The eXtensible Catalog Organization is hosting a meeting of XC community
members to be held in Charlotte, North Carolina, on May 5th-6th, 2010. 
Current and future members of the XC community will gather to learn about XC
Project’s accomplishments and to create an action plan for remaining XC
software development.   Attendance at the meeting is by invitation only.  We
encourage institutions that are interested in making a significant
contribution to the future development of the XC Software to apply for an
invitation by submitting a proposal as described below. 

Background

For the past two years, the eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project
(www.extensiblecatalog.org) has been working to create open-source,
user-centered, next generation software for libraries.   The software suite
is composed of four software components that can be used independently to
address a particular need or combined to provide an end-to-end discovery
system to connect library users with resources.

The project has been hosted at the University of Rochester and funded
through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Scholarly
Communications Program as well as through significant contributions from and
in collaboration with XC partner institutions.  The Mellon grant phase of
the project has just come to a conclusion and the eXtensible Catalog
Organization (XCO) has been launched with the primary goal of overseeing and
directing the future of the XC software.

Call for Meeting Participation

We have already produced a substantial amount of useful software with the
support of current partners, however, we now need the participation of the
larger library community to make XC successful.  To aid in future planning,
the XCO is hosting a meeting about XC to guide the next steps toward the
completion of a production ready end-to-end system.  The primary goals of
the meeting are to:

·         Show off what we have done.  We have built software that fills
many needs for libraries and this will be a great opportunity to see it in
action.

·         Update on what is left to do.   There are some things that remain
to be done in order for XC to be a production ready piece of software.

·         Obtain support from meeting attendees in the form of financial
resources and developer contributions.   Two current XC funding institutions
have offered to match such contributions, so one outcome of the meeting will
be to develop a plan for obtaining these matching contributions among
meeting participants.

·         Create an action plan for finishing XC, using contributed
resources of all kinds. 

In order to meet these goals and have an effective meeting it is crucial
that we solicit the participation of libraries that share the XCO vision and
who might enable XC software to make that vision as successful as possible;
therefore meeting attendance will be by invitation.  We will be: 

·         Inviting our sponsor and partner institutions, as they have shown
their strong interest in XC via their contributions of various types of
resources.

·         Issuing a call to all libraries, software vendors, consortia or
other organizations with an interest in helping to complete XC.  

We invite interested institutions to let us know about your interest in XC
and in attending this meeting.   A representative for the institution should
submit an email participation proposal to Randall Cook, XCO Project Manager,
([log in to unmask]) that:

·         Summarizes the institution’s interest in XC (e.g., hurdles the
institution faces that XC could solve)

·         Summarizes your library system’s technical infrastructure (e.g.,
what ILS you use, what the library website is built on, consortial
requirements, and so on)

·         Describes possible ways that your institution might be able to
assist XC.  We are especially interested in the following:

o    Financial contributions to help fund software development

o   Programming resources that can be dedicated to the XCO e for 6-12 months 

o   Other contributions (in-house expertise that could be donated to the
XCO, etc.).

The details of the meeting are not yet finalized, but the following is what
we know at this time:

·         The meeting will begin with a group welcome dinner on the evening
of May 5 and continue with a full-day meeting at UNC/Charlotte on Thursday
May 65.

·         The welcome dinner, as well as breakfast and lunch the following
day, will be provided for one staff member from each attending institution.
  An institution may request to send more than one attendee, and will then
be responsible for meal costs for additional attendees.

·         Travel and lodging will be self-funded by the attendee’s home
institution.

·         There will be no registration fee to attend the meeting itself.

During the coming weeks, we will be reviewing responses to this Call for
Participation.  We will then issue invitations to the meeting and will be
able to communicate more details about the meeting to invited attendees.

We encourage institutions to submit proposals for participation even if
there is some doubt that you can attend the meeting due to scheduling
constraints.  We may be able to arrange for remote participation in the
meeting when necessary.     

You can learn more about XC by watching four screen casts we have recently
released http://www.screencast.com/users/eXtensibleCatalog and by visiting
our website at www.eXtensibleCatalog.org. (Look for a revamped website at
this address in the near future!) 

Jennifer Bowen
Co-Executive Director, eXtensible Catalog Organization