TPD @ C4L

Last week, I traveled to Ann Arbor, Michigan for the Code4Lib conference. Code4Lib is a loosely organized group of coders, hackers, and a merry band of the tech-savvy and tech-interested from around Library Land.

I started with a tour of U-M’s Shapiro and Hatcher libraries. In my time there, the Shapiro was officially the Undergraduate Library, and universally and justifiably called “The Ugli.” They have put a lot work into space design for student usage, and it is now the most heavily used study space on campus. They have a lot of good ideas to share.

The conference itself is a (mostly) single track meeting with hour-long blocks divided into several ten- to twenty-minute long talks. Some of the topics included lessons we can still learn from computing in the 1960s and 70s; tweaking, cleaning, transforming, and generally embettering metadata, especially in our digital collections and repositories; and accessibility (Welcome to WCAG 2.2!).

And of course, if you had AI, Machine Learning, and Large Language Models on your bingo card, lucky you! These are increasingly the components of the really interesting software tools in use.

C4L has always solicited lightning talks from the attendees, and there were some gems this year, from very meat-and-potatoes (“managing bound-width records in FOLIO”) to very personal (“using AI for better transcriptions of my late grandfather’s recorded storytelling”). As there had been a few presentations on ETD programs, I did a quick talk on the OATD.org site.

For those familiar with Ann Arbor and who will want to know: Yes, I did get to Zingerman’s. I had the #13, Sherman’s Sure Choice. Yes, with both old and new pickles.

As we’ve discovered in ZSR, students naturally establish study areas with some noise allowed and some without. The Shapiro Library helps to reinforce those organic decisions with signs like this.

The University of Michigan is (as far as I could see) gracefully and peacefully coexisting with student protesters on the Diag immediately in front of the Hatcher Library. This has also been the site of the annual Hash Bash for over fifty years. Some schools just know how to be cool with things. [LATE EDIT: Nope, I guess this happened.]

Boa constrictor digesting a Zingerman’s sandwich