Access 2007 Conference Retrospective
The team from the University of Victoria Libraries who organized this year’s Access Conference need to be praised for bringing together an excellent conference, in an excellent location in a beautiful city.
I was a little concerned to discover that I was expected to present myself for conference breakfast each morning at 7:30am, but the quality of the food supplied by the conference hotel was more than compensation for losing a little sleep.
Since the conference closed at lunchtime today, I have had chance to explore Victoria, the capital of British Colombia, which is a great city surrounding a harbor full of the busy toing and froing of float planes, whale watching excursion boats, and cute little harbor ferries.
The conference itself had many highlights, a few of these included:
Jessamyn West’s opening keynote. Jessamyn, of librarian.net, delivered an entertaining opening to the first day, punctuated with clips from the UK Channel 4 TV show, The IT Crowd. Her theme was that, we can’t describe this Web 2.0 stuff but we know it when we see it. Possibly the role of the library is to bridge the gap – on the one hand shout at the technologists, calling their bluff on the difficulties of providing technology only via five year plans, or that connecting remote libraries is difficult – whilst on the other hand introducing the public to simple wonders it can improve their lives with. [Slides pdf]
Mark Leggott of UPEI, who became the butt of the conference running joke – his picture and the fact he joined UPEI last year, appeared in practically every presentation – gave an interesting overview of the Fedora/Drupal/Moodle based repository system that thy have assembled at UPEI which is offering broad services for ingesting and making available all sorts of data – a refreshing mention of the benefits of semantic web technologies, through Fedora. [slides pdf]
Joshua Ferraro of LibLime, subject of a recent Talking with Talis podcast conversation with me, gave an overview of the origin and rapid expansion of LibLime which grew out of his frustration about the lack of take up open source library systems. He described how they need to carry out a careful balancing act, being both open source and yet providing a commercial support service to libraries. He drew to a close with a good Q&A session where it was obvious that some still had concerns about this new way of obtaining ILS services.
OCLC’s Roy Tennant closed the conference with an overview of OCLC’s intentions with their Grid. More on the session here. Entertaining as ever, Roy is always good value at these events.
They have video recorded all the sessions so keep an eye on the conference web site for the links from the program page.
Now I can relax and spend a couple of days taking in the country on Vancouver Island as I take a hire car on circuitous route, including two ferry trips, towards Vancouver airport before heading home to dear old Blighty. Thanks to those local, and not so local, Canadians who gave me suggestions as to where I might head. First stop is Cathedral Grove to take in some rather large trees.
