OR Software Contest

The (first annual) OCLC Research Software Contest has a winner!  Dazhi (David) Jiao of Bloomington Indiana won for his OPAC (sorry if that link isn't working, David is moving it to a more permanent location) that includes a ranked list of harvested citations when a detailed bibliographic record is displayed.  The judges (Elizabeth Lawley, Roy Tennant, Jon Udell, and three of us here at OCLC) thought David's submittal showed an innovative way of integrating the OPAC with harvested metadata and that it made good use of open source software from OCLC.

In addition to the honor of winning, David won $2,500 and a trip to Dublin Ohio to visit us.

Honorable mention goes to Ross Singer's Wag the Dog implementation at Georgia Tech that uses the xISBN service.

Although we had around 50 registrations for the contest, we only had four actual submissions, which is less than we hoped for, but the four we did get were all solid systems.  And yes, we plan on holding a similar contest next year, so it's not too soon to give it some thought, especially for those that were planning to submit, but just didn't quite get around to it.

I think that next year we'll ask that submittals be running on the contestant's site, accessible via the Web.  All four this year fell into that category, and it certainly simplifies the judging when we don't have to get the code running here at OCLC, especially since much of the judging is done by external judges that don't have access to our internal systems.

So, congratulations to David, and we hope to be swamped with submissions next year.

--Th

Comments

[Jenn Riley]

Congratulations to David! I have the privilege of working with him here at Indiana University, and he's an absolute gem. His recognition for this project is well-deserved. David was also one of the key people involved with the implementation of IU's Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/cushman/, which uses a thesaurus structure to improve browse and search results for end-users. David consistently displays a keen vision for how bibliographic information could be used in novel ways. Kudos!