Ticer Summer School

I went to the Ticer Summer School 2009 on Friday 31st of August to to talk about Summa as part of a panel on Integrated Search alongside Jørgen Madsen (Primo), David Lindahl (eXtensible Catalog), and Benoît Pauwels (VuFind).

Tilburg University Campus

Thomas Place made the introduction explaining the basic concepts of Integrated Search. Afterwards we each presented our systems followed by a short question and answer session. I think it was during these presentations that people realized how similar most of the systems actually were.

After a coffee break each of us once again got up to do a second presentation – this time focusing more on a specific feature.

• Jørgen Madsen: Joining Catalogues – Clean-up and Deduplication
• David Lindahl: Metadata Handling and FRBR
• Mads Villadsen: Facetting and Clustering
• Benoît Pauwels: Web 2.0 Features of Integrated Search

Each presentation was once again followed by a longer question and answer session.

My slides from both of theses can be found on the Presentations page on the Summa Wiki.

The day concluded with a panel discussion based on questions from the audience. All during the day the people from the audience had been very good at asking relevant questions, and I think they really managed to get to the core of the issues regarding usability, faceted searching, and integrated search itself.

This is the first time I have been part of a panel in this way, and also the first time I have been at a Ticer Summer School – and I found both things to be a really great experience. I have never been to anything that has been as well organized as this, and all the people were very interested and engaged in the discussions. The other panel members were well prepared, open for discussion, and willing to talk freely about any issues. I can only hope that I was in the same league as them.

All in all I had a really nice time, and if I ever get the chance to do something similar again I would be very interested.

Faceting and Flash Disks in the Gobi Desert

As has been mentioned in many different places the code4lib 2009 videos are now online.

Those that missed the finer details in Toke’s talk about complete faceting of 100 million documents can go see the video here. Lots of good, nerdy stuff.

Toke and Mikkel also both gave lightning talks.  Mikkel’s talk about how easy it would be to set up a Summa installation in the Gobi Desert was on day three, and is available here. He is on somewhere near the middle of the video (number 5 of 9).

Toke’s talk about Flash Disks and how they will save everyone of us was on day two, and can be seen here. His talk starts about a third of the way into video as number 6 of 16 (he is actually on twice – the first first attempt without any graphs in his slides is number 4…).

Watching the videos really make me want to go to code4lib again next year.

Road trip to code4lib

We’re going to code4lib 2009 at the end of february! “We” means Mikkel, Mads, Jørn and Toke. None of us has been to code4lib before, but we’re very excited about it. Judging from the website, there will be a bunch of geeks hell bent on making interesting stuff and having fun. Making interesting stuff and having fun is what we do all day at work, but this will be new interesting stuff and new fun.

We’ll be presenting the faceting system used by Summa, more specifically how we’re scaling to a large number of documents and tags. It seems like SOLR is the default choice for a lot of people at the con and since SOLR has its own faceting system, we’ll have to be prepared for some critical questions afterwards. We all love a technical debate, especially when we’re forced to rethink our own strategy, so it’ll be great.

If the computer gods and the organisers of the conference are game, we will also do a lightning talk about Michael’s highly experimental experiment called The SummaSlider.

One little caveat; none of us has been to USA before. We’re kind of scared about customs and the prospect of sitting close to three smelly nerds 2 times 9 hours on the planes. On the other hand, some of us are looking quite forward to the adventure of Mads walking around in his Make them listen! T-Shirt, Jørn selling the rest of us to some gangsters in Central Park, Mikkel getting arrested for being a communist (aka Open Source evangelist) and Toke being fined for jumping naked into snow drifts from the second floor of the hotel.

Helsinki

I had the pleasure to visit Helsinki this Tuesday doing a presentation about Summa. The audience was a good mix of librarians, technical people, and decision makers so I tried to strike a middle balance in the technical level of the presentation.

It was a two-hour thing so I was a bit nervous about whether the timing would match up in the end. Luckily it did that very well.

It was in relation to the Finnish National Digital Library project and I was number two (of three) presentations that day. You can find more information about the program here (sorry, Finnish only, but there is a picture of me me me!). I found this english article about the Finnish National Digital Library.

You can download an annotated PDF version of my slides on the Summa wiki. The PDF export messed up with the gradients a bit, but it is readable I will have the ODP sources and PNGs up when we have a proper place to host such things. If you want them feel free to email me.

Summa@Oslo 2008-11-20

I am writing this blog post while waiting for my flight at Oslo airport. Unfortunately the airport doesn’t seem to have wifi so the actual posting will have to wait until later. I would have thought that all airports would have wifi by now, but I thought wrong.

So why am I in Oslo? I was invited to give a small talk about Summa/Search at Biblioteklaboratoriet. In particular I was asked to talk about the various services we have integrated in the web interface.

The talk itself went quite well I think (slides available here for the interested).

The main presentation was about a project called Pode, which is a library project working on mashups and alternative presentations of library information. They weren’t that far along in regards to actual implementations – however they appeared to have some good ideas, and I hope the meeting as a whole was able to provide some inspiration for them as well.

biblioteket.se also presented what they were doing. They have a nice website mashing up data from various sources, but what I actually found most interesting were some of their statistics. More than half of their users come to them through Google – ie. they completely bypass the site’s search interface and any information that might be available on the front page, and instead go directly to the full record view.

Also they have (among other things) user created tagging, ratings, and reviews. Their conclusions were pretty clear: Practically nobody writes reviews, tagging does a bit better, and ratings is the thing that actually gets used.

Another project they were involved in is Öppna Bibliotek. This is an attempt a creating an open service were libraries can store additional metadata about items (for instance reviews, discussion, etc.), and all the data is under a Creative Commons license.

After the presentations there were some general discussions about mashups and their potential – but the focus rather quickly shifted to that of ownership of the library records. It was seen as a real hindrance to creating open communities that the libraries were unable to give interested users a programmatic access to their records. And looking at things like the situation with OCLC I can only agree.

All in all it was a good trip, and I got to talk to some interesting people working on interesting projects.

A few random pictures from the trip:

The future of the OPAC

Gave a small talk today about the future of the OPAC at Gentofte Bibliotekerne. The talk was mainly about my ideas for future library services.

Primo, Arena and EasyOPAC all did presentations of their products too. However, they really didn’t provide any perspectives on the future of the OPAC, but rather tried to pitch their existing products the best they could – as such, they all gave presentations of their upcoming search engines (ARENA in offline slide mode).

Overall, it seemed that the audience was quite confused about what the differences between products were and especially how to choose between them. Also, the open source concept was a bit vague – especially when it came to the question about what you get with Summa and how much you have to do yourself to get up and running.

In addition, it was really striking to see how alike all the presented search engines were both in terms of page structure and layout, and in terms of content and addons. Clearly, people really have been stealing from each other along the way – mostly from Summa, of course – but I was still amazed to see how little difference there actually were between products.
On the positive side, though, I interpret this as a big pat on the shoulder to Summa: it shows that we have been making the right interface decisions.

Afterwards, I was told that the audience they had enjoyed my little talk and that it had been uplifting to hear things from a different perspective – a helicopter perspective, as one person labelled it.

I had also brought our Summa sweets along. Unfortunately, they had all melted on the train and were inseparable from the napkins in which they were wrapped. (Note to self: do not wrap Summa sweets in napkins). Luckily I could show them the sweets photo Jens took yesterday.

Download my presentation. (5 MB pdf). Its also over at SlideShare.