Day 2 at Code4lib 2009 in Providence Rhode Island was kicked of with an excellent keynote from Index Data’s President and co-founder Sebastian Hammer.  He took as his inspiration the 11ft tall gold-covered bronze statue of Independent Man, originally named "Hope" which tops of the dome of the Rhode Island Capitol building opposite the conference hotel.

Libraries are independent but they need work together to engage with the rest of the world.  They need to cooperate and standards are key to this.  Standards do suck but they are necessary. Some say that bodies such as NISO are broken.  We need to fix or replace them for us to be successful.

Sebastian’s talk was a good scene setter for Timothy McGeary, of Lehigh University, who gave us a progress report on the Open Library Environment (OLE).  OLE are working to redefine library business processes, complementary to the DLF’s work on discovery interfaces with the ILS-DI.  They are looking beyond the traditional confines of the ILS business processes.  They are being heavily influenced by SOA in designing reusable modules.    They are geared towards higher education use cases, but it doesn’t mean public and Government libraries cannot join in.

Their objective is to raise the library to the enterprise level within the institution.  They are working towards a draft release for comment of the design document in June.  in the meantime they have an online survey for those with “library applications that are currently in development or production that might be related to the goals of the OLE Project”.   This initiative is something worth watching.

Bess Sadler, University of Virginia gave us an update on progress and up coming features for Blacklight OPAC, first shown at code4lib 2007.   They have been, amongst other things, been concentrating on specific indexing for specific groups.  eg. an instrument index for music so that a pianist and a violinist can find works to play together.  On a technical point she announced that they are standardising on Jangle for ILS connection.

LibLime’s Joshua Ferraro walked us through the functionality and philosophy behind ‡biblios.net, which was the subject of my Talking with Talis conversation with him last month.  There are three barriers to libraries sharing data – data in silos, licensing, and technology.  ‡biblios.net addresses all of these with a Software-as-a-Service, free, shared cataloguing system seeded with 30M catalogue records (including 5M contributed by Talis), all covered by the Open Data Commons licence which we funded in cooperation with Creative Commons.  In the Q&A at the end, Anders Söderbäck from the National Library of Sweden said that they will contribute their records to ‡biblios.net.

Chris Catalfo, took the next session showing how easy it was to extend the cataloguing client used by ‡biblios which itself is available Open Source from ‡biblios.org.

Other highlights from the day included FreeCite – An Open Source Free-Text Citation Parser – demonstrated, without much help from his internet connection, by Chris Shoemaker.  And ‘Freebasing for Fun and Enhancement’ by Sean Hannan of Johns Hopkins University – this Freebase thing and it’s APIs is very powerful we are going to see a great deal more of this I predict.

I also presented on Project Juice – an open source JavaScript framework for extending OPACs.  More on this in a later post.  In the meantime my slides are on Slideshare.  Slides from other presentation and eventually videos are starting to appear as links from the conference schedule.