Hackfest 3:
THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL
(or)
Can I Get A Metasearch?
A Cast of Dozens
And the O'Reilly Lithographic Spirit Gods
Access 2004 – Halifax – 13 October 2004
First, A Poem
"Guinness, Murphy’s, Harp
Hops is bitter fruit. All
Good from Dublin Core"
-A Librarian (Unknown)
Found in a bar in Windsor, ONT, in 2002
A Definition
• Hack \Hack\. noun:
– “A quick job that produces what is needed, but not
well.” (Jargon File 4.3.0)
– “One who works hard at boring tasks [syn: drudge,
hacker.]” (WordNet (r) 1.7)
• Hack \Hack\. verb:
– “To use frequently and indiscriminately, so as to render
commonplace.” (Webster’s, 1913)
• Fest \Fest\, Feste \Fes”te\, noun:
– “A feast. [Obs.] –Chaucer.” (Webster’s 1913)
Objectives
• Solving problems or develop new ideas
• Sharing a temporary, non-competitive, nonwork, no-pressure, no-string-attached,
collaborative social, and educational
environment
• Learning about contemporary issues in
libraries and tech
• Learning from each other
• Having fun
The Event
• 40+ signups, 35+ attendees, many newcomers
• Held at St. Mary's University
• Sixteen project ideas suggested in advance (but
kept private until Hackfest)
• One big lab, one big meeting room
• Two dedicated remote hackfest servers
• 30+ minutes of discussing projects
• Group up and go!
The People
The Suggestions
• Sixteen (16!) project suggestions
• Several metasearch ideas (framework,
training)
• Several personal library ideas (rss from
repositories, tables of contents, integrating
with external systems)
• Others: cobrowsing, harvesting,
conversions, "bitter date" normalization
Project: Tables of Contents
• Who: Richard Baer, John Dobson, Grant GelinasBrown, Todd Holbrook, Sherri Vokey, William
Wueppelmann
• What: To discover a method for harvesting e-journal
table of contents information from freely-accessible
publisher web sites (without having to enter into
negotiations with the publishers). Library users would be
able to save a list of favorite journals in a web-based
personal account and receive notification of updates. The
ability to link to the full-text (with an active subscription)
would be an additional feature, as would searching within
the personal database.
Project: Tables of Contents
• Screen scraping: recovery of a document's
underlying data structure by parsing its
source code
– inference of boundaries between records and
fields through examination of patterns in the tag
structure
– inference of what data elements are represented
through examination of table headings, field
labels, other clues contained within tags such as
name or class attributes
Project: Tables of Contents
Project: Tables of Contents
Project: Tables of Contents
Project: Personal Library
• Who: Nancy
Hoebelheinrich, Tracy
Seneca, Brandon
Uhlman, Lisa Yeo
• What: To come up with
the ways and means that our
library systems can talk to
personal library systems
from Apple, Google, etc.
Project: Personal Library
• What is a personal library?
– More than a simple list of the bibliographic (or
sales) info about items I own or have read.
– I should have access to the full text, and to
related full text wherever feasible.
• Reviews of the work
• Materials by same author (or auto-link to federated
search)
• Recommended (related) reading
(see project 8)
Project: Personal Library
• Not limited to items documented in databases, but can
include scanned items, my own personal papers.
• I should be able to navigate by methods meaningful to me,
not just info about the item. (personal timeline, categories
I create).
• A personal library should grow more rich over the years,
not just because I add items, but by learning how I use its
contents. Not just the data about the item, but also data
about how I used it.
Project: Personal Library
• Our bookshelves
– The books
– Our ephemera: folders, notepads, papers, photocopied
articles
• Bibliographic Management (ProCite, RefWorks,
Citation Manager, Online Portfolios)
• Browser bookmarks, our own web pages/sites,
blogs
• Accounts: Amazon, Netflix, AllMusic, ITunes
• Hard drive: downloaded articles, directories for
classes, projects
Project: Personal Library
•
LibDB
Emphasis on different interfaces for different user types
•
Citation Manager
Simon Fraser University
Integration with research sources; data entry not separate task
•
Delicious Library
Visual interface; easy to enter, gather related information with physical item in hand.
•
Library Lookup
Gather information from your library catalog while browsing amazon
•
Project 8:
•
Stuff I've Seen
Blog book recommendation activity
Susan Dumais - Microsoft
Automatically index items you’re interested in; emphasis and ranking based on how you
interact with the item, not just the item itself.
•
Federated Searching
Enhance the information you have by pulling in related material. Your personal library should
grow on its own.
Project: Personal Library
Project: Personal Library
Project: Personal Library
• Interesting issues:
– Copyright / Authorization
This can’t “belong to” an institution – it
shouldn’t go away when you finish school, etc.
– How does your access to related materials
change as you move from place to place?
Project: Metasearch Considerations
• Who: Julie Arie, Roy Tennant,
Kent Weaver
• What: Document to "highlight
issues to consider when
reviewing metasearch software
applications."
• Definition: "an application that
performs simultaneous searching of
two or more different types of
resources and effectively presents
results, with appropriate machine-level
communication between related
applications."
Project: Metasearch Considerations
• Local: configure/control, compatibility,
licensing, political/privacy/administrative
• Application: protocols, syntax, authentication,
configuration, target parameters (presentation,
configuration, technical), deployment, results,
interface, management, consortial support,
hardware, interoperability
• Vendor: implementation costs, maintenance
costs, support, roadmap/vision, selection process
Project: Metasearch Architecture
• Who: Walter Lewis, calvin
mah, Art Rhyno
• What: How do you design
an architecture for
metasearch that can be used
in different environments?
• Artifact: design docs,
sample profiles
Project: Metasearch Architecture
• Design Layers:
–
–
–
–
Targets
Instances
Branding
Application space
• How do you model/define schemas for
each?
• SETH: "Search Everything 'Till it Hurts"
Project: Metasearch Arch.: Target
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<targets> <target>
<user_agent> <default/> </user_agent> <host/>
<HTTP_parms> <steps no=""> <base_HREF />
<method> GET|POST </method> <nvp name=""/>
<extract name="" type="regexp/Xpath"/>
<cookie name="" path="" domain="" age=""
secure=""> PASS_FORWARD COLLECT </cookie>
</steps> </HTTP_parms>
<Z_parms> <database_name/> <port/>
<result_set_naming_required>
</result_set_naming_required>
<Z_RecordSyntaxes> <Z_Syntax/><Z_Syntax/>
</Z_RecordSyntaxes> </Z_parms>
<wsdl>URI</wsdl>
<target_URL/><last_updated/>
</target></targets>
Project: Metasearch Arch.: Instance
<?xml version="1.0"?> <target_sets> <target>
<search_label /> <search_descriptor /> <result_label
/>
<preferred_record_syntax>
mergeability criteria dedup
</preferred_record_syntax>
<result_ranking /> <transformer /> <timeout />
<authentication>
<user>machine login/pass</user>
<target> SAML? referrer apache_style form
certificates</target> </authentication>
<resolver_url />
<search_types><search_type> SUBJECT|TITLE|
<transform type="HTML|SCREEN|PDF" />
</search_type> </search_types> <generator />
<target_hints> <!-- hand off when search fails -->
URI|text </target_hints>
<!-- if failed --> <alt_target/><meta><instance_name />
<form_type/><form_label /> <help_files />
</meta> </target> </target_sets>
Project: Metasearch Guide
• Who: Joyce Wong, Simon Lloyd, Lissa
Potter
• What: An interactive tool that incorporates
critical thinking processes from library
tutorials and help guides with meta-search
functions
• Artifact: A new prototype user interface
Project: Metasearch Guide
• Major changes between proto-type and new draft
include:
– a more structured approach in which the tool is
presented as a series of steps.
– emphasis is on examples to guide students through the
critical thinking
– user is asked for backup search words near the
beginning of the tool. The backup search words are then
included as alternate search strategies later on.
– demos in the form of videos
Project: Metasearch Guide
• The team also discussed more advanced
features such as:
– "test run" options by which users can test their
search statements by a preliminary result screen
that provides both qualitative and quantitative
evaluations.
– the option to save their search history in some
form of personalized
Project: Rakoon
• Who: Peter Binkley, Corey
Davis, John Durno, Kenton
Good, Michael Hohner,
Ross Singer, Steve Zinck
• What: a co-browser for
RAKIM (virtual reference
tool) using Cocoon
• Artifact: a working
prototype
Project: Rakoon
• Co-browsing:
– Bandwidth-intensive session w/shared screen,
mouse, etc. (e.g. QuestionPoint)
– Co-proxy with regular screen refreshes from
shared cache (e.g. 24x7)
• Used latter as model, creating proxy using
Cocoon, built on Art Rhyno's Hackfest I
project
Project: Rakoon
Project: Rakoon
Project: Rakoon
Project: Rakoon
• Future development:
–
–
–
–
Proxies HTML well, but not other media types
Security audit
PATRIOT Act issues
Actual integration w/RAKIM (!)
Project: RSS From Repositories
• Who: Kristina Aston, Cameron Metcalf,
Pat Moore, Miles Poindexter
• What:
– getting an RSS feed out of a digital repository classified
in their field of study
– alerting users when the latest additions are added
– an RSS feed of new book acquisitions on a library's
homepage instead of statically-generated HTML pages.
• Artifact: Prototypes! See
http://rockies.med.yale.edu/~group8/
Project: Mirroring Weblogs
• Who: Dan Chudnov, Brian Tingle
• What: How to enable a LOCKSS-like "lots
of copies" of weblog data? If an
"important" weblog "goes dark," how can
we re-light it elsewhere?
• Artifact: Simple design, diagram
Project: Mirroring Weblogs
Summary
• 30+ people
• 8+ projects
• Wide range of activities:
– Focus on metasearch and personal library
– New service models, new models for existing
services
– Working demos
– Whiteboard-only hacking
– Building on previous years' work
Thoughts on Process
• Still not sure whether to share suggestions
beforehand; good reasons for/against
• Quick re-assessment of ideas, skill balance
soon after project groups assemble
• Post-lunch-ish reassembly, quick reports
• Whole-day pre-conf, single location, format
works
• Wiki helpful for organizing projects,
perhaps we can do more with it
New for 2004: Hackfest Awards
The "There's More Than One Way To Hack It" Duct Tape
Hackfest Awards
Art Rhyno:
Access Pimp
(self-proclaimed!)
(honest!!)
Hackfest Awards
2002
2004
2003
Peter Binkley:
Lifetime Achievement
Acknowledgements
• Tamsin, Steven, Peter, et al. at Acadia, Saint
Mary's for everything, esp. logistics, support
• Saint Mary's for facilities
• John for co-coordinating
• SFU (calvin), YCMI for servers
• Roy for the hype
• All the participants!