Access 2008

Access was great, my first time going, first time at a hackfest, first time presenting at a conference. I had to laugh to myself at some points. Presenters were throwing out their Access “street cred” - being at the ‘96 Access…I was in high school.

Hackfest Worked on problem 7:

7 . Socialize Evergreen! John Blyberg just released SOPAC 2.0 (http://www.thesocialopac.net/ and http://www.blyberg.net/2008/08/16/sopac-20-what-to-expect/) built on a Drupal, MySQL, and Sphinx platform, with interfaces defined for sharing tags, reviews, and ratings of materials (Insurge). Your mission: accomplish one or more of the following: * Wouldn’t it be nice to have a different interface for Evergreen? Maybe one built on Drupal, so you can host your whole site in it? You can’t argue with those rhetorical questions, can you? So, stop blubbering and build an ILS connector between Evergreen and Locum (SOPAC’s catalog discovery layer). Right now the only available ILS connector for Locum is to III. This aggression will not stand, man! * Enable Evergreen to contribute tags, reviews, and ratings to Insurge. Hmm, that means you’ll have to teach Evergreen how to store tags, reviews, and ratings first. Okay, do both. And figure out how to pull tags, reviews, and ratings from Insurge while you’re at it, okay? Geez. Do I have to do everything here? * Figure out how to replicate Insurge. Possibly to an entirely different platform. CouchDB? Solr? PostgreSQL + Full Text Search? I dunno, you’re the big-brained person. LOCKSS!"

I spend the majority of the day setting up an ideal test environment - installing mysql, php5, with any and every dependency necessary. Then setting up drupal, sphinx, locum, and insurge. My theory was going to be how I could scrape the web interface in Evergreen, but that was foiled by the bug I found in the server image. Dan Scott troubleshot for a bit, but it was almost 4 by then, and everybody was wiped. So we just chalked it up to experience for the future…although Dan was happy I found the bug…and had it fixed by the next morning!

Presentation Presentation went well. I presented on a panel with, Ilana Kingsley (University of Alaska Fairbanks), Dave Mitchell (London Public Library), Harish Nayak (University of Rochester), and Debra Riley-Huff (Ole Miss). We ran really tight on time, from what I hear, that always happens when presenting with panels. If you want to have a look at the slides, you can download them here. When the audio from Access gets all hashed out, I’ll post that too.

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