Code4Lib Journal Issue #20 Published; My Editorial: "It is Volunteers All the Way Down..."

Issue #20 of the Code4Lib Journal was just published, and I had the honor of being the coordinating editor for the issue. Being on the editorial committee of the Journal has been a heck of an experience, and I think I've had just a taste of what journal editors and publishers must go through to produce quality content.

My editorial focused on an issue that has banged around in my head for a while and has come up in multiple venues in recent years -- how do we grow as a community while remaining responsive to the community and true to its roots. I suggest that there is a merit-based way to approach this, and I lay out my thoughts in that article.

In addition, the issue has seven great contributions from the community. The first set of articles show ways to manipulate metadata records.  In Workflow Tools for Digital Curation Andrew James Weidner and Daniel Gelaw Alemneh describe how they use AutoHotkey and Selenium IDE at the University of North Texas to automate various aspects of manipulating digital objects.  Heidi Frank show how to process MARC records from Archivists Toolkit in Augmenting the Cataloger’s Bag of Tricks; the techniques – using MarcEdit, Python, and PyMARC – are transferrable to other sources of records as well.  In Keeping up with Ebooks Kathryn Lybarger introduces a tool for updating batches of vendor-supplied records through a set of normalization routines.

Jason Clark show how Montana State University is using YouTube as a digital video platform in Developing a Digital Video Library with the YouTube Data API. Getting users what they want without extraneous hits is always a challenge, and in Better Search Through Query Expansion Using Controlled Vocabularies and Apache Solr demonstrates how to configure SOLR to make the best use of a hierarchical controlled vocabulary.  In Breaking Up With CONTENTdm Heather Gilbert and Tyler Mobley lead us through the migration of a repository to Fedora Commons using Drupal, Blacklight and Rutgers’ OpenWMS software.  And for the hardware geeks, Tim Ribaric and Jonathan Younker describe how to build a simple desk counter tied to a Google Spreadsheet in Arduino-enabled Patron Interaction Counting.