NEWS

Winners of ELympics Code Competition Selected by Panel of Distinguished Judges

Three prizes and a special award are given to library developers who wrote code extensions to Ex Libris products and shared their work with the library community

Ex Libris® Group is pleased to announce the winners of the ELympics competition, which ended on March 31. During the five months of the competition, 45 code extensions for Ex Libris products were submitted to EL Commons CodeShare, the collaborative site of the Ex Libris developer community. A panel of four judges—Marshall Breeding (Vanderbilt University), Sebastian Hammer (Index Data), Andrew MacFarlane (City University London), and Yohanan Spruch (Ex Libris)—selected the winning entries.  

First place, carrying a prize of $5000, is awarded to Maccabee Levine, of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, for the Related Items Bookshelf. Levine describes the code as follows:

The Related Items Bookshelf is a virtual shelf browsing tool. Embedded into the bottom of an item's Tomcat WebVoyáge record page, it displays a scrollable, virtual bookshelf of the catalog items shelved next to the primary item, in call number order.

In second place is Kai Jauslin, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), whose prize of $4000 is for the Primo CMS SOLR Websearch adaptor:

This Primo deep search adaptor allows Primo users to connect to any Solr Server and thereby directly integration webpage content to Primo. Solr is an open source full text search engine that has connectors to most content management systems.

The third-place award of $3000 goes to Ere Maijala, of the National Library of Finland, for the Tomcat WebVoyage Enhancer:

WebVoyáge Enhancer is a Perl daemon that sits between Apache and Tomcat. It intercepts requests and responses and allows customization of responses before they reach Apache and the user's browser. WebVoyáge Enhancer has a modular design, and most of the built-in functionality is to provide a framework for plugins.

In recognition of the Xerxes interface application created by David Walker of the California State University (http://xerxes.calstate.edu), Ex Libris and the panel of judges have decided to award Walker a special prize of $5000. One of the first people to take advantage of the open interfaces of the Ex Libris MetaLib® gateway and metasearch solution, Walker initially developed Xerxes as a user interface layer for MetaLib and has been the driving force behind the initiation, design, development, and support of Xerxes for the last four years. Xerxes has been implemented in institutions in the United States, Japan, Sweden, and Australia. A true supporter of collaboration, David is a focal point for the MetaLib and SFX® communities, always willing to assist and advise other members.  

“I applaud the three winners and David Walker for their noteworthy achievement,” commented Sebastian Hammer, president and cofounder of Index Data. “Congratulations to the team at Ex Libris for engaging an online community that has a lot of potential,” he added.  

“These awards reflect the collective opinions of the panel,” remarked Marshall Breeding, director of innovative technologies and research at Vanderbilt University Libraries and executive director of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. “Granting a special award to David Walker is our way of ensuring that he receives recognition for this important project.” This view was reaffirmed by Andrew MacFarlane, senior lecturer in information science at City University London.  

Yohanan Spruch, chief technology officer of Ex Libris Group, noted: “The diversity and innovation of the code contributions is a tribute to the library community. At the same time, it highlights the flexibility and openness of our products and the importance of the Ex Libris open-platform program.”

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