I knew you people were holding out on me! We've jumped from 26 people
to 52 who are registered to attend the pre-conference. That's
fantastic, but it might mean we need to book a larger space. I'll get
back to you on that.

One question I'm getting a lot is whether one needs significant java
programming experience in order to participate in the pre-conference.
The answer is no, you do not. Once upon a time you needed to be
pretty handy with java in order to use the lucene libraries to do
much of anything. But now we are in the brave new world of solr, and
all you need to be able to do is

1) install solr, and
2) get your data in a form that can be read by solr.

In order to get much out of the pre-conference, you should be
comfortable doing the following things:

1) Downloading and installing servlet based applications, like solr.
This isn't hard, so don't freak out if you don't know what that
means. By all means, get a head start by downloading and running the
solr nightly build, available here:
http://cvs.apache.org/dist/lucene/solr/nightly/
This will require some rudimentary java skills, like you will
probably need to be able to set your JAVA_HOME environment, set a
classpath, etc. If you plan to run solr on your laptop (highly
recommended for the afternoon workshop) you will need to have java
1.5 installed. If you are a windows user, you will need to have
cygwin installed. I'm getting all this from the solr tutorial,
available here: http://incubator.apache.org/solr/tutorial.html  It's
a good idea to go through the tutorial beforehand, just to have a
basic understanding of how things work. We're all a friendly bunch,
so if you're having trouble I'm sure someone will help you, but in
order to be able to spend the maximum amount of time on solr and
lucene, and less time on installing java 1.5 and installing cygwin
and the like, try to make sure you have all that stuff done before
the workshop.

2) Getting your data in an XML format readable by solr. There is no
specific technology required to do this, and the best way to get it
done is going to vary according to what your skill set is like, what
your data set is like, etc. Personally, I have data in XML, and I
just write XSLT to transform it into solr-parseable XML. You might
prefer Ruby, Java, PHP, Perl, Python, whatever turns you on, so long
as you can output XML files in a format readable by solr. That means
you will probably need to be able to do a bit of programming on-the-
fly, as you decide what your solr index is going to look like and you
massage your data to get it in there. Decide what language you feel
the most comfortable in, make sure you know how to use it to output
XML files, and make sure you have everything available that you would
need to do that.

That's all! I'm betting that if you're a part of code4lib, you're
going to come equipped with the skills I've described above. If these
aren't things you've done before but you're still interested in
participating, you have lots of time to get up to speed before the
workshop.

I hope this relieves some fears from people who want to participate
but aren't sure if they can. I have found solr quite painless to
download and install, and fun to play around with. I bet everyone has
a few days off next week. Spend some of it geeking out with solr.

Remember to register if you plan to attend!
Bess

Elizabeth (Bess) Sadler
Head, Technical and Metadata Services
Digital Scholarship Services
Box 400129
Alderman Library
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904

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