The conference hotel rates are low enough but as an independent cataloger, I still would like to ask if anyone is interested in sharing a room with me. I have reserved a standard room at the Holiday Inn Express for the nights of the 15th & 16th ($76/night plus $15.20 tax). If you are also interested in sharing a ride, I'm driving from Portland early Wed (15th) morning and returning to Portland after noon on the 17th.

Any starving student or underemployed librarian out there?

On Wednesday and Thursday there are 1 hour 15 minute slots for Lightning Talks. A lightning talk is a fast paced 5 minute talk on the topic of your choosing. If you'd like to do a lightning talk please add your name, topic to this page. You can do more than one if you want, but if the lots fill up (there are 30 of them) you might have to choose which one you want to do.

Mark Jason Dominus has a nice page about lightning talks, which includes this summary of why you might want to do one:

Maybe you've never given a talk before, and you'd like to start small. For a Lightning Talk, you don't need to make slides, and if you do decide to make slides, you only need to make three.

Vote for the Code4lib 2006 t-shirt design!

Please log in to participate in voting!

You may choose 1 design.

The proposal with the most votes wins. In case of design requirements (i.e. one color designs allowed only) the design with the most votes that fits the critera wins.

Happy voting!

If you are in town after the conference and are looking for something to do the The Portland Jazz Festival is running from February 17-19, 2006

The internationally acclaimed Portland Jazz Festival will feature McCoy Tyner, DeeDee Bridgewater, Bill Frisell and Eddie Palmieri, plus more than 90 additional jazz performances at multiple downtown venues.

With a bit of python the code4lib 2006 schedule has been encoded using the hCalendar microformat. hCalendar allows you to bundle up event information so it is available downstream to machines that crawl the content, while keeping the content readable for us humans. It is really very easy to grok, and the only reason for the script was to avoid repetitive typing.

Here's what a sample event looks like in hCalendar:

11:05- 11:25 -


Connecting Everything with unAPI and OPA - Dan Chudnov

Which is equivalent to the ical


BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en:Connecting Everything with unAPI and OPA - Dan Chudnov
DTSTART:20060215T190500Z
DTEND:20060215T192500Z
URL:http://www.code4lib.org/2006/chudnov
END:VEVENT


The page includes a 'subscribe' link (at the top) to Brian Suda's x2v, which extracts hCalendar from a page and spits back iCal for your calendaring application to ingest.

Further encouraging active participation, code4lib 2006 is currently having a t-shirt design contest. The winner gets to see their design on the official code4lib 2006 t-shirt, given to every attendee of the conference.

If you are interested in submitting a design, you may use the following template (graciously borrowed from cafepress.com): http://www.cafepress.com/content/si/temp_10x10_apparel.zip. Submitted designs will be added to this post, and we will hold a public vote on the designs next week.

The only major restriction to be aware of is that at this time, we are unsure if the t-shirts will be full-color or 1 color. So, while your design may be in color, it should also work as a 1-color design as well (you may submit two versions of a design to meet the above criteria).

The Code4Lib Conference Schedule is now available. And what a lineup it is! From "Connecting Everything with unAPI and OPA" to "What Blog Applications Can Teach Us About Library Software Architecture" and many geeky points in-between, this is clearly the library tech fest of the century. Until, that is, we do it all again next year.

With two keynotes, 15 prepared talks, a ton of lightning talks, two generous breakout periods for unplanned mayhem, and evening socializing, what's not to like? If I were you, man, I'd like stop trying to debug my crappy code and register.

How many people will have registered by the official start of the conference? Which, by the schedule, will be 0930 PST on February 15, 2006.

Put your guess and your name/nick, in the list below, sorted by guess amount. Winner (closest to exact amount without going over) gets a six-pack of black butte porter from dchud. Seriously.

• 100 - dchud
• 95 - jaf
• 93 - artunit
• 85 - rsinger
• 64 - roy
• 42 - edsu

Limited to attendees of the code4lib 2006 conference. Employees and the families of employees of Code4lib Inc. may not participate. Exports of xray crystallography-based strong encryption methods are prohibited. May cause the condition known as "hot-dog fingers". If your code sustains a slashdotting of longer than four hours after attending the code4lib 2006 conference, see your doctor immediately.

Casey Durfee

It can be difficult to enhance, fix or extend legacy/closed-source web applications such as online catalogs without being able to alter the web application directly.

I will discuss using AHAH (Asynchronous HTTPRequest and HTML) as a technique for doing so and compare it to AJAX, proxying and SSI. Examples from the Seattle Public Library’s next generation online catalog will be presented. Performance and scalability concerns will also be covered, time permitting.

Art Rhyno

Slides (html)

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications are considered some of the largest and most complex systems ever written, and support many of the functions that libraries associate with the acquisitions and processing side of their operations. The information retrieval layers of library systems receive a lot of attention with good reason, but there’s also a body of standards and best practices for back office systems which libraries could benefit from as well. Open Source ERP systems offer options for libraries to take advantage of OMG standards and workflow engines, and this session will give an overview of some currently available ERP options.