One Big Library.

Bess Sadler, Erik Hatcher, and Art Rhyno joined me to discuss the recent eIFL-FOSS meeting they attended in Cupramontana, Italy. Bess, Erik, and Art have each done fascinating work in the past and are involved in many exciting projects today. We discussed many of these and how they led to their respective involvement in eIFL, and what the goals and next projects for eIFL-FOSS will be.

Bess also interviewed many other meeting attendees, and those interviews are included as well. I hope you'll agree that hearing straight from this diverse, dispersed community of library supporters is a unique opportunity to get a sense of both the scale of work that needs to be done to improve libraries everywhere, and of the enormous opportunities available to us now.

Show notes include:

• Visit the eIFL home page
• NGO-in-a-box
• Erik's books on Amazon.com
• Art's book on Amazon.com
• See Collex in action and visit the Collex blog
• Read up on Solr
• Attend the Solr workshop/preconference at code4lib 2007

Subscribe and listen via the links at left!

Are you a code4lib-type person who wants a GTD-style web-based personal task tracker? I just set up a copy of tracks and want to give it a go. It's as easy as you'd hope with all that railsy ajax goodness and has feeds so you should be able to do useful stuff like publish an ical feed to gcal or ical or list "last action done" items on your blog (you showoff you!).

Want to use it too? Just send me email with your preferred nick and pass. (This will not be secure, nor will the site!) There's no signup function yet, and no real admin features, so cc yourself a copy of your message to me. :)

As far as I can tell after a quick glance there aren't many "social" bits worked into the system yet... it's just about you and your tasks. For now. I think.

Rails has grown on me more recently and some of the improvements for 1.2 are really appealing. I'm trying to get in the habit of running more rails apps, and, besides, I've wanted something like tracks for a while anyway.

Anyway, send a message and I'll hook you up.