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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 [log in to unmask] (434) 243-2305