This came across with a few of my mailing lists today and I thought you’d all be interested: I am conducting a survey for my dissertation which looks at the changing role of the public library website. It also explores the role that open source content management systems play in this change. If you work [...]

This past weekend I had the pleasure of spending time with some local librarians. As it always does, the discussion of open source and my opinions came up – in particular what my opinion was of the ‘in-fighting’ going on right now in the Koha world. For those who have spoken to me (not just [...]

This disclaimer is of course on the about page of this blog, but it bears repeating before I start: Disclaimer: Please note that the words on this blog are my words and no one else’s. The opinions and views presented here are my personal views and not those of my employers. Now that that’s out [...]

Our closing keynote was Eric Lease Morgan – I’ve read a ton of his articles, but have never seen him in person. Eric started with a history of him. He has been ‘kinda sorta’ writing code since 1996 1976. While driving taxi after college, he discovered his first ‘itch.’ He wanted to know how much [...]

Jennifer Bielewski and Jenny Liberatore from Lyrasis gave the Each One Teach One talk. They started by telling us the most important thing is to tell your attendees what the outcomes of the workshop will be – what will they learn in this workshop? We were then introduced to the SMART Training Objectives: Specific Be [...]

SCLENDS is a consortium of libraries in South Carolina and their talk was next up on my agenda. While it was a panel, Rogan did most of the talking and started with some background info on South Carolina: 2008 population was 4,479,800, there are 46 counties and 2 public library consortium. In June of 2008 [...]

Jed Moffit, Bill Erikson and Matt Carlson were up during our lunch to talk to us about the developments that were coming up from KCLS. Jed says that we have to have something in the new developments that is better than ‘sucks less technology.’ He is hoping that these developments will be genuinely of value [...]

Bill Erickson started his Acquisitions roundup by showing us ‘Selection Lists’ – this is a concept I’m unfamiliar with. It’s basically a list of items you want to perform actions on. So you can create a list of items to order and then order from it – but you don’t have to – you can [...]

Bill Ptacek from the King County Library System (KCLS) was our keynote with his talked entitled “From Singing the Blues to the Birth of Cool.” KCLS serves 1.7 million people in the county where many large (many tech) companies live – Microsoft, Nintendo, Boeing, Amazon and Amgen. In addition to housing these major companies, King [...]

Bob Molyneux was up next with the ‘State of Evergreen’ talk. Dec 1999 PINES goes live with 26 systems, 98 outlets People would actually pass over their local library to go to a PINES library instead. So PINES grew because librarians saw their patrons leaving for libraries that belonged to PINES. June 2004 Lamar Veatch [...]