by Carol Bean

It’s winter, a time when we all think of food, and here we offer up a full fare of delicacies to warm your soul. But before you rush headlong into this dining experience, take a moment to savor the aroma of fine scripting, the abundance of tempting ideas laid out in glorious openness, the exhilaration of anticipating the finest brain food your colleagues can offer. We bring to you, after weeks of ardent and arduous refinement, a nine course feast, replete with delectable samples of scripts, mouthwatering snippets of code, and oversized servings of data manipulation.

For the amuse-bouche, may we offer Creating a Seamless Cross-Platform Online Experience for Mobile Users to stimulate the palate? Katherine Lynch has prepared a blend of disparate web ingredients to masterfully combine them into a pleasing display for any palate. As we move to the second course, I would suggest HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org as a delightful transition. Jason Ronallo presents us with results of his recipe for successfully mixing new ingredients in web presentation, including, for our dining pleasure, a discussion of ways to enhance and extend the sometimes sparse offerings of Schema.org.

For the third course, where we prepare for the delights of heavier fare, you will find nothing better suited than Using VuFind, XAMPP, and Flash Drives to Build an Offline Library Catalog for Use in a Liberal Arts in Prison Program. Julia Bauder takes a melange of difficult circumstances to create a masterful dish that is suitable for many other settings.

In the fifth course, still teasing your palate, we offer Improving the Presentation of Library Data Using FRBR and Linked Data. This timely piece, prepared at the Oslo Public Library in Norway, has been created by Anne-Lena Westrum, Asgeir Rekkavik, and Kim Talleras, three data chefs who introduce us to their work with the Pode project to wrangle MARC data into a more palatable dish.

As we move from the lighter fare, we lay out Presenting Results as Dynamically Generated Co-authorship Subgraphs in Semantic Digital Library Collections to satisfy your cravings for a richer and more complex dish. James Powell, Tamara M. McMahon, and Dr. Ketan Mane challenge our taste buds with fare from the Los Alamos National Laboratory that combines metadata and visualization tools to give users a graphic display of author connections.

Then, for course number six, rather than staid duck, meat or lamb, we offer you an opportunity to extend visualization techniques with William Denton’s On Dentographs, A New Method of visualizing Library Collections. Our seventh course takes you to the inner workings of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, with Matthew Gibson’s Using XSLT’s SQL Extension with Encyclopedia Virginia. Here you will find a delectable taste of combining XML with a relational database that enhances the flavor of both.

And as we move to the penultimate course, we bring you Ref2RIS: Importing Word-Processed Bibliographies into Bibliographic Management Software. Deborah Fitchett lays out a melange of bibliographic styles, and offers us a sampling of fruit to pull the dish together.

Finally, as a sweet conclusion to this singular repast, consider Terry Reese’s Purposeful Development: Being Ready When Your Project Moves From ‘Hobby’ to Mission Critical. Here, your meal will find a thoughtful conclusion with the juxtaposition of open and closed code.

We hope you enjoy our Mid-Winter feast!