“WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.”

“The rapid rise of participatory media technologies – weblogs, social networks, microblogging, video sharing sites – are transforming the news media landscape, reshaping how ideas are spread. Much of the early research on the influence of participatory media on existing institutions focuses on specific, successful cases where media frames developed online influenced offline media. Our project seeks to complement this work with tools to facilitate quantitative analysis of the relationship between media sources. We will present our prototype system to retrieve, tag, cluster and analyze blog and newspaper data, and discuss how the Media Cloud platform will be used in our future experiments, and can be used by other researchers to analyze patterns of influence in news media.”

“Library closures, slashed budgets, user apathy – everything’s online, right? It’s a story many of us have heard too often or experienced ourselves, especially with the recent downturn in the economy. But many libraries are re-inventing themselves, offering new services and transforming into very different entities while still at heart performing the same role they always have – helping communities connect with information.”

Come to this NEASIS&T program to hear:

* How changes in publishing are driving changes in libraries. How can we radically change an ancient institution that evolved from providing shared print copies into one that effectively provides online content (that we often don’t even own). It’s time to get past the kludges in our processes and organizational structures and embrace our future.
* What it takes to be a librarian these days. What skills and interests are necessary? In 10 years will we be librarians or technologists?
* Success stories from libraries that have radically changed their roles and services.
* How to design your library around user expectations and keep your organization relevant.

We’ll provide breakfast, lunch, and network access for all!

Speakers:

* John Palfrey, Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School & Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
* Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian for Research & Instructional Services at Temple University’s Paley Library
* Shana Kimball, Publications Manger at the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library
* Marguerite Avery, Senior Acquisitions Editor at The MIT Press
* Cyril Oberlander, Associate Director of Milne Library at the SUNY College at Geneseo

Cost:

Students / Retirees: $50
ASIST & SLA members: $60
General public: $75

For more info:

http://tinyurl.com/yf7rjdz

neasist09

Posted by Rich

“2009 is the 100th anniversary of the Special Libraries Association, making this an ideal time to consider if there is a future for special libraries (and the skill set of librarians who work in them). Are we prepared to answer the question of whether in the struggle for our survival we will be “the fittest” or if special libraries will become a casualty of the ongoing information revolution? In exploring these questions Dr. Pearlstein will take a look at the roles special librarians have typically played as intermediaries and arbiters of information and knowledge in their parent organizations, discuss the increasing challenges to these roles from both within and outside the profession, and conclude by taking a pragmatic look at some ways to position ourselves for survival and success in a future of ongoing economic and social turbulence.”

RSVP
http://gslis.simmons.edu/signup/
by Tuesday November 10, 2009.

Posted by Rich

The Open’s theme is ‘Doing More with Less,’ and we’re lucky enough to have a collection of some of the brightest minds in social media and marketing to talk about how they are using the web to expand their businesses, making both time and money stretch to maximum efficiency. …”

“The wait is over! The Boston Book Festival has just announced its official schedule of events, and with 31 to choose from, and you’re guaranteed a fun-filled, jam-packed day on Saturday, October 24 between 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Click here for the list of sessions with times and locations.”

“In addition to our illustrious workshops, panels, presentations and performances, there will be more than 30 exhibitor booths set up in the plaza, featuring local booksellers, publishers, educators, and arts organizations. Meet authors and get books signed!”

“Don’t forget to bring the kids! We have several great events planned for the young ones, including fun activities put on by some of our exhibitors– the Boston Children’s Museum, 826 and One Laptop Per Child for example. And don’t be surprised if you run into Curious George or Madeline!”

“Also, be sure to check out the Festival Stage in Copley Square plaza, featuring live tunes ranging from a cappella to bluegrass, funk to reggae, with some impressive talent from Berklee College of Music.”

“Feeling peckish? Score a free cup of joe from Green Mountain Coffee or a chowdah sample from the Legal Seafoods Chowder Truck.”

Most events are free, but some require purchased tickets to attend.

Ken Burns, Anita Diamant, Anita Shreve, Jane Kamensky and Walter Isaacson are some of the writers who will be attending. Nicholas Negroponte will be talking about the One Laptop Per Child project, New York Times personal technology columnist David Pogue will leading a discussion on ebooks and digitalization.

For more information:

http://www.bostonbookfest.org/index.php

Posted by Rich

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Research on Computation and Society are facilitating a free Ruby on Rails workshop this weekend, October 16 and 17. Intended to be a supportive learning environment to encourage women in the software industry, men can register as the guest of a woman. Newbies are welcome. There is a discount with an in-home child care provider. Register through the blog post linked above.

Popular with developers, Ruby on Rails simplifies the programming of Web applications and should be a good first language for someone without programming experience. Knowing a programming language will only help librarians in these times. If you can’t figure out how to use Ruby in your job, learn a different language, like perhaps Python. I’ve heard from many programmers that learning languages becomes easier after they’ve learned one.

Addenda 10/15: The ladies running the workshop told participants it is full. I think there will be a webcast or some kind of audio archive. Information might be in the blog post linked above.

10/17: Webcast! IRC on freenode.net: #boston.rb -> Boston Ruby group’s channel, which they’re encouraging the participants to use today. Tweet hashtag: #rorw4w (In English: that’s the Twitter tag.)

And lots more notes~ That way you folks who don’t care about programming and what nifty tools like Ruby on Rails can do can easily skip this post.

Notes on downloading and installing the software are on the devChix wiki. Ruby and Rails require lots of pieces in order to work and to work together. One of the strengths is that they can sit on top of any database language. For the class, we’re using SQL. The sets of slides our instructor, Sarah Allen, uses are available via Slideshare and GitHub. There’s also a Ruby group on Google Groups. Supposedly, it’s safe to ask for help there. I can’t vouch for that because I haven’t posted on the list before. I’m in the beginner’s workshop.

Because I have Panther (Mac OS 10.3.9), my experience downloading and installing all of the software is different from a lot of other people’s experience. Apple has included Ruby as part of what comes with their machines since Leopard (10.5). I needed to snag git from a site other than that linked to from the wiki because those were all for more recent versions of Mac OSX. The One-click installer for Ruby didn’t work as I expected it to, so I ended up installing the various tars by hand. Thank you, JB, for taking the time several years ago to teach me how to do that when I needed to install mutt at work. Because of going through that experience, I knew to download the tar, find the README, INSTALL, or other file in the folder, and follow the instructions for installing the files. I became really good at ./configure, make, sudo make install, and so on. All together, it wasn’t too much yak shaving. I’ve been in situations before where each time I wanted to install software, I needed to grab another language or program or three. I use Terminal, Mac’s command window, all the time, so having to manually install the various programs wasn’t that horrible on its own. It was just mostly time consuming work between the downloads and waiting for the code to compile. If you have never had to install software that way, consider yourself lucky on some level, but I’ll say it’s very good knowledge to have. Luckily, there were rolling chairs, but unfortunately, the steps got in the way.

Sarah Allen and Sarah Mei, the ladies behind the workshop, both decided to do something about the gender disparity in the open source community. Sarah Allen, our workshop leader, talked about attending conferences regularly where there would be 6 women out of 200 total attendees. About 3% of the people in the open source developer community are women. The Sarahs would like that number to grow and see these workshops as a way to connect to women and encourage them to participate. The organizer at Berkman, Liana Leahy, admits when she attends tech gatherings, she often feels like she’s representing her gender more than being there as an equal.

In the class, we’re going to do some test driven development (writing code to address test plans) and agile programming.

Needed:

• ruby
• rails
• rake (make for ruby)
• git
• database (SQLite is what we’re using in the course, but it runs on top of many other ones)
• editor (Any editor should work. I’m using BBEdit because Komodo Edit (their suggestion) wasn’t working on my machine: the newest free version runs on a higher OS. After some digging, I found Komodo Edit 4.3.2 runs on 10.3.9, so I downloaded, installed, and began using it because it has better project management and Ruby visualization.)
• heroku (free rails hosting with some awesome project names)

During the intro, they asked for a show of hands as to who had programming experience. Most of my developer friends don’t consider anything of the dappling I’ve done to be real programming, so I kept my hand down. When Sarah was naming languages after that, she listed Basic. W00t! I’m finally somewhere where my past programming experience counts for something. Of course, she also listed COBOL, Pascal, and several other older languages no longer popular. Some of the older ladies raised their hands in response. That made me grin. We’re worried about gender disparities in programming now. Imagine what it was like 40 years ago.

Too bad I don’t think I can be in Seattle in a few weeks … That sounds like a lot of fun!