This list represents the accepted conference talks that you can expect to hear at the conference. Thank you to all who submitted talks this year.
When we don’t negotiate, what do we lose? There’s a systemic reluctance to negotiate for a higher salary or benefits package especially as a woman in tech, but this is not confined to just women. There is a pay gap; helping to close it requires negotiating with employers to compensate... more
Many information professionals deal with impostor phenomenon (IP): an observed anxiety caused by one’s feelings of fraudulence, fear of being exposed as a fraud, and inability to internalize personal achievement. These feelings negatively impact our work, potential for future projects, and perception of our self-value. Feelings of IP extend into... more
Micro-volunteering is an easy, low commitment, and time-bound volunteer assignment. It is a 'byte-sized' way to make a difference by helping with micro tasks or sharing expertise, and lends itself to workplace volunteering. This presentation will provide an introduction to micro-volunteering, including benefits, how to create a micro-volunteering project, platforms,... more
Over the years libraries have searched for software solutions to satisfy their needs. With the advent of open-source solutions suddenly we have great flexibility in the customizations that we can do to existing software products to fit our needs. But, have we gone too far? Are we making organizational decisions... more
In the Digital Library Initiatives department at NCSU Libraries', we often have new professionals, student workers, as well as full-time staff who are interested in advancing their software development skills. Through colleague-led opportunities like an informal discussion series related to software development, reading groups (both code and literature), code reviews,... more
So you’ve hired a talented team, developed a shared vision, and implemented a bunch of user-centered tools and services. Now, how do you keep it going? Following up on Sibyl Schaefer’s 2015 talk “Designing and Leading a Kick A** Tech Team,” we’ll discuss how our small team of archivists provides... more
The ArchivesSpace application was first released in 2013 and its community has grown substantially in the years since. Recent changes in staffing and leadership of the program have provided us with an excellent opportunity to evaluate our progress, examine our activities and assess how best to work together as a... more
After nearly 22 months of design and development, the Hydra-in-a-Box project partners -- the Digital Public LIbrary of America, DuraSpace, and Stanford University -- have made demonstrable progress to extend the Hydra project codebase and to develop next-generation repository and metadata aggregation solutions, incorporating the capabilities and affordances to support... more
Archivematica is an an integrated suite of open-source software tools that allows users to carry out digital preservation on existing and new digital content in their libraries, archives, and museums. As a tool suite, Archivematica has always been part of an ecosystem of digital library platforms. This presentation will review... more
At Code4Lib 2014, Sumana Harihareswara delivered a keynote titled, “UX Is A Social Justice Issue.” Harihareswara encouraged attendees to practice a disciplined empathy in the work of designing library services, because “a better user experience is the best force multiplier we have at our command.” This inspirational keynote motivated a... more
As a developer or librarian in library technology, you probably ask yourself questions like “What do I need the system to do?” all the time. How would things change, if you rephrased the question to be user oriented like "What are the problems I want library software to help solve... more
As more institutions seek to improve their user experience through advancement of web accessibility of interfaces and content, the need emerges for a set of patterns to serve as a framework for accomplishing this. Focusing on strategies for improving web accessibility on a larger, distributed scale, this talk will detail... more
Community-oriented projects keep library technology vibrant, and can provide life support in those times when it could otherwise sink. Whether open source or not, a stated commitment to community is something that we tend to look for in choosing a technical solution, digital project, or professional development opportunity. Understanding how... more
Although no one would argue that web accessibility is unimportant, the current state of library search catalogs indicates otherwise. Many existing products barely, if at all, pass the most basic of accessibility standards. Even then, an accessible site may not be efficiently usable for a disabled user. We certainly need... more
Privacy-protection technology tools help individuals to thwart surveillance and data collection efforts by corporate, government, or other entities. Prior research findings indicate that the average Internet user is highly concerned with privacy and loss of control over the collection and use of their information. However, most users take little action... more
This talk will introduce a number of natural language processing techniques and their applications in computational linguistics and machine learning. Attention will be given to data preparation and modeling building, as well as the statistical and theoretical underpinnings of many current techniques. Examples will be derived from experiments using DPLA... more
We've heard a lot about natural language tools and interfaces over the past several years--Google's Translate, IBM's Watson, Apple's Siri--but what's the true state of the art once we've parsed the fine print and extracted the key ideas? Takeaways from this talk: • Natural language understanding remains a monumental challenge... more
Linked data promises to make library metadata more accessible and powerful. The clearly-defined URIs of linked data will form chains that lead to new connections and insights. But is there a flip side to such sharply-delineated data? Real life is messy and natural language doesn’t come with precise definitions. How... more
Book recommendation systems are increasingly common, from Amazon to public library interfaces. However, in the land of archives and special collections, such automated assistance has been rare. This is partly due to the the complexity of descriptions -- EADs describing whole collections -- and partly due to the complexity of... more
Open data in government is an initiative designed to ensure that the public can freely access government data and easily share the data with other citizens. Future mandates will include transparency of both government funded research as well as federal spending. Our panel will facilitate a conversation about the current... more
Metadata is frequently cited as the most significant cost of a digital library project. As such, care should be taken to ensure that when metadata is created, it is done in such a way that its quality will not be low enough to be a liability to current and future... more
Information architecture (IA) can be a powerful tool for clarifying who you are as a library and what you’re doing both for your staff and for your users. Yet the IA skillset and the actual work that is done to produce an IA is rarely defined clearly. This talk will... more
Over several weeks, our online catalog was hit by millions of ISBN searches from thousands of IP addresses, with several hundred thousand requests/day at the peak of the attack. I'll talk about how we tried, failed, and ultimately succeeded in blocking this attack while minimizing the impact on our legitimate... more
Making Your Library IT Defensible: 5 Easy Things To Prevent 85% of All Targeted Cyber Intrusions All libraries can easily follow the top 5 mitigation strategies. These will block the vast majority off all attacks. use application whitelisting to help prevent malicious software and unapproved programs from running patch applications... more
You want to build a blazingly fast, secure and feature-rich website. Perhaps it needs to include dynamic features like search, responsive design and easy editing options for content creators. A static website might not be the first tool that comes to mind to accomplish this task, but it might actually... more
The DevOps Handbook is a guide to re-organizing your workplace for greater speed in producing new ideas, more stability in key systems, and increased satisfaction among employees and customers. If technology should be at the centre of libraries, here is one way to make that real. Development becomes Public... more
This talk will describe the design and features of the new, totally re-written version of SolrMarc, an indexing tool for creating Solr add documents from MARC records. SolrMarc has been used by both Project Blacklight and VuFind to create the Solr index that they rely on for searching. The new... more
This talk will introduce the concept of Coordinated Discovery (CD) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. CD aims to provide a coherent experience across resource types—bibliographic, digital collections, article, etc.—while at the same time optimizing the experience of any one type. Discovery across resource types is coordinated rather than aggregated... more
This presentation will show how the worldwide surge of work on distributed technologies like the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) opens the door to a flourishing of community-oriented librarianship in the digital age. The centralized internet, and the rise of cloud services, has forced libraries to act as information silos that... more
HTML5 has become the preferred, widely supported method of serving video on the web. This is a tools talk...but not an Amazon sales pitch. I was genuinely surprised at how easy, yet flexible ET is - and how well it dovetails with Amazon's other services and I think other people... more
As born-digital archives become a core part of archival processing, traditional processing archivists who lack Digital Archivist job titles face numerous challenges when meeting the processing and preservation needs of born-digital collections. Knowledge, skills, and institutional culture about who is responsible for the management of born-digital archives can all be... more