thoughts on code4lib northwest

Here are three areas that stand out to me from yesterday's Code4Lib Northwest meeting in PDX:

The increasing importance of cloud services. There were several presentations that focused on the opportunities that cloud-based services offer libraries, including Michael Klein's metapresentation. Kyle Banerjee described an Orbis Cascade Alliance initiative that will make it easier for member libraries to use Linux servers for their work, using Amazon Web Services' EC2.

The increasing importance of non-relational database options. This is an area that I've spent a lot of personal time with recently, working with AWS SimpleDB. At the meeting, Kyle presented on NoSQL databases. Also, Shirley Lincicum presented on the Needle graph-based database, which she used to create a unified directory from irregular web page data from multiple institutions. Non-relational databases can be seen as a subset of cloud services. Based upon my work with SimpleDB, what's important is the increasing awareness of lighter, non-relational options when starting a database-dependent service. The strengths of RDBMS don't change, but the available options are broader.

The increasing diversity of library management systems in the region. Beth Longwell and David Drexler presented on Eastern Oregon University's impending migration from Innovative Millennium to Evergreen, with support from Equinox Software. Support for consortium interoperability, which would ideally be accompished via a standards-based approach (NCIP) still seems up in the air. But the EOU work underscores the fact that the regional Alliance libraries will likely become less homogenous in their library management systems in the coming years. This could lead to us becoming more atomized as institutions, but I hope that's not the case.

Jon Scott and I presented on applying autocomplete to WorldCat.org discovery. A demo site is online and Scott mounted his code samples on github.