A friend of mine works for Mozilla's Peer 2 Peer University; she recently wrote
a blog post that discusses some ideas for designing a conference for equity,
interaction and learning. Might be of interest both for the pre-conf and
conferences in general. Sadly, I can't attend, but I hope it
Another little quick comment, adding to the chorus of lurkers and people who
aren't sure if they're coders. Someday I hope to get to a code4lib conference
(if only to tell people in person I knew Jonathan Rochkind way back when), but
in the meantime I've been on this list on and off (but
I feel like a couple years ago a librarian(s?) created a Google Custom Search
Engine that did exactly what you describe as focused searching, but I can't
find a link any more. You can search the CSEs by scrolling down on this page
(and there are a couple of links to directories, too):
Just a quick thank you to everyone who contributed to this discussion. I've
been a lurker for I think a couple years and have learned tons just being on
the list and trying to absorb what I can without having any real coding
experience (anyone ever hear of Dr. Scheme? That's the language I
