This documents my day-long experiences at the Computers in Libraries annual conference, March 31, 2009. In a sentence, the meeting was well-attended and covered a wide range of technology issues.

Washington Monument

The day began with an interview-style keynote address featuring Paul Holdengraber (New York Public Library) interviewed by Erik Boekesteijn (Library Concept Center). As the Director of Public Programs at the Public Library, Holdengraber’s self-defined task is to “levitate the library and make the lions on the front steps roar.” Well-educated, articulate, creative, innovative, humorous, and cosmopolitan, he facilitates sets of programs in the library’s reading room called “Live from the New York Public Library” where he interviews people in an effort to make the library — a cultural heritage institution — less like a mausoleum for the Old Masters and more like a place where great ideas flow freely. A couple of notable quotes included “My mother always told me to be porous because you have two ears and only one mouth” and “I want to take the books from the closed stacks and make people desire them.” Holdengraber’s enthusiasm for his job is contagious. Very engaging as well as interesting.

During the first of the concurrent sessions I gave a presentation called “Open source software: Controlling your computing environment” where I first outlined a number of definitions and core principles of open source software. I then tried to draw a number of parallels between open source software and librarianship. Finally, I described how open source software can be applied in libraries. During the presentation I listed four skills a library needs to become proficient in in order to take advantage of open source software (namely, relational databases, XML, indexing, and some sort of programming language), but in retrospect I believe basic systems administration skills are the things really required since the majority of open source software is simply installed, configured, and used. Few people feel the need to modify its functionality and therefore the aforementioned skills are not critical, only desirable.

Lincoln Memorial

In “Designing the Digital Experience” by David King (Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library) attendees were presented with ways websites can be created in a way that digitally supplements the physical presents of a library. He outlined the structural approaches to Web design such as the ones promoted by Jesse James Garrett, David Armano and 37Signals. He then compared & contrasted these approaches to the “community path” approaches which endeavor to create a memorable experience. Such things can be done, King says, through conversations, invitations, participation, creating a sense of familiarity, and the telling of stories. It is interesting to note that these techniques are not dependent on Web 2.0 widgets, but can certainly be implemented through their use. Throughout the presentation he brought all of his ideas home through the use of examples from the websites of Harley-Davidson, Starbucks, American Girl, and Webkinz. Not ironically, Holdengraber was doing the same thing for the Public Library except in the real world, not through a website.

In a session after lunch called “Go Where The Client Is” Natalie Collins (NRC-CISTI) described how she and a few co-workers converted library catalog data containing institutional repository information as well as SWETS bibliographic data into NLM XML and made it available for indexing by Google Scholar. In the end, she discovered that this approach was much more useful to her constituents when compared to the cool (“kewl”) Web Services-based implementation they had created previously. Holly Hibner (Salem-South Lyon District Library) compared & contrasted the use of tablet PC’s with iPods for use during roaming reference services. My two take-aways from this presentation were cool (“kewl”) services called drop.io and LinkBunch, websites making it easier to convert data from one format into another and bundle lists of link together into a single URL, respectively.

Jefferson Memorial

The last session for me that day was one on open source software implementations of “next generation” library catalogs, specifically Evergreen. Karen Collier and Andrea Neiman (both of Kent County Public Library) outlined their implementation process of Evergreen in rural Michigan. Apparently it began with the re-upping the of their contract for their computer hardware. Such a thing would cost more than they expected. This led to more investigations which ultimately resulted in the selection of Evergreen. “Open source seemd like a logical conclusion.” They appear to be very happy with their decision. Karen Schneider (Equinox Software) gave a five-minute “lightning talk” on the who and what of Equinox and Evergreen. Straight to the point. Very nice. Ruth Dukelow (Michigan Library Consortium) described how participating libraries have been brought on board with Evergreen, and she outlined the reasons why Evergreen fit the bill: it supported MLCat compliance, it offered an affordable hosted integrated library system, it provided access to high quality MARC records, and it offered a functional system to non-technical staff.

I enjoyed my time there in Washington, DC at the conference. Thanks go to Ellyssa Kroski, Steven Cohen, and Jane Dysart for inviting me, and allowing me to share some of my ideas. The attendees at the conference were not as technical as you might find at Access, Code4Lib, and certainly not JCDL nor ECDL. This is not a bad thing. The people were genuinely interested in the things presented, but I did overhear one person say, “This is completely over my head.” The highlight for me took a place during the last session where people were singing the praise of open source software for all the same reasons I had been expressing them over the past twelve years. “It is so much like the principles of librarianship,” she said. That made my day.