Observations and Ideas

I’ve been to my share of library conferences over the last couple of years. They all have something to offer in their own way: networking, schmoozing, wacky vendor displays, swag, etc. It’s been my experience, though, that as a geek/developer, I’m often a little disappointed at the content — it’s just not geared toward someone like me. This is why I love Code4lib. The conference is densely packed with interesting technical presentations. They are the kind of talks that not only inspire you, they give you something concrete to take back home. In addition to the presentations, you are surrounded by an interesting gang of library technologists, who, I get the sense, all have tricks up their sleeves. It makes for a fulfilling week, to say the least.

Some highlights

My week started with the Evergreen pre-conference, skillfully lead by Dan Scott. Dan blogged about it here. Apart from some technical woes, a lot was seen and (hopefully) learned by all. We performed the install, imported bib and holdings data, implemented new functionality (new OpenSRF method and OPAC UI) to email a user their password if they have forgotten it, and took a quick look at some of the staff client interfaces.

Conference day 1 began with Brewster Kahle’s keynote address on his work with archive.org and openlibrary.org. Brewster’s vision and chutzpah is refreshing and inspiring. The goal of “One wiki page per book” sounds so simple (and obvious) when inserted into a slide show, but the implementation will require tremendous work and resources. I applaud their efforts, not only in principle, but because I think it will lead to better information and resource sharing in the long run.

After lunch, Winona Salesky and Michael Park did a joint presentation called “XForms for Metadata Creation”, which included two different MODS editors developed with XForms. I liked this talk in particular for two reasons. For starters, the demos I saw were that of a simple (yet powerful) bibliographic data creation interface, which I see as potentially useful for any ILS. Additionally, the use of XForms, which I only have a basic understanding of, gave me a chance to see some new (for me) technology in action. My interest is piqued.

I skipped the breakout sessions that day to put together a (5 minute) lightning talk on Pylons. One of the interesting challenges of lightning talks is the use of a shared PC and what amounts to a moratorium on web access for the sake of efficiency. My presentation was a set of images and screenshots, the first a crane on a sunny Portland day, which seemed apropos of the topic. I discussed one particular aspect of Pylons, which allows you to easily plug in custom pre and post-processing middleware applications for your web apps. I demonstrated a simple XML validator and a highlighting plugin which bolded pre-defined terms in the HTML on its way to the client. These gave me the chance to dig a little deeper into Pylons, an architecture which I think has a lot of interesting potential.

Wednesday morning I learned a lot about RDA. Later, I thought the discussion on of the ILS Discovery Interface Task Force segued well into Ross Singer’s lightning talk on Jangle, which, as Ross pointed out, could be used to implement the proposed standardized ILS interface.

I was not able to attend the last day, so I missed a chunk of the conference, including Dan’s CouchDB talk. Glad it went well, Dan!

Wow, now I realize why most folks blog about conferences as they are happening 😉 It’s a lot to digest, especially for a conference as dense as code4lib. There were a lot of great presentations, breakout sessions, and lightning talks this year and this post only comments on a few of them. Next year’s conference will be held in Providence, RI, and if you can, I would recommend checking it out.

-bill

I was curious about how many circulations PINES had on the biggest day on record. And that led to our asking: which hour and which minute had the most circs?

Maximum circs by DAY:
96,326 – May 29, 2007

Maximum circs by HOUR:
11,305 – May 29, 2007, 11 AM

Maximum circs by MINUTE:
548 – May 2, 2007, 9:21 AM

I understand that the day after Memorial Day in 2007 is remembered as a very busy day for reasons that are clear.

For a bit of perspective, the FY 2005 NCES/NCLIS data for all US public libraries give the following annual figures for total circulations by library:

Q3 (third quartile–the libraries above this number are in the top 25%):
144,663

Q2 (median–the middle value):
43,912

Q1 (libraries below this number are the bottom 25%):
13,113

The arithmetic mean is 229,685.

That maximum number of circs for PINES for one day is greater than the median annual value for all public libraries.

Why is the mean so much higher than the middle value? Because the distribution of all these numbers is highly skewed–in the Statistical sense. And that fascinating topic can be the subject for compelling blog post at another time.

Bob Molyneux

We get this question often at Equinox Software and we see it on occasion on the Evergreen community mailing lists and in the library blogosphere.

I am a single-branch public library with about 25,000 titles. I’ve looked at the options and I really like Evergreen. But isn’t it simply ‘too big’ for my situation?

It is true Evergreen was built from the ground up to handle the largest of library systems: it’s highly scalable, fault-tolerant (meaning it can sustain hardware failures and keep running), and has capabilities that make it a perfect selection for large libraries and consortia. Those attributes/goals are clearly stated on the open-ils community website.

However, it is important to realize this does not mean Evergreen is not a good solution for smaller libraries as well. Evergreen does in fact “scale down” elegantly. We know this because there are developers in our community that run Evergreen on their laptops. That’s right folks–they can run the entire server-side software stack on their laptops. Another example: Bill Erickson, at the last code4lib conference, ran an “Evergreen install in 20 minutes” breakout session in which Evergreen was installed on a laptop.

Evergreen was designed to be able to scale to multiple servers of varying sizes and purposes. But it can also scale to a single server (or laptop) if that’s what the library desires and what makes sense in the cost-to-uptime ratio.

Also, the ability for Evergreen to “scale down” from a functional standpoint is something that’s apparent in Kent County Library’s recent migration announcement. Kent County Library serves a population of approximately 19,500 though a main library and 2 smaller branches. There is more information about the decision to go with Evergreen on the Kent County Library blog.

I hope this information puts the rumor to rest that Evergreen is just for big libraries and consortia. The fact is Evergreen can work quite well in smaller situations.