code4lib

Casey Bisson

The number of programmers in the library world is growing and our individual efforts have shown great promise, but they exist largely as a spectacle that few libraries can enjoy. We need better means to aggregate our efforts and share solutions that can be employed by libraries without programming staff.

Looking outside libraries, we see some interesting examples in the blog world. The blog world is growing with new bloggers every day, but the most interesting aspect is how many people with limited technical skills are using (maintaining and configuring) blog applications like WordPress or Moveable Type, and how quickly the contributions of the many plugin and theme developers are implemented on those blogs. What lessons can we learn from this and how might a library application built from those lessons work? Are some software architectures better at leveraging the network effects of the growing number of developers in our community than others?

I’m working on a project that attempts to answer those questions and I hope to release a public beta shortly (update: it's WPopac, online now). I’d like to demo it and ask for participation.

Update: slides posted.

Casey Bisson
E-Learning Application Developer
Plymouth State University
Plymouth, New Hampshire
http://oz.plymouth.edu/~cbisson/