Science Library Pad

my presentation on SOA and BPEL for Access 2006

My presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/library-web-services-for-discovery-and-delivery-of-scientific-information

Bookmarks from within the presentation, with some corrections and additions, available at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/access2006akerman

The audio of the presentation is at

http://www.access2006.uottawa.ca/2006-10-13-07-akerman.mp3

Overall, I thought it was well-received, but I still don't think most libraries are thinking beyond adding a few Web Services.  The main focus for library technology seems to be around the catalogue and adding layers on top of it, not breaking it apart into services.  There still seems to be limited concrete action in working on library SOA to integrate with the various frameworks that are out there.

If we can't fix the ILS, maybe we could work on a smaller group addressing issues related to journal article repositories?  I didn't even touch on the Fedora Web Services and workflow support in the above presentation.

I basically continue to be concerned about a lot of diverging wheel-reinvention activities, rather than seeing a lot of unifying activities starting to deliver good models and services.

Previously:
October 15, 2006  SOA BOF - links and thoughts

Sidebar:
This is not as-presented, this is a previous version, the reason being that somewhere between Windows PowerPoint 2000 SP3 and Mac PowerPoint X, the clickable weblinks got completely munged.  Wedged to the extent that even when I try to fix them in Win PowerPoint 2000, it won't let me save the changes.

I don't know if this is related to some bizarre Microsoft limitation, or to some Win-Mac interchange bug, or to a Mac specific bug.

Plus which I got an exciting SlideShare error when I tried to upload: "Camping Problem! SlideLoader::Controllers::Upload.POST"

Access 2006 podcasts and presentations

http://www.access2006.uottawa.ca/index.php?page_id=10

My presentation isn't up yet - somewhere in moving back and forth between Windows and Mac, the hyperlinks all got lost - have to fix that first.

SOA BOF - links and thoughts

I had a small but useful BOF on SOA at Access 2006.  Thanks to Glen Newton for posting the BOF, via the magic of blog communication, and thanks to Alison for trying out the nano-BOF-introduction idea I suggested.

Anyway, here are some SOA starting points, from my participation in an SOA Symposium last year

• bookmarks - http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/soasym2005
• presentation - Service-Oriented Architecture Methods to develop Networked Library Services (PowerPoint)
• video - me doing the presentation (RealVideo)

In terms of my thoughts, I think it's great that Access brings together people from so many different perspectives and backgrounds, all with some connection to library technology - this is silo-breaking as it's meant to happen, but that is also a tremendous challenge.  We have people who come to coding through a formal CS background, people who come to it from a lifelong interest in hacking, people who arrive at it through scripting, and people who manage coders without having ever written code.  That's a really diverse range of backgrounds to try to address.  I think there is a balance between "just getting it done" and some of the higher-level structures and concepts that can be provided by software engineering.  I will have more to say about this when I do a posting about my Friday afternoon "SOA / Web Services / Lego / BPEL / Framework" presentation.

My colleague Stephen Anthony was as always helpful during the BOF and during other discussions, in particular he pointed out to me that I need to find some better terminology for "rapid but non-architecturally-guided" development.  I had been using "Agile" as a shorthand, but to most people that means the (excellent and used by CISTI) concepts of Agile software development.

The following previous posting will lead you to links for all the SOA Symposium videos and presentations: March 13, 2006 - video from Manitoba SOA Symposium.

Access 2006 - Thursday 12 - I'm sick

Much we can control with our technology, as I'm sure is reflected in today's Access 2006,
but weather and health are not amongst them; I'm home sick.

Planet Access

http://web5.uottawa.ca/bibnet/planet-access/

Aggregation of blogs from Access 2006 participants (Access 2006 starts next Wednesday, October 11)

BOF on SOA at Access 2006?

Anyone interested in a BOF on Service-Oriented Architecture at Access 2006?

I don't know how the Access BOFs work, but I do see there is a slot

Thursday, October 12, 2006

5:00pm - 5:45pm     Birds of a Feather
7:30pm -     Improv Night at the Velvet Room

With so much excellent thinkage on SOA, it would be nice to see what info can be exchanged.
In case you're wondering, CISTI is already developing its services within an SOA today.

You can read my Service-Oriented Architecture category for more info, it has the past two years of my links and thoughts on the topic.

UPDATE 2006-10-15: I held the BOF, you can read my report.

institutional repositories preconf at Access 2006

Registration is now open for the free, full-day CARL Institutional Repositories pre-conference at Access 2006.

The pre-conference will be October 10, 2006, 9:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m.

This full day pre-conference is sponsored by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and is open to everyone interested in learning more about institutional repositories or sharing their experiences with others.

Access 2006 registration is open

Access 2006 - registration

** Access 2006 has a maximum registration of 250 attendees. To ensure fair 'access' to all, we are limiting registration to 7 attendees per institution.

Access 2006 programme up

The Access 2006 Tentative Programme has been posted

http://www.access2006.uottawa.ca/?page_id=5

I am pleased to announce that I will be one of the speakers.
I will be covering some aspects of Service-Oriented Architecture, Web Services, BPEL, and library integration into scholarly communication workflows.

I don't think I'll be able to compete with "Laughter Yoga" though.

Google Calendar experiments

All conferences I plan to attend:

XML feed

iCal (e.g. copy and paste this link into Mac iCal Calendar->Subscribe... )

subscribe to this calendar (within Google Calendar)

---

Just Access 2006 as a single subscribable event

action=TEMPLATE
text=Access 2006 library conference
location=11 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON
details=Capitalize on Access 2006 to weather the information technology storm
dates=20061011/20061015
trp=true
sprop=website:www.access2006.uottawa.ca
sprop=name:Access 2006

Event construction per http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/event_publisher_guide.html

---

Syntax note: in order to have an all-day event series, you must end it one day AFTER the actual event, i.e. the syntax is FROM... TO... without including the TO date.  So to make the even from the 11th to the 14th, I have to put the end date as the 15th.

It's interesting that Google recommends creating a URL that is not technically valid.  All of the spaces and characters in it are supposed to be escaped according to the URL syntax.

In Mac OS X 10.4, Safari saves the iCal link as "basic.ics", which if you double-click will open iCal and ask you to add it to an existing or new calendar.  Note: it is not a dynamic feed, just an added set of calendar events.  Firefox doesn't know what to do with it: it just sees it as a text/calendar file.  It will not save it with any extension by default.

You can subscribe to it, but only by manually doing it within iCal (copy the link and paste it into Calendar->Subscribe... )

Access 2006 website is up

http://www.access2006.uottawa.ca/

(I don't know if they plan the shorter URL access2006.uottawa.ca to work; it doesn't seem to at the moment.)

It just came up so there's no much info yet.
As mentioned previously in my Access2006 category, it will be October 11-14, 2006 in Ottawa.

Ottawa library conferences in 2006

Quite a lineup this year:

• 148th ARL Membership Meeting.  May 16-19, 2006.  Fairmont Chateau Laurier.  UPDATED 2006-02-13: new link.
• Archiving 2006.  May 23-26, 2006.
• Canadian Library Association (CLA) 2006.  June 14-17, 2006.  Ottawa Congress Centre.  UPDATED 2006-02-13: new link to conference website.
• GeoTec Event.  June 18-21, 2006.  Ottawa Congress Centre.  co-located with the Association of Canadian Map Libraries and Archives (ACMLA), the Canadian Cartographic Association, and the International Cartographic Association
• Access 2006.  October 11-14, 2006.  (see previous year: Access 2005, as well as my category Access2005)  UPDATED 2006-02-03 with link to Access 2006 website.
• Council of Federal Libraries Annual Fall Seminar 2006.  (see previous year in my category CFLAFS2005)

Previously:
June 19, 2005  CLA 2006 in Ottawa