[CODE4LIB] SHARE call for creative responses
SHARE is seeking applications for a technical project manager<http://www.arl.org/news/arl-news/3178-arl-seeks-share-technical-project-manager>and hopes to receive applications from interested individuals by this week. At the same time SHARE will also entertain creative responses to this job posting. In particular, if an existing team with the requisite project management and development skills wants to put forward a proposal that supplies both the technical project manager and the forthcoming developer positions, we would consider the offer. In other words, if you have a team ready to dig into the development of the SHARE notification service<http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/share-notification-system-project-plan.pdf>, we'd love to hear from you! Please take a look at the SHARE call for creative responses<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MV0l5IB0QWxOPZLcws2xsNp7PhzmwO2U_GhSD0aM19o/edit?usp=sharing>and get back to us before 4/23. Thanks, ...Eric Eric Celeste / e...@clst.org / http://eric.clst.org / 651-323-2009
[CODE4LIB] Fwd: ARL Seeks SHARE Technical Project Manager
I am happy to report that we have just posted a position for a SHARE Technical Project Manger<http://www.arl.org/news/arl-news/3178-arl-seeks-share-technical-project-manager>, the person who will lead the development of the SHARE notification service<http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/share-notification-system-project-plan.pdf>. If you are interested, or know someone who we should consider for this position, please contact share-project-mana...@arl.org. Have a great 2014 Code4Lib Conference this week! ...Eric Eric Celeste / e...@clst.org / http://eric.clst.org / 651-323-2009 If you're having trouble viewing this email, you may see it online<http://t.e2ma.net/message/t5d6f/dx8nyc>. Share this: <http://t.e2ma.net/share/outbound/e/t5d6f/dx8nyc> <http://t.e2ma.net/share/outbound/t/t5d6f/dx8nyc> <http://t.e2ma.net/share/outbound/f/t5d6f/dx8nyc> <http://t.e2ma.net/share/outbound/l/t5d6f/dx8nyc> [image: Association of Research Libraries] <http://t.e2ma.net/click/t5d6f/dx8nyc/x8qd6b> ARL Seeks SHARE Technical Project Manager by *Judy Ruttenberg* | *202-296-2296 <202-296-2296>* | * share-project-mana...@arl.org * | on *March 25, 2014* [image: ARL Seeks SHARE Technical Project Manager] <http://t.e2ma.net/click/t5d6f/dx8nyc/d1rd6b> image © Niklas Wikström <http://t.e2ma.net/click/t5d6f/dx8nyc/ttsd6b> The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is recruiting a project manager for an 18-month project to build the SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) Notification Service (PDF)<http://t.e2ma.net/click/t5d6f/dx8nyc/9ltd6b>. SHARE (www.arl.org/share) <http://t.e2ma.net/click/t5d6f/dx8nyc/peud6b> is a collaborative initiative among ARL, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. The technical project manager is a full-time position with standard ARL benefits for 18 months with the possibility of extension. This position is also eligible for telecommuting. Areas of Major Responsibilities Taking goals and direction from SHARE’s technical director, the SHARE technical project manager will oversee the agile development process by a small (2–3 person) distributed team in building SHARE’s Notification Service through a series of sprints in which discrete periods of effort produce working code. The technical project manager will work collaboratively but with a substantial amount of autonomy with concentration on the following tasks: - Working with a part-time technical director, contribute to the selection of the development team and sprint schedule. - In collaboration with the development team, distill development tasks into discrete 2- to 3-week sprints of work. - Oversee the day-to-day operations of a distributed team of developers during each code sprint. - Review the project schedule with senior management and all other staff who will be affected by the project activities, and revise the schedule as required. - Track progress, review project tasks, and meet deadlines while ensuring deliverables are clear to the development team and to stakeholders. - Build team cohesion and foster good communication among stakeholders and the development team. Position Requirements Education BA/BS, or equivalent knowledge or experience. Experience - Demonstrated success with agile development methodologies and with supervising distributed teams, preferably on open source projects. - A solid understanding of and demonstrated experience with using appropriate open source and agile tools such as Jira and GitHub. - Preferred experience in publishing or scholarly communication in libraries. Compensation Salary is dependent upon experience. ARL offers standard benefits including sick leave, vacation, TIAA/CREF. Applications Screening will begin April 9, 2014, and will continue until the position is filled. Please e-mail a letter of application and résumé to share-project-mana...@arl.org. View/download a PDF of this job description<http://t.e2ma.net/click/t5d6f/dx8nyc/56ud6b>. *ARL is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to diversity in the professional workplace.* The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizatio
[CODE4LIB] SHARE Notification System Project Plan
The SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE)--a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU)--today released<http://www.arl.org/news/arl-news/3117-share-releases-notification-system-project-plan>the SHARE Notification System Project Plan (PDF)<http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/share-notification-system-project-plan.pdf>. This plan describes a first step for SHARE, one that would increase our awareness of research output emerging from our universities and other research centers. Making this notification system a reality will be the work of an open source development project, so you can expect to hear more about this in the coming weeks and months. For more information about the project, visit the SHARE webpage<http://www.arl.org/focus-areas/public-access-policies/shared-access-research-ecosystem-share>or follow SHARE on Twitter <https://twitter.com/SHARE_research>. And, yes, for those of you keeping track, this is the more formal announcement of the same plan that I accidentally broadcast to C4L last week. As I said last week, I'd love any feedback you may have. Thanks, ...Eric Eric Celeste / e...@clst.org / 651-323-2009
Re: [CODE4LIB] SHARE plans
Whoops! Dear Code4Lib, I just spammed you all with a message intended for Dan. Sorry! Of course, if any of you feel like plowing through that one and offering me advice, I'd love to hear it! Again, apologies. ...Eric Eric Celeste / e...@clst.org / http://eric.clst.org / 651-323-2009
[CODE4LIB] SHARE plans
Hi Dan, I saw your GWU posting on C4L last week and it sounds like you have a great shop. I hope you are enjoying it. I really appreciated the brief conversation I had with you at CNI last month. The SHARE plans are starting to come together with a bit more specificity, and just last week we learned we could be on a very fast track for some grant funding. While this is terrific for the project, it does mean we have to make some decisions without as much clarity as I'd like. I'm wondering if I can impose on you again for some thoughts on these decisions? If so, read on. We now have a project plan<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-7zHFvuOmgxv_RYCS8VSE7-3G9XYkUzflw-w1gsI-0E/edit>for the notification system I described to you in December. While this is still pretty much an internal document, feel free to look it over if you like. Essentially, we want to build a system that captures research release events from a variety of systems from CrossRef and CHORUS to VIVO and local repositories to systems like RePORT and the Open Science Framework. These events would represent publications, but also data sets or presentations or other outputs of the research process. The goal is to build a digest of these events that can be subscribed to (like "following" on Twitter) or queried by stakeholders such as offices of sponsored research at universities to managers of funding agencies (federal and private) to publishers themselves on the hunt for future authors and editors. Even though we are still defining the scope of this work and trying to come to grips with how much is already being done by some of the players, we are also trying to wrap this up in the form of a grant proposal this week. For the purposes of this grant, I've asked that we plan for a team of one development project manager and two full time programmers. We may have a site in NYC or Virginia willing to host this team, or we may want to allow the team to be distributed around the country in an effort to broaden our available pool. In particular, I'd love to get a project manager on board ASAP, since this person could help sort through some of the existing projects and open source codebases to determine from what foundation we would best launch the development effort. I believe we will have to start this small, focused on a partner or two and what we can harvest, how we can structure these "events" and store them for retrieval and push notifications, then iterate as we add partners and build toward the full notification system. The SHARE steering group supports all the code we write being open source (there was advocacy for the Educational Community License <http://opensource.org/licenses/ECL-2.0>, which I am not familiar with, but is an offshoot of Apache) and any data we assemble being CC0. I imagine this would be an agile project managed on github, though I was particularly intrigued by the degree to which it sounds like your shop has focussed on github as a management tool. Whew! That's a mouthful. I am wondering whether you have any advice given this summary. In particular, I am wondering if you have any thoughts about who might be a suited to being a project manager for this kind of effort and whether you have any wisdom to impart about the choice of embedding staff in a host institution vs. trying to manage a distributed team? At CNI you seemed interested in the potential of the project itself, I also wonder if this still sounds worthwhile to you or what warnings of advice about the scope of the task itself? Finally, you had mentioned both a staff member at GWU and a few other names when we were sitting at CNI, but if I wrote that on a piece of paper there, I am having a devil of a time finding it (partly because I am on the road this week). If you have any thoughts about people who would be good for this development team, let me know. The SHARE steering group imagines this could grow into something on the scale of I2 or Sparc, so it could have longer legs than just this notification system too. Of course, that will depend partly on how well we pull off this first step. Yikes! Another mouthful. OK, I'll stop there. :) Maybe I should just call. If so, give me a time and number and I'll try to ring you up. Thanks! ...Eric Eric Celeste / e...@clst.org / http://eric.clst.org / 651-323-2009
Re: [CODE4LIB] newbie
> > To offer a counterpoint to no PHP folks, One reason I like PHP is because right now its pretty much essential to know if you are using open source web applications like MediaWiki, Wordpress or Drupal. I feel like Javascript is also a must for web work. Agreed. I actually hated both PHP and JavaScript, but found I had to know them. I've become more of a fan of JavaScript, even though it is an odd beast. It is just so accessible and (carefully deployed) powerful that it is hard to resist. A kind of Dennis the Menace of the web. PHP is another story. I do need it for just those apps Karen describes. When I want to dig in I need PHP. But I still hate PHP. The online documentation is great, but it really _needs_ this documentation since it seems every function uses a slightly different parameter order or return type and you never know what to expect without looking it up. Unfortunately, this loose ethic has infected code written with PHP so that Drupal and WordPress both suffer the same problems. Yes, if you are going to dig into existing apps you may need PHP. That's why it is good to know what problems you need to solve _before_ committing to your language. The code already written is part of the _community_ of the language. You will do better if you can speak the language of the community. But if you do not have to learn PHP, I would not make it a starting point. It is just too scattered to be fun, at least for me. I would never use PHP to teach programming, though I might use JavaScript or Ruby with new or returning programmers. > I keep toying with Ruby on Rails and getting about 1/3 of the way into the > book I have before getting completely sidetracked by another project. I had this same problem for a few years. Part of the turn-off for me was the very "insiderness" of the Ruby crowd. Rails, especially, forces a way of thinking on you, a "religion" as I often term it. Many languages do this, but I found many of the books assumed you were ready to adopt the religion, and I was not. I finally broke through this barrier with the help of "Learning Rails" from O'Reilly press. The authors of this book are explicitly skeptical of some of the Rails religion, and make it clear when they are following "the way" and when they wander afield a bit. I found this welcoming and very helpful for arriving at Rails with my own set of questions and assumptions. I don't think Rails is magical or a solution to all (or even most) problems. But I do think it is a great deal of fun and a very efficient and effective framework for database-backed web apps. Especially if you have found yourself enjoying SmallTalk, Model-View-Controller, Cocoa programming, or the like, you might find a comfortable home and community in Ruby on Rails once you break through the crusty religious barrier. ...Eric Eric Celeste / e...@clst.org / http://eric.clst.org / 651-323-2009
Re: [CODE4LIB] newbie
I agree with the responses that suggest you look at the problems you want to solve and then decide which language, and more importantly which _community_ surrounding a language, is most in tune with solving those problems. If you are not sure what you want to solve, but just looking for ways to stay sharp, I have two current favorite ways to do that: (1) JavaScript is already available to you, very versatile, and a lot of fun to play with. JavaScript is built in to every browser. You don't need to have access to a web server to have a lot of fun with it. There are a ton of books, lots of websites, and all kinds of small problems you can solve with it. It is the foundation of client-side computation on the web, a key way that current websites become more responsive to their users. Add some study of CSS (cascading style sheets) and you can do miraculous things with JavaScript. If you go this route, don't be shy of using jQuery from the beginning. It only makes JavaScript easier to use when manipulating web pages. (2) Ruby is a blast, and Ruby on Rails is a rocket. Most server side tools require a whole suite of tools working in concert to get going. PHP depends on Apache and often on plugins that can take a bit of tweaking. Ruby, on the other hand, pretty much depends on itself. And Ruby on Rails gives you a whole web server environment to play with on your own machine without much hassle. You don't really even need to install a database to get started, since it can use SQLite. If you get serious, you can even deploy a Rails app via Heruku for free or cheap. Ruby is, IMHO, a beautiful syntax and may actually make you smile as you code. Rails made me laugh out loud as it simplified what I thought of as horribly complex tasks in other languages and environments, though it also made my head hurt as I unlearned old habits. If nothing else, you may be entertained while learning. Give http://tryruby.org 20 minutes for a taste. These are my current thoughts, very different than what you might have heard from me a year ago. But really, a lot depends on the problems you are trying to solve. Think about those for a while and let them lead you. ...Eric Eric Celeste / e...@clst.org / http://eric.clst.org / 651-323-2009 On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 2:24 PM, jenny wrote: > A newly-minted library school grad who has up to this point focused my > studies on Rare Books and Book Arts, I've been interested in getting > back into some programming--I took two classes in college > (VisualBASIC), have a smattering of web design and php, MySQL, > exposure, but I'd like to try my hand at teaching myself a language in > my free time. My partner is a former dotcom programmer (now studying > neuroscience) and has offered to assist when needed, so I'm not > completely on my own (thank goodness). > > My question is, where would you recommend I would begin? What's hot > right now in the library world? Python, PERL, Ruby? Any advice you'd > have for a beginner like me or even recommendations for online courses > would be extremely appreciated > > JC >
[CODE4LIB] a first look at Code4Lib
Even though I've been around for a few years and even remember some very early discussions that eventually boiled into the founding of Code4Lib, I've mostly been a lurker in this community. I am in the middle of my first Code4Lib conference and writing a piece for some folks at CLIR who are trying to determine what role DLF should have as a program of CLIR. They were curious about Code4Lib and lucky me, I offered to come visit and report back. I welcome your feedback on the report I am drafting. I'd like it to be a fair assessment of the conference. http://eric.clst.org/C4L/FirstLook Thanks for a wonderful meeting, I'm looking forward to tomorrow (today!), ...Eric Eric Celeste / e...@clst.org / http://eric.clst.org / 651-323-2009
[CODE4LIB] Minnesota Historical Society RFI
The Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) is looking for help building its next generation search tool. The engine currently driving their search is proprietary, difficult to maintain, and expensive to tweek. They are very interested in open solutions, though anything that might work is of interest. What makes the MHS case challenging is that they bring together a wide array of material, from traditional web search to image searching to people searching and birth and death records under one roof. Since one query can draw results from such varied sources, the result sets need to be presented in a way that helps the user sort through the possibilities. Today they issued an RFI. I will be helping them sort through the responses, so I'd love to make sure we get some interesting ones in there! That's why I'm sharing this with Code4Lib. If you'd like to respond, please go for it! If you know someone to whom MHS should send a copy of their Request for Information, please let me know. The RFI itself can be found at: http://eric.clst.org/MHS/RFI Thanks for any feedback you care to share! ...Eric Eric Celeste / e...@clst.org / http://eric.clst.org / 651-323-2009
