Coffee|Code : Dan Scott

I gave a lightning talk at the code4lib conference today on File_MARC for PHP introducing the File_MARC library to anybody who hasn't already heard about it. I crammed nine slides of information into five minutes, which was hopefully enough to convince people to start using it and provide feedback on what could be improved or smoothed out... I'm looking forward to chatting with more people about it over the remaining days of the conference. I've already introduced a few people to PHP's simple tests for test-driven development, so even if nobody ends up using File_MARC, at least people are learning about some of the hidden gems in PHP.

The funny thing is that I had originally pitched a full session talk on this subject for the conference, and it didn't make the cut of the ruthless democracy that is code4lib. In retrospect, even a twenty-minute thunder talk probably would have been too much information for anybody but the most die-hard PHP and MARC coder out there; the lightning talk was a perfect format for the talk. I hope to let the documentation do most of the talking in the future.

Here are the slides from the talk in OpenOffice.org and PDF format. Enjoy!

/me notes that UnAPI would be useful here... Gotta try and submit a patch to the s9y repository...

In a post on the priorities of Canadian academic insitutions on academics vs. sport, Ted Schmidt wrote a number of words that I agreed with, among which were:

200 spectators watching a beautifully coached University of Toronto team take on the Laurentian Voyagers in the biggest city in Canada. 200 spectators.And therein lies the difference between Canada and the USA.

However, I objected to the following statement:

What was more impressive was to see 13 of the 15 players on the U of T team were from the Metro Toronto area. No embarrassing recruiting here. You need real marks to attend this school. Sadly the Laurentian team had three players from Saginaw, Michigan.What's that about? We have to go to Michigan for scholar-athletes?

Unfortunately, I was unable to post a comment on his blog due to some requirement to log in to wordpress.com, so I have to post my reply here.

Let's see. Metro Toronto has a population of approximately 3 million (based on the 2001 census). The Greater Sudbury Area has a population of around 200,000. "That" is probably about wanting to field a competitive team (which is one of the ways universities get brand recognition, and which is arguably more important to smaller universities than to massive research universities), which means that smaller universities have to expand their recruiting efforts outside of their given geographical boundaries if they want to avoid a continuous run of embarrassing losses... with perhaps an occasional miracle thrown in.

You seem to be suggesting that students shouldn't go to a university that's not the closest one to their home town. Perhaps the Saginaw students were attracted to Laurentian's Sports Administration program, or the Kinesiology program, or want to specialize in mining-related research. Maybe the possibility of attending lectures by TVO's 2007 Best Lecturer Competition winner was a draw. Or perhaps they are interested in participating in a bilingual university. Maybe the ruggedness of the Sudbury landscape draws them. Sure, it's probable that they were recruited -- but it's also probable that they had other choices of universities that they could attend. They chose Laurentian, and they chose Sudbury. We're happy to have them.

I'm a big fan of CIAU basketball (ah, dating myself there, I guess it's CIS now); I used to cover it for the student newspaper when I was a student myself, and went all the way to Thunder Bay to cover the CIAU finals. And yes, it is good fun if it is relatively competitive. Back when the women's basketball team at LU was continuously headed to national finals, it was _not_ fun when teams suffered horribly one-sided losses to them. That wasn't really fun for anyone. So, yes... let's keep it competitive, let's encourage the exchange of ideas and the movement of students between academic institutions and cities, and let's celebrate the Canadian academic culture without slighting people and institutions that contribute to that culture.

Google just announced that they will start accepting applications in March for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2007. In 2006, over 100 organizations participated in the GSoC, and Google expects to have a similar number participating in 2007. There are no lack of potential open-source development projects in the code4lib arena that could use a student's help for the summer, and I think there are sufficient potential mentors in the code4lib community that we could handle a number of successful applications.

So what do you think? I think we can start discussing possible projects now, and we should take advantage of the perfect timing of code4libcon to try and crystallize a list of potential projects and willing mentors.

A couple of ideas to get started with:

• Merging ANSEL and MARC-8 encoding support into iconv for the good of all library applications (maybe we could co-sponsor the project with GNU?)
• Refactor LibraryFind to be I18N-friendly and remove embedded style tags (although yeah, I know the good LF folk are already working on this)
• Package and/or document and/or I18N-enable and/or provide translations for selected applications for Library-in-a-Box
• ...

I made a mistake, or several mistakes, a few weeks back.

Yes, shocking to hear me admit that, I know.

Here's the set up: one night a week, I'm the LibrarianTM on reference duty. In practice, this means that I continue to sit in my office working on library systems problems while the library assistants who actually staff the reference desk out on the library floor masterfully answer the questions of our patrons. In theory, this means that I'm available to assist the librarian assistants with any particularly thorny reference problems that come their way. Over the course of the past year, that theoretical scenario hasn't happened once.

Until, of course, a few weeks ago. A knock came at my door around 6:45 pm, and D****, the librarian assistant staffing the reference desk said that I had the opportunity to resolve my first issue. The issue? A patron wanted to borrow one of the books that we keep on our quick reference shelf (a combination dictionary / thesaurus) for an exam she was supposed to write in fifteen minutes. D****, knowing my lack of experience in these matters, told me that the typical response to this kind of request was "No", but that if I wanted to allow the student to sign out the book anyways then D**** would have to fill out some forms to enable the circ desk to temporarily circulate the item.

I thanked D**** for the quick summary of the library norms and went out to meet with the patron. I hadn't quite made up my mind, but after allowing the patron to explain the situation, we checked the catalogue to find out if there were any similar books available in our circulating collection. It turned out that there was at least one older edition (by ten or fifteen years) of the same book listed as being on the shelves; so I apologized and told the patron that they should find and check out that book, and that I wouldn't authorize the quick reference item to go out.

The patron seemed to understand this response, and went off to get the book. So one would think that, all in all, this was a successful end to an exceptional situation: library policies that had been put in place years ago prevailed, and the patron was still pointed to a resource that would more or less meet their needs. But I can't qualify it as a success, because I don't know what happened next. Was the patron even able to find the book on the shelf? It's not unusual for these things to be misplaced... Did the last-minute hassle of having to go through this process of twice explaining why she hadn't yet purchased a copy from the bookstore, as had been advised by her instructor, then find this older edition of the book, cause her to under perform on her exam?

If I had the chance to do it again, I would send her on her way with the quick reference book in hand on a four-hour loan. It would have meant breaking with library policy, but we would have had one more grateful patron who would have positive associations with our library. To that patron: my apologies. I hope your exam went well despite your last-minute hassles.