A bunch of #code4lib folks will be converging on Chicago this summer for the annual American Library Association conference. Several of us thought it would be fun to get together for a sprint on a project that has yet to be decided. A potential project is building a framework for metadata translation similar to bibutils or perhaps Cheshire. I worked on creating a bibutils wrapper for Python a few months ago, and decided it would be better to have a pure python framework instead. The wrapper worked ok, but only on particular platforms, and the API felt kludgy in that bibutils is oriented towards command line tools. There’s also some interest in having a discussion and possibly some hacking on mirroring OPACs that Art Rhyno and Ross Singer have been working on.

I called Chicago Public Library to reserve some of their rooms but they’re already all booked up. Fortunately the Lincoln Park Branch has a nice room (with wifi) which chipy used for their pypi sprint a few months ago…and I just reserved the space for the entire day of Friday June 24th, 2005. My friend Brian Ray from chipy kindly offered to stop by his local branch to fill out the paper work to make it official.