Wednesday, the final day of the UKSG conference was fabulous. We started the day with a discussion of Web 3.0 that I am totally going to crib for my Web 3.0 session in September. The speaker, Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef , discussed the emergence of metadata and the move from “reading” the web to “computing” the web. He also talked about RDF and turning the web into a database. It was all fascinating stuff and I will definitely be using it. We snuck out after that to get ready for our session at 11am, the final breakout session of the conference. It went pretty well – not as many questions during the session itself, but lots of folks stopped by and chatted afterward. I took about 50 moo cards and left with 6. I was pleased! After that was a discussion of the similar issues plaguing the music industry and libraries – that of content distribution that both supports content creators and allows democratic access to culture by the public. Jim Griffin, a music industry exec, was funny and thought-provoking. After that was a final lunch – with goodbyes and thank yous to all the nice people I met and to those who invited me to the conference as well.
Last night’s final dinner was a “red” themed dinner – everyone was supposed to show up in whatever they felt interpreted the red theme best. I wore a red sweater. The guy who won the contest wore copies of the Sun and the Mirror (“redtop” papers) plastered to his entirely red outfit as well as a little hat made of more pages from those papers. I recieved enough advice about where to go in London that I’m probably going to have to extend my vacation for another week (we can consider this my official request for time off, right Bill?) and had a lovely time eating myself silly. I, along with the rest of my table, received advice on how to taste wine in the snobbiest French way by a truly charming French man and we discovered that there were more midwesterners at this conference than we had ever guessed. I sat across from a lovely woman who lived in Kansas City, MO for years before she relocated to Glasgow, Scotland.
In response to Margaret’s concerns for my health, I am walking a lot – we are about 1/2 mile or better from the conference center, so I get it at least a couple of miles a day walking back and forth – but there is no way on earth I could walk off all of the amazing food they are providing!
I’m off to a discussion on Web 3.0 and then a repeat of our session! Have a lovely day!!
Great, now I’m going to have that song in my head today. Oh well, it will be a change from Madonna’s Material Girl, which has been running through my head for a week!
Anyway, Tuesday, after our first class, I went back to the hotel and headed to the bar area for High Tea. I had little finger sandwiches (of ham & mustard, smoked salmon & cream cheese, roast beef (withhout the tomato) and I passed on the cucumber sandwich), fruit cake (real, live fruit cake!!) with my scones, devon clotted cream, strawberry jam and tea. It was a perfect snack – a bit heavy, perhaps, but lovely to eat & experience. Now I’m getting ready to head to the evening reception & dinner. I’ve still got a couple of hours before dinner, so I’m sure I’ll be ready for it – despite the big tea – when it is served!
I attended a session this morning on the Changing Face of Library Automation and Open Source by Ken Chad. He is a consultant who, among other things, helps library systems during the change-over to a new ILS vendor. He started with an overview of the state of the library market (with a UK bias) and actually began by talking about Google. A frequent message I’ve heard in the conference, and he reiterated, was that Google is a library company – their mission statement makes them definitely “one of us”. Ken stated that they got into the library world in the reverse, though, by starting with search and moving on to collections (via Google book digitization, Google Scholar, etc), rather than starting with a collection and branching out to searching that collection, as libraries do. He reviewed the UK based vendor landscape and showed that change of ownership and/or consolidation is happening everywhere. He then listed the influences of vendor strategies:
- Web 2.0
- New User Behavior
- W3C standards (web services, etc.)
- Need for increased productivity at reduced cost of ownership
Ken then brought up the “Amazon-like” recommendations engines and how libraries and vendors aren’t offering anything like it – yet. Next was a look at the fact that the market is failing (he mentioned the “Opac Sucks” conversations in the US from a while back) and said that this will open the way for open source.
He mentioned, during the second half of the program, social production (people giving their time w/others to produce goods – such as Linux – for free), passionate amateurs (LibraryThing’s Tim Spaulding, for one) and that “most creativity is collaborative”. He advocates for the library to be a platform for collaboration and creativity. The audience then chimed in on the concept of a sense of value – Radiohead’s recent release of an album without a price, the users could just pay what they thought it was worth. One lady said that 80% of the downloads were paid for. She also brought up the concept of restaurants that don’t have fixed prices and the fact that people are paying enough for the food that they are making a profit.
Finally, the discussion centered on open source alternatives to traditional ILS offerings and how they are used in libraries. Several people are using solutions such as Koha or Evergreen. One gentleman said that he had used a commercial VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) that was so bad, they ended up recreating one in Facebook!
All in all it was a good presentation and an interesting discussion!
The class went quite well – it was a packed room of attentive and interested folks! Nothing better than that! The presentation is published via Google Docs, so if you want to see the updated version of our dog & pony show, take a look!
So last night, about 11pm, I went out for my last smoke of the night. While I was out there, I was approached by a middle-aged English woman, asking me if she could buy a fag off of me. While I thought I was prepared for that question, I apparently wasn’t. I giggled. I then told her that there was no need for money, I believe in smoker’s karma – I donate one to you, there will be one for me when I need one. She insisted, and gave me 25p (about 55 cents) for one cigarette. What this taught me? I’m still juvenile enough to get a giggle out of selling a fag (for under a dollar, even!) on the streets of England and that cigs here must be rather expensive and I’m glad I brought my own!
We ate 
, we walked around Torquay’s harbor and did all manner of window shopping before we stopped off at the Living Coasts (with my pics on Flickr) and wandered through that “coastal zoo”. We have been busy! I also stopped off at a bar and had a “Devon cream tea”, consisting of 2 scones, jam, devon clotted cream and a pot of tea. It was AMAZING. I may be hooked!! After all that, I took a nap and then Bobbi and I went down to dinner at the conference. It was an international buffet, which was good (not as good as last night, but what can you do?). We discussed library differences between UK and US libraries (not so many?) and had a good time. Now it is almost 11pm and I’m ready for bed!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/webgoddess/tags/traveling/ – my pics of my journey from Missouri to Torquay, Devon, UK. Long and arduous – but totally worth it! I’m off to the 2nd conference reception and dinner – the first (last night) was freakin’ awesome, so I’m looking forward to tonight. More later!
Oh! I like 45 minute breaks between classes – it allows me time to blog! This morning, I skipped the very first class (on campus-wide alert systems, by the people who managed Virginia Tech’s system) in order to get ready for my session. Sorry to anyone who wanted to learn more about how V Tech coped with the shooter tragedy last year.
My session was the second of the day and it went very well. The participants were active and asked great questions, as well as suggesting great ideas for mashups (maps of school bus routes, maps of school sporting events, maps of campus with pictures of the buildings in the descriptions and using Google’s directions feature to get from one building to another, etc.). The wireless kept going down during the session time, but we just did the ideas/questions part of the session while it was down and did the demonstration of Popfly, Pipes and Google Maps while it was up.
The third session was on disaster recovery. I have some work to do when I get back… There were some great bits of info in that session, all of which mean more work for Nikki & I! Asset tracking and the transition of disaster recovery planning to business continuity planning were the main themes. The presenter, an employee of Springnet – the part of Springfield’s utility service that handles telecommunications and data services – was really thorough about covering the requirements for a good BCP (Business Continuity Plan) and had several good ideas, including getting pictures or video of the server room to document exactly what was in there in a visual, quick-to-access way.
Nikki has been attending some good sessions as well. She’s covered planning ahead with public access PCs, Web 2.0 and securing public access PCs. She’s saying that she’s learning lots and is pretty excited about the conference and what she’s getting out of it.
Next is “real world wireless implementations”, which is apparently aimed at beginners who are in the planning phase of wireless, but might have some good info anyway. If it doesn’t, I’ll skip out early and come back to the room to rest before tearing up the Texas Hold ’em tournament tonight!
More later!!
Something crazy happened when I updated WordPress to version 2.5 this afternoon – all my categories ran away. I imagine this will cause some issues until I go through and recategorize ALL my posts, but until then, please bear with me!
