Code4Lib was held in the Jones Room.

The Robert W. Woodruff Library played host to the Code4Lib Southeast conference on April 21st. The conference, which is a regional subset of the national Code4Lib group, was the first of its kind in the Southeast. Representatives from libraries across the Southeast ranging from Florida State University, up to North Carolina State University, and across to University of Louisville were all in attendance.  Georgia had attendees from all three of the large academic universities in Atlanta and more from academic and public libraries across the state.

The program was packed with topics on many areas of interest to libraries today including: bento-box search, optimizing reusable content in LibGuides, using machine learning for research, and how to build a collaborative environment for those interested in coding. These topics helped to generate questions and thoughtful conversations throughout the day.

Emory was well-represented with three presentations. Christeene Alcosiba presented on “The Experience IS the Product: Hacking Library Experiences and Products with Design Thinking.” In this presentation, Christeene explored the way that design thinking principles should not be limited to web design but can also help hack the way we think about other aspects of library work such as programs and processes.

Bethany Nash, Simon O’Riordan, and Jay Varner shared their recent work on implementing digital object identifiers (DOIs) in Emory’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) repository application. During their talk, the trio covered why they were working on the project, the eventual outcome, and the roadblocks they had to conquer along the way.

Courtney Baron and Jenn Young’s workshop on “Coding the Encyclopedia: Wiki Markup for Beginners” gave an introductory look at how to get up and running with Wiki markup. Using Wiki markup, you can go beyond simple edits of a Wiki page and can move towards creating new articles and adding more features to Wikipedia pages.

The end of the day focused on the future of Code4Lib Southeast and how to continue to make events like the conference happen again. Attendees agreed that sharing ideas and having conversations among regional libraries is important and that having a Code4LibSE conference was helpful in doing that. We look forward to the next Code4LibSE.

The conference was the first of its kind in the Southeast, was organized by Laura Akerman and Elizabeth Mumpower of the Libraries’ Core Systems Team with a lot of help and advisement from Rosalyn Metz.

To see the schedule and presentations from Code4LibSE 2017, please visit our Wiki.