Coffee|Code : Dan Scott

Evergreen developer workshop at OLA SuperConference, February 24, 2010

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:45:39 -0500

Given the the awards that Project Conifer will be presented with at the OLA SuperConference, this might be a good opportunity to mention the Customizing and Extending Evergreen: a guide for geeks workshop that I'll be giving on Wednesday, February 24th. The workshop description promises:

Together, we will break OpenSRF down into its constituent parts (JSON, XMPP) and put it back together again in Perl, Python, and JavaScript so that you can define new services, or integrate existing services into other applications and websites. You will learn how PostgreSQL underpins Evergreen's search indices and how to access and modify any data in the system with permission-based storage APIs; plus we will build new interfaces with the Dojo JavaScript framework Evergreen extensions.

That's a hefty agenda for a half-day workshop, but I promise to do my best to deliver on that promise...

Conifer garners two awards from the Ontario Library Association

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:28:05 -0500

The Ontario Library Association (OLA) announced its 2010 OLA and OLA Divisional Award winners today, and to my great surprise Project Conifer was named the winner of two awards:

The Ontario College and University Library Association (OCULA) Special Achievement Award
The Ontario Library Information Technology Association (OLITA) Award for Technical Innovation

All of the libraries in the Project Conifer consortium have been listed in the award announcement, and for good reason: everyone using the Evergreen library system since May 2009 has contributed to the project, be it by bug reports, or suggestions for enhancement, or sharing approaches to solving problems, or contributing code. This has been a real team effort, and make no mistake: the road has been bumpy at times, and there's a lot of road left to travel before we get to our destination. Dan furtively glances at the open list of requested enhancements on the Conifer ticket system and gets back to finishing off this blog post... The continuing support of staff and librarians across the consortium has been critical to keeping things moving in a very positive direction, and I'm delighted that they're being recognized for their efforts.

In which I perceive that gossip is not science

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:48:22 -0500

Marshall Breeding published the results of his 2009 International Survey of Library Automation a few days ago. Juicy stuff, with averages, medians, and modes for the negative/positive responses on a variety of ILS and vendor-related questions, and some written comments from the respondents. One would expect the library geek blog niche to light up with reaction to the revelations contained in the data.

Except: there were 2,098 total responses to the survey, with 1,633 from the United States [1]. Responses were limited to a single response per library. The ALA estimates there are 122,356 libraries in the United States [2]. So, slightly more than 1% of the libraries in the United States are represented in this survey. Which, if it was a truly random sampling, might be enough to derive some validity from the results. But these survey responders? They're self-selected, therefore more likely to either have an axe to grind or a selection decision to defend. And the perspective of the responder on which these perceptions have been based, and in turn on which Breeding has drawn his observations, may over-represent one aspect of the system. If a circulation clerk responds, they may base their responses primarily on the speed and ease with which they can handle typical circulation tasks, while ignoring the experience of the patron using search and self-serve account interfaces; or a cataloguer may focus on the ease of copy cataloguing but gloss over the system's integration with authentication and financial systems, etc.

In my opinion, the survey's methodology makes its results more akin to gossip than science, and Breeding himself recognizes the lack of validity of his effort. After summarizing all of the findings, making some observations about open source and companies, and providing an overview of his methodology, he issues a caveat at the very end of all of this that effectively admits that the survey is worthless: "one should not read too much into the survey results."

If that's the case, then why even bother issuing this flawed, unscientific survey and publishing its results? A rigorous comparison of library systems that employs both quantitative and qualitative aspects in the assessments would be a useful contribution to the library world. This survey, however, deserves a swift trip to the round file.

References

PKG_CHECK_MODULES syntax error near unexpected token `DEPS,'

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:35:57 -0500

The next time you bash your brains against autotools for a while wondering why your perfectly good PKG_CHECK_MODULES() macro, as cut and paste directly from the recommended configure.ac entry for the package you're trying to integrate (in this case libmemcached), and you get the error message PKG_CHECK_MODULES syntax error near unexpected token `DEPS,' on one system and not on another, it's probably because you're missing the pkg-config package on the failing system.

It would be nice if the error message gave you a clue, but it doesn't and probably can't, because the macro simply doesn't exist until the package is installed. So I'm telling you. Go forth and code now that that irritation is gone.

MARC library for C# coders

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:30:12 -0500

C# isn't in my go-to list of programming languages, but I can understand why others would be interested in developing applications in C#. So it's good news to the C# community of library developers (it would be interesting to find out how many of you are out there) that there is now a library available for parsing and manipulating MARC records for the C# language. From the CSharp MARC homepage:

C# class structures for reading and manipulating Library of Congress MARC records using the MARC21 standard. Based upon the PHP Pear package File_MARC (http://pear.php.net/package/File_MARC) by Dan Scott

Congratulations to Matt Schraeder on the release and good luck with MARC! And thanks for the shout-out, that was very kind of you.