Day 3 of the March Sprint

This morning we were buzzing from the Meet-up, excited about the interesting people we met and the cool things they talked about. Graham Steel, who was in town for yesterday’s event, stopped by to see what the team was up to (largely coding / blogging and ignoring one another) and Mahendra headed home with our thanks for a really great event.

Work on new functionality for BibServer continued today, as Mark wired up the new front end into the back end which should – after testing – add some smart and helpful options to your user experience. Etienne worked away on the back end, with a new asynchronous parser sub-system; he was also excited about his development of an example parser plug-in to query Wikipedia and parse results using BibJSON. The idea of this is that, when searching for something in Wikipedia, each page result for that word is parsed for citations; these citations are then put through BibJSON and dropped into BibSoup as a collection. So, you search for X in and a moment later there is a BibSoup collection by that name displaying all related citations! This is still in the testing phase, and search phrases have to be precise as all of Wikipedia’s relevant results are returned, but we are ‘guardedly excited’, to borrow Etienne’s elegant phrasing. More on this, and the other cool coding Mark and Etienne have been doing, later.

Meanwhile, I have been writing up about last night’s Meet-up and following up with the lovely attendees, as well as thinking more about the Hackathon in June. The group discussed OpenGLAM and publicdomainworks which are projects / areas we have had / will have a lot in common with, and looked at ongoing opportunities together.

There will be more blog posts as coding is tested, events confirmed and collaborations agreed, so watch this space.