipients of the 2007 Code4lib Conference Scholarship for Women and 2007 Code4lib Conference Minority Scholarship.

Nicole Engard is the recipient of the 2007 Code4lib Scholarship for Women. Nicole works at the Jenkins Law Library as their Web Manager, and was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker in 2007.

Joshua Gomez is the recipient of the 2007 Code4lib Minority Scholarship. Joshua is currently a Library Assistant III at the Getty Research Institute, and is pursuing his education in computer programming and information science.

In looking for a solution to organize a local elementary school library, Delicious Library was my first stop. And perhaps my last... except for faceting it with Flare, of course.

I scanned a few books into Delicious Library:

And then I exported the library (to a tab-delimited format), wrote a little Delicious Library export -> Solr importer script, and my Delicious Library is now faceted with Flare:

Please sign the petition in support of the European Commission's proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate

"INTERNET ARCHIVE goes SOLR" reports Tracey Jaquith. Tracey's announcement is worth quoting in its entirety:

We converted from a badly deteriorating "home grown" server that
was made up of java + jetty ( + rsync for replication) + an older
version of lucene.
I make some comparisons of SOLR vs. "prior" using "[]" notes below.

I parsed 2 days worth of SOLR logs to determine:
Max queries/sec: 8.8
Avg queries/sec: 5.4

Pragmatic Studio does it again, putting on another top notch event: Rails Edge Reston. I was fortunate enough to attend and pick up a few more gems of Ruby wisdom. Some of the highlights:

• Met William Groppe (Mr. Ruby Brain) in person, after collaborting online on solrb for a little while. Putting a face and a handshake to a virtual collaborator is important.
• Also met two of edsu's co-workers. Nice to see so much Ruby library work. Times they are a changin'.
• Metaprogramming was the very first session. As it should be.
• Stuart Halloway did a solrb code review and his changes will be reflected in future commits. Speaking of Stu, he and his evil twin, Justin Gehtland, have produced a spectacular enhancement to Rails with Streamlined, a way to elegantly declare a user interface to a relational database. After seeing Streamlined again in more detail, I'm convinced that Flare is destined to be Streamlined Solr. Justin and Stu - thanks for your inspirations, in more ways than one.
• Got to see many of my good friends and heros again, including Mike, Dave, Chad, Jim, Duncan, Stu, and Justin. I met Bruce Williams and Marcel Molina Jr. for the first time. All presentations were well done, and informative to even seasoned Rails developers.
• I briefly presented Collex/Flare/solrb during Thursday nights "Open VGA" sessions, though a bit too frantically. My presenting chops were a bit rusty, and doing a 7 minute presentation illuminated the need to get a more succinct and distilled elevator pitch for Solr Flare. code4lib conference is the next Solr flare explosion for me.