Saturday

I drove down to Orlando for my first ever American Library Association (ALA) meeting from Gainesville, registered, got some coffee, and found the meeting room for the 8:30 session chaired by Violeta Ilik of the Linked Data special interest group. I gave a talk on OpenVIVO – you can find the talk on Figshare here: https://figshare.com/articles/OpenVIVO_a_hosted_platform_for_representing_scholarly_work/3458447.  About 100 people attended the talk.  Questions centered around interaction with the faculty and the relationship of VIVO to authority files. Subsequent talks presented Linked Data for Production and an effort at the University of Utah to improve authority records for Utah authors and historical figures.  The shift from record-based library catalogue management – MARC records and central authority files, to entity-based – person, org, work, represented by linked data, is fundamental and has consequences for all of library information management.  OpenVIVO's approach of using identified entities with information available via public APIs in real-time is a radical example of the entity-based approach.  VIVO has a complete entity-based model, and represents entities as linked data natively.  And while it is a demonstration, it is a working demonstration – complete, and sharing data at http://openvivo.org/data 

I attended a second morning session on linked data and the work of WorldCat on person entities.  During the session I experimented with the WorldCat search capabilities using my own record(s) as examples.  Very little of my published work is represented in WorldCat.  But there was a record, and it had a VIAF number, and I made note of it to add it to my VIVO profile.  I also found a long lost paper from 1998 that I had published with a cardiology research group that had not made it onto my professional vitae.  I thought I had done a good job of maintaining my vitae as a text document, but this particular paper had not made it to my vitae.  As the ecosystem improves, and works are accurately associated with people, this kind of error should become quite rare for everyone.  The paper is available here:  http://openvivo.org/display/doi10.1016/s0735-1097(98)81558-1

Following lunch with Dave Eichmann and Violeta, I visited the exhibit hall.  ALA is a big meeting – 18,000 attendees (down from a high of 25,000 in years past).  Attendees include librarians of all kinds from libraries of all kinds – community, children's, cultural heritage, research university libraries and much more.  The exhibit hall was huge and had a wide variety of exhibitors – publishers, information technology solutions, children's books, library furniture, robotic book dispensers, orthotic shoe inserts (librarians are on their feet a lot), government agencies, and much more.  I spoke with our friends from Lyraris, and Thomson Reuters, chatted with reps from Morgan-Claypool, publishers of the VIVO Book (who then put the book on display at their booth), and met people from Chemical Abstracts, and TIND, a CERN spin-off, offering an integrated library system based on the Invenio framework.

It was a good day.  I met interesting people, saw interesting projects, had an opportunity to present OpenVIVO, and gained a better understanding of the breadth of the library world.