2007 – long after the day after the day it began

So yeah, my posting rate has almost ground to a halt in the last few months. And yes, it really was the day after Jan. 1 when I started this. For many reasons, this blog is going on an extended leave, which, in fact, it was already on, but making it official makes it a little less embarrassing. I leave with some parting thoughts and expect to return in about two months. When I was young, I grew up in an era when hitchhiking was relatively safe. For example, my younger brother and I hitchhiked when I was 10 years old into town to see the original movie version of Charlotte's Web. Of course, such activity is beyond dangerous now, but one consequence of hitchhiking that I never properly took into account was that it was usually much easier to get somewhere far away  from home than to get back again . In some ways, I feel like I have traveled some distance with this blog and now need to think about the return trip. But if you were leaving someone's house in the dead of night, the tradition was to at least leave a parting message with some reason for your nocturnal departure, and so, with a web-based scrap of paper and a scrawling pen, this is mine.

Although it was never clear from the wacky way that the original blog software dated postings, I started LibraryCog in the Fall of 2003, in part, to get a talk pulled together for a very nifty conference called Zap Your Pram. At the height of my posting powers, I was managing about one blurb every two weeks, but this slowed down after the first year, and 2006 became the year that my schedule overwhelmed this particular part of my life. There are many blogs that I find so incredibly useful and provocative that I would be the last to argue against Karen Schneider's Draft Blog Guidelines, particularly the best practice of only establishing “a blog if you plan to maintain it—that is, to post to the blog at least once per week”, but I don't know if I ever see myself getting to this level of throughput. Karen, Dan Chudnov, and Lorcan Dempsey are excellent examples of why my RSS reader is the most useful conduit to desired content on my desktop, and there are so many others as well.

However, despite my awkward counting of the initial days, it is still, more or less, the dawn of a New Year, and if I can't make a resolution to be a more frequent scribe, I can at least sketch out some of what has kept me hopping in 2006 with a view towards some predictions for 2007.

International Connections

In the Spring of 2005, I had the opportunity to write a report on Open Source for eIFL, a non-profit foundation which supports information access initiatives in developing and transition countries. This was the beginning of a positive relationship with a very vibrant organization that does incredibly good work in many parts of the globe that are short of resources. In 2006, I became even more active with eIFL than I was in the preceding year, including making a trip to Beirut to give a workshop on Open Source, and helping to arrange for a sustained eIFL-FOSS program that was kicked off with a meeting of international information access advocates and technical  folks at the monastery of Eremo delle Grotte dei Frati Bianchi in the eastern Italian province of Ancona.

The monastery  meeting and eIFL-FOSS were the topics of a Library Geeks podcast with myself, Bess Sadler, and Erik Hatcher, and I won't go into too many details here, but the short version is that Bess was appointed the western co-chair for the eIFL-FOSS initiative, and is working with Tigran Zargaryan from Yerevan State University library in Armenia to put together Open Source solutions  for eIFL countries.

Bess is also, of course, a top tier blogger, and her description of this initiative gives a good sense of how exciting eIFL-FOSS will be for all libraries, including those that may not have resource issues. I can't say enough good things about Bess and Tigran. I purposely wanted Bess to be the one to represent the West since she has very impressive international experience in Guatemala and Mexico, and her technology background is rock solid. Tigran, of course, is well known to those who attended the first code4lib conference at Oregon State University, where he won an award for traveling the farthest to attend. I worked closely with Tigran in the proposal that led to the eIFL-FOSS meeting and we presented it together to the eIFL Board in Rome over the summer. I have full confidence that eIFL-FOSS will achieve incredible things with Bess and Tigran leading the way.

Bess had already done some important groundwork for eIFL-FOSS prior to the meeting in Italy by wiring in one of the world's leading technologists to the library community. Bess works with Erik at the University of Virginia, and Erik just happens to be the co-author of Lucene in Action, the bible of Lucene developers. Erik is also a committer to the solr project, and has been working towards adding some MARC smarts to a nifty system called Collex, resulting in something new and exciting application called Flare. Erik has even been hanging around the #code4lib channel and will be conducting a solr preconference workshop at the upcoming code4lib conference, in addition to sharing keynote duties with Karen Schneider. If that isn't enough, Bess and Tigran are also speaking at the same conference, only the much revered Access event comes close to assembling such a dazzling array of voices in one gathering.

In terms of predictions, I think eIFL-FOSS will be a huge step forward for libraries. The flagship project, Library-in-a-Box, is an exciting focal point for making the best of OSS easily accessible to every organization, regardless of size. Put the brainpower of people like Erik and Ed Summers in the mix (Ed also attended the eIFL-FOSS meeting and is one of the library community's deepest technical resources), and good things are bound to happen.

I expect a lot of buzz will come out of Erik's code4lib preconference and the code4lib conference in general. I described code4lib to someone as a “Monterey Pop Festival for library geeks”, maybe it will also be like Woodstock in that everyone will claim they were there years later.

Knowledge Ontario

In 2002, I was in the thick of hosting Access but managed to attend a small meeting between the preconference events to talk about a project called the Ontario Digital Library (ODL), which was also a presentation at the conference. The ODL was largely a Ontario Library Association (OLA) initiative and a lot of us with OLA connections quickly adopted the project as our own (I was a president of OLA's technical division in 1999 and have participated in many OLA projects before and since).

My role has been as the Chair of the Technical Committee, an incredibly rewarding task in most ways since the committee has very enthusiastic and  productive members. In March, 2006, the Provincial Government announced an $8M commitment to the ODL, which was re-branded to become Knowledge Ontario. There are a suite of programs and services associated with Knowledge Ontario, but the one that has occupied a large part of the Technical Committee's attention is OurOntario, a project that seeks to digitize and make available community content. Walter Lewis and I did a session on OurOntario at Access 2006, and Walter has been a force of nature in pulling the pieces together to make it a great showpiece for Knowledge Ontario.

I am going to skip a lot of the technical bits because the deeper importance lies with the content itself. Now, I should confess, my wife and I co-own a 111 year old newspaper business, and have both become charter members of a local history group, so I am more than a little biased, but it is material like local newspapers and the records of local historical groups that hold the glue that binds a community together. I think libraries can help capture this content before it disappears in ways that would be inconceivable for most commercial indexing services. We have pulled together some incredibly rich sources for OurOntario, mostly thanks to Walter and his co-workers' ground-breaking  work in Halinet, which he described back in 2002 at Access, and which we were able to build on for OurOntario, but I think the model is very extensible. In fact, the plumbing we are using for OurOntario has also been utilized for Alouette, an emerging nation-wide Digital Library project for Canada.

My prediction here is that libraries will become even more involved in indexing local and community content in 2007. There are many natural allies for this, and several projects are already underway, but libraries are in a strong position to bring these initiatives to fruition.

Lucene – an indexer for the Masses

I have written a lot about Lucene in the last year in postings, listserv responses, and every other forum I have been around, and also put together a Lucene Summit in October. Peter Binkley captures the interest in Lucene well, this is probably the number one technology for libraries right now. So much so, that I am going to shut up about it for a while, but please note, if you haven't already signed the check for Endeca or Primo, this is the path you should seriously consider exploring.

ILS Convergence and the Rise of Evergreen

I initiated a one day symposium in Windsor on the Future of the Integrated Library System in November. I had lots of help, superb speakers, and one of the outcomes was a partnership between the University of Windsor and the Georgia PINES consortium to work on a Acquisitions layer for Evergeen. I knew we were on the path of a hot topic when I read Lorcan's post on the state of library systems right before our event kicked off, but the event came together in ways I wouldn't have thought possible when it first came forward as part of my Systems group's strategic planning process.

Richard Wallis has a fascinating post on the lack of vendors in the conversation on the state of the ILS but I am still concerned that more of the library community hasn't raised alarms about the shrinking ILS marketplace. There should be sessions filling the slots of every major library conference right now. Even institutions that have managed to delude themselves that they don't already deal with OSS by virtue of using any substantive network technology, should be interested in fostering systems like Evergreen and Koha as a backup strategy if nothing else.  I appreciate what has appeared on the NGC4Lib list, but the ILS has got to be a huge concern for almost everyone with any kind of constraints on their technology budget.

One thread that has been consistent in what has been said is that no one wants to go through a library system migration if they can avoid it. I have deep sympathy for that sentiment but my prediction is that libraries will have do some serious evaluation of how much they are willing to pay for the ILS in 2007 as the costs for 2008 start to reveal themselves. I am hopeful that the library associations, and others, will step up and help with the homework on this.

Blogging Platforms and more thoughts on things I may never finish

This document is written in OpenOffice and is served directly to the Web through some shared XSLT, and I have worked on WebDAV and a bunch of other technical layers in the quest for a seamless blend of blogging and document creation. I am a fan and actively use Wordpress and Drupal, but I still want a desktop that lives on the web, with equal footing for both desktop applications and browser-based systems. I started an application last year at code4lib for syncing S5 screens and audio, and have scattered projects all over the place to feed into a blended platform. I really want all of this pulled together properly, and to find a way to make blogging, IRCing, document writing, and running through slides, a less disconnected experience.

Will I succeed? Whatever powers the next posting that appears here will probably contain the answer. Until then, I wish for all the best for you and yours in 2007. Be careful on the way home.