What I've been up to

A quick overview of recent activity:

Publications

Investigating Faster Techniques for Digitization and Print-on-Demand

I’ve had my first ever article published  in the New Review of Academic Librarianship  (Vol. 18, Iss. 1, 2012). Its a targeted write up of some of the findings from my 2010 Arcadia Fellowship. Despite some doubts about the true value of LIS research journals, I’m really pleased to get this done. Its also made me realise the value editors can bring to the publication process.

I’ll eventually get the pre-print into a repository and you can view the original report upon which it was based on the Arcadia website.

Software Selection Methodology for Libraries

I’ve contributed to a software selection methodology of libraries, put together by the forward thinking folk at Cottage Labs for Lyrasis for their Open Source Software in libraries site. Its pretty general but contains a few nuggets learned from several implementation and selection projects.

Talks

I’ll be speaking speaking at DCMI seminar on Linked Data held at the British Library next week. Looks to be a great event. It will be a report back on the COMET project, hopefully timely given OCLC’s recent vote on ODC-By Licensing for WorldCat data. There have been some reservations regarding this, especially around attribution stacking. This was the the main problem we faced in Comet but attribution can work if handed correctly (i.e. better than we’ve done  so far with Marc21). Its’ a niche used license compared to CC0 or PDDL but is a really welcome move forward from OCLC. Apparently their WorldCat API sees 15 million hits a month! Thats usage that many open data suppliers could only dream of.

Code

Speaking of Comet, the code base for the whole project is now on the glorious Github, which I am slowly waking up to. I’ve also added source for a barebones interface to consumer the SALT library recommender API. I’ll make a conscious effort to get over coder shyness and get more work up on there where feasible.

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