I got to go to the Open Content Alliance Workshop last week.. It was one of the best conferences in recent memory, and I had a blast! The Open Content Alliance is a group that encourages open access to online digital library content. The OCA is like Open Source for the library world.

I got to meet a bunch of great people and got to hear librarians talk about Web APIs! Robin Chandler from the California Digital Library talked about “the Dawn of the Embedded Library” and showed Connotea (social bookmarking for scientists), Library Thing (previously blogged by May, now even public libraries are using it!), and LibX, a Firefox extention for direct library access (who knew?)! Anna Miller from Luna Imaging showed a cool online book reader they made. She works with David Rumsey so we talked a bit about The Maps. Phil Zuckerman of Applewood Books loaned me his laptop so that I could demo the Open Book Factory, which I hope to have online in a couple weeks. Tom Garnett from the Smithsonian gave a moving talk (“Life on this planet is in crisis”), about the ambitious Biodiversity Heritage Library project, which plans to digitize more than 2 million volumes of biodiversity research that is in the public domain and still being actively used by scientists. I talked with Martin Kalfatovic and Suzanne Pilsk from the Smithsonian, and Chris Freeland and Doug Holland from the Missouri Botanical Gardens, and Prof. Lee Giles of Penn State, about how to collaborate with the BHL project. The MoBot team have already built the Botanicus Digital Library and the TROPICOS nomenclature database, and Lee Giles’ team has already built the Citeseer scientific search tool. I talked with Juliet Sutherland of the Distributed Proofreaders about how to collaborate with them. [omg fanboy]I saw Whit Diffie (inventor of PKI) but didn’t get to meet him.[/omg] John Gilmore explained to me that I actually wasn’t on the no-fly list, but was probably on the “selectee list”, which many people call the no-fly list. We also talked about the Ed Rosenthal case. The night ended with Shag and I talking about lots of different projects, including his exciting work on writing linux drivers for the Plustek OpticBook bookedge scanner, which is close to working (It lights up! The scanner arm moves!) but not quite done. I wish I had more spare cycles to help with the drivers, but I’m going to contribute to the front-end. Whew! That’s about all I can remember.. Thanks to Chet Grycz of the Internet Archive and Sayeed Choudhury of Johns Hopkins for organizing such a great event!

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