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This morning I had a pre-conference session on using Amazon Web services at code4Lib. It was a small room of people but I enjoyed having the opportunity to work with people on learning to use the EC2 system. In preparation for this I created a guide on using Amazon EC2.

I came into town yesterday and managed to get a short run in and was amazed at how effectively Bloomington had dealt with the snow from the last few weeks.

In the afternoon on Monday I attended an overview of some open source and cloud based initiatives coming out of the islandora project. The most interesting aspect of this pre-conference was the overview of cloud based tools that are being developed to support the islandora framework. The presenter talked about a number of initiatives (e.g. discovery garden) that are leveraging open source and cloud platforms to extend the implementation of islandora. It was interesting to learn that there is going to be some growing integration between dspace and fedora in the coming releases. This may not mean anything for ZSR in the next year but poses some interesting opportunities for a new product in the coming years.

There were a lot of interesting ideas in the islandora talk but one in particular was the use of fedora as a central database for client-based applications including Zotero. The long and short of many of the demonstrations were that there is great promise in the drupal, fedora and islandora platforms. One key feature was the ability to separate the presentation layer (drupal) from archival storage (fedora).

The session concluded with a discussion about automation vs user-controlled tools. There was some interest in finding ways to map data from some non-traditional cataloging tools including archivmatica, zotero, refworks, etc. We wrapped up the session playing with fedora/drupal. Of note, we played a bit with Kakadu, an image transformation program and djatoka, a large image viewer.