Report: “Codex Hackathon, a Two-Day Marathon Of Tech For Books”

From The Boston Globe:

…the CODEX Hackathon, a weekend-long event at MIT timed to coincide with the American Library Association’s midwinter conference in Boston. The second of its kind, it united programmers with librarians, students, and others with an interest in books to dream up and create apps and websites meant to expand the frontiers of publishing — all in the space of two days.
“There are a lot of really talented developers who love books, and who would love to participate if they knew the problems that needed to be solved,” said organizer Jennifer 8. Lee, the author of the best-selling 2008 book “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” and cofounder of literary studio Plympton.
Participants ranged from high schoolers to bearded hackers and entrepreneurs to gray-haired librarians. Though some projects were as whimsical as Van Seters and Mohankumar’s, others targeted major current dilemmas in library science and publishing. One common goal was to help readers better access and use online repositories of information — plentiful these days, but often clunky or hard to navigate.
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For the latest hackathon, Lee secured about $35,000 in funding from sponsors including Google and the Harvard Book Store. That money went toward travel stipends for attendees — organizers prioritized stipends for women and underrepresented minorities, Lee said — and for hacker fuel: sandwiches, Indian cuisine, and a steady supply of coffee, soft drinks, and bags of chips.

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Visit the Codex Hackathon Website

Filed under: Frontiers, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing