Below is a brief description of the Inaugural Code4Lib "Midwest" Regional Meeting, but for HTML layout goodness complete with a couple of pictures and a cheesy movie, see the blog posting and the temporary/hidden link. [1, 2]


Inaugural Code4Lib "Midwest" Regional Meeting

I believe the Inaugural Code4Lib "Midwest" Regional Meeting (June 11 & 12, 2010 at the University of Notre Dame) was a qualified success.

About twenty-six people attended. (At least that was the number of people who went to lunch.) They came from Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois. Julia Bauder won the prize for coming the furthest distance away — Grinnell, Iowa.

We began with Lightning Talks:

 * ePub files by Michael Kreyche
 * FRBR and MARC data by Kelly McGrath
 * Great Books by myself
 * jQuery and the OPAC by Ken Irwin
 * Notre Dame and the Big Ten by Michael Witt
 * Solr & Drupal by Rob Casson
 * Subject headings via a Web Service by Michael Kreyche
 * Taverna by Rick Johnson and Banu Lakshminarayanan
 * VUFind on a hard disk by Julia Bauder

We dined in the University's South Dining Hall, and toured a bit of the campus on the way back taking in the "giant marble", the Architecture Library, and the Dome.

In the afternoon we broke up into smaller groups and discussed things including institutional repositories, mobile devices & interfaces, ePub files, and FRBR. In the evening we enjoyed varieties of North Carolina barbecue, and then retreated to the campus bar (Legend's) for a few beers.

I'm sorry to say the Code4Lib Challenge was not successful. Us hackers were either to engrossed to notice whether or not anybody came to the event, or nobody showed up to challenge us. Maybe next time.

There were fewer participants on Day #2. We spent the time listening to Ken elaborate on the uses and benefits of jQuery. I hacked at something I'm calling "The Great Books Survey".

The event was successful in that it provided plenty of opportunity to discuss shared problems and solutions. Personally, I learned I need to explore statistical correlations, regressions, multi-varient analysis, and principle component analysis to a greater degree.

A good time was had by all, and it is quite possible the next "Midwest" Regional Meeting will be hosted by the good folks in Chicago.

For more detail about Code4Lib "Midwest", see the wiki. [3]

[1] blog posting - http://tinyurl.com/342e8pc
[2] cheesy movie - http://infomotions.com/tmp/code4lib/
[3] wiki - http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Midwest


Thank you, one and all, for participating.

-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame