What I Learned Today…

My colleague at ByWater Solutions, Joy Nelson, was up this morning. She started mentioning that migration is not as easy as moving information from point A to B. It’s about getting things to fit in the right spot and at the end of the day it’s not the data that tells you you’re done, it’s the people. You have to keep a good relationship with your client: Manage expectations Communicate  [ Read More ]

Open source (and Koha) is about a lot more than the code and the programmers – it’s about the community. So with Koha, how does the community work? Chris Cormack broke it down for us in to some very simple steps! People are always on IRC talking about Koha and our lives (Stats) The Mailing Lists are very active (as the last speaker mentioned) and are a great way to  [ Read More ]

Paul was up first talking about Koha 3.8. He highlighted for us the features he thought were most important. First some numbers! 1087 changes were made to the source code! Some were small and some very large. 71 different contributors 26 organizations contributed (this uses the email domain – so it might be more) The youngest contributor to Koha was 14!! During the Catalyst Open Source Academy in NZ The  [ Read More ]

David Lee King posted the slides from some of his talks at Computers in Libraries last week and I figured I should probably do the same thing so here we go. My first presentation was with Louise Alcorn and Christa Burns, I talked about Open Source Tools : Open Source Tools for Libraries View more presentations from Nicole C. Engard Next I was on a panel with fellow systems librarians  [ Read More ]

Andy Woodworth was up first in the Ebook Trends talk. Andy’s talk was super fast and super awesome. I do hope that he shares his talk with us all so you can read that instead of my shortened summary. Andy started by summing up his opinion of the current Ebook frontier as “Everything is amazing and no one is happy” He summed up all of the technology changes that have  [ Read More ]

Susan Hildreth, director of the IMLS gave the keynote this morning. Susan started by introducing us to the IMLS and the grants that they offer to libraries and librarians. There were many great ways to get funding for your library and/or your professional education. The one grant program that makes the most sense to share (given the session title and my audience) are the Sparks! Ignition Grants which include small  [ Read More ]

Adam Shambaugh and Jill Luedke from Temple University gave the next talk I attended. They talked to us about the Capture and Idea project at Temple. Adam introduced us to the term “Fuzzy Front End of Innovation” which means ideas in their infancy. This is the window of time before an idea becomes reality. Some of obstacles during this phase of innovation include: Limited ‘buy in’ Ideas of ill-defined Decisions  [ Read More ]

First up this morning was David Lee King sharing library website tips with us. I’m not working in this field so much anymore (web design) but I still wanted to see what cool tips David had for us all so here I am. David started by blaming Ned Potter, author of The Library Marketing Toolkit (http://thewikiman.org) for this presentation because Ned asked him for some tips for elements every website  [ Read More ]

This week I was on a panel at AALL (my first time at this conference) that discussed coding in libraries. There were four of us and four languages to discuss. I started with MySQL (and an introduction as the Koha Goddess who helped bring Koha to law libraries). I showed some of the MySQL tables in Koha and explained how they were created and how to query data out of  [ Read More ]

Marshall Breeding was up this morning talking to us about learning from libraries he’s visited around the world! I don’t see Marshall’s slides online yet, but I hope to find them sometime because he has a ton of awesome pictures in them to share with us all. First up, in 2007 Marshall visited Yonsei University library in Seoul, Korea. Marshall feels that they have done everything they could with technology.  [ Read More ]