What I Learned Today…

Michelle Manafy was our keynote speaking this morning talking to us about the digital natives – those who have grown up with nearly ubiquitous digital technologies. Michelle started with a series of quotes: By the time they finish college, kids will have spent over 10,000 hours playing videogames, sent and received over 200,000 emails and instant messages and spend more than 10,000 hours talking on cell phones — Mark Prensky  [ Read More ]

This afternoon’s talk was taking the book ‘In Pursuit of Elegance‘ by Matthew May and how we can implement the theories in the book in libraries. Erica Reynolds started by talking to about a familiar topic – ‘less is more.’ In libraries we seem to always want to add more – more signs, more images, more everything and to be elegant you actually need to do more with less. Erica  [ Read More ]

First up this morning (for me) Aaron Schmidt and Amanda Etches-Johnson. Disclaimer 1: That pesky catalog problem – we really don’t have any control over this in most of our systems Disclaimer 2: Like the catalog we don’t really have a lot of control over what all the other systems we subscribe to look like 0% of searchers start their research at library websites (according to perceptions survey). Aaron and  [ Read More ]

This year at SLA I’ll be teaching librarians how to use WordPress (an open source content management system). If you’re in the Philadelphia area and/or attending SLA this year, consider joining me for “Designing Library Websites with WordPress.” Date: Saturday, 11 June 2011 Time: 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Level: Introductory Instructor: Nicole Engard Description: Content management systems are making it easy for libraries to create their own websites with  [ Read More ]

Today I had the honor of moderating the Top Tech Trends panel at the Ontario Library Association’s Super Conference. My computer was tied up with slides so I had to take notes the old fashioned way – with a pen and paper. This means I missed a lot since I can type much faster than I can write, but I thought I’d share a few key points from the presentation.  [ Read More ]

In March I’m doing a day long camp for NyLink on open source software in libraries. If you’re in the area make sure you sign up because space is limited. The library community is abuzz about open source software. Open source usually refers to an application whose source code is made available for use or modification as users see fit. Make sense? Probably not! Would it help if you knew  [ Read More ]

The program is out and I’ll be giving two pre-conference sessions at Computers in Libraries 2011 in Washington, D.C. Make sure you register early!! W7 – Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data Sunday, March 20, 2011 :: 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM Nicole C. Engard, Director of Open Source Education, ByWater Solutions Brian Herzog, Head of Reference, Chelmsford Public Library This workshop explains what mashups are, how  [ Read More ]

In addition to my posts on KohaCon10 others posted information they learned and shared at the conference – I thought I should share that here so that you all can keep up with everything Koha and KohaCon related. KohaCon10 & our API KohaCon10 Presentations KohaCon10 video 1: Rosalie Blake KohaCon10 video 2: Lee Phillips Why Librarians Love Koha KohaCon10 Pictures KohaCon10 is Finished Technorati Tags: kohacon10

Up next our own Ian Walls to talk about his awesome visions for where we can go with Koha 4.0! Ian warned us that the following could all be ideological and naive and we have to remember that they are all just his ideas and nothing concrete. First (and Ian rants about this alot) we need to rebuild some of the modules like holds, notices, accounts (a big problem for  [ Read More ]

Andrew Ruthven was up first this morning at the hackfest to tell us about using Git. For those who don’t know Git is what we use to keep track of changes to Koha files. With git we can track changes to software and files and come back and view a history. Using Git you can look back and find when bugs were introduced (often referred to as ‘blame’) and then  [ Read More ]