Well, the conference is over for another year! We finished off the joint SLA-MLA conference with a great social event at the Cathedral Village Free House where I was finally able to meet Jessamyn West.
Well, that's not quite true – I've “met” her before but this was the first time meeting her in person. Since long before I became a librarian, I've been reading Jessamyn's posts on MetaFilter and librarian.net. I first made official contact with her while in library school (I tried to bring her in as a “Lunch Bucket” speaker but wasn't able to pull it off…one of my great regrets of my time at FIMS) and have occasionally been in contact since then.
Jessamyn wrote a bit about her time in Regina on her personal blog (which is where the title of this post comes from) and highlighted the presentation given by Sabina about the BC Evergreen initiative on librarian.net. Very cool!
Saskatchewan public libraries had a massive project underway during the past year to create a similar province-wide library system but didn't receive funding in the most recent provincial budget. The project is still moving forward but in a modified form. I don't know if we'll use an open ILS like BC has but I hope so. Perhaps the lack of government funding may turn out to be a blessing in disguise if it encourages the participants to more seriously consider the open source route.
I'd seen a presentation by Sabina's boss on the BC experience during a meeting of the Saskatchewan Single Integrated Library System project late last year so decided to skip her presentation for one on “open” libraries by Patricia Moore from U of S (who happens to be in the background of the photo below.)
(And as an aside, my preference is conferences where similarly themed presentations don't overlap so you can hit all the “technology” ones in a row or all the “management” ones or whatever without being forced to choose between two similar ones.)
One really good point by Pat was that we have to shift the perception of open source software and technology as somehow inferior to its commercial counterparts. “Open source is essentially peer-reviewed software and if that's the gold standard for the journals we supply in our libraries, it should be the gold standard for the technology that we utilize too.”
What else? Jessamyn's presentation on “Towards Open Libraries” was excellent – full of humour and insight into the current trends in librarianship and seemed to be very well received by the crowd. She usually puts slides and notes from her presentations on librarian.net – the Saskatchewan one isn't up as of this writing but I assume it will be eventually.
I think Pace enjoyed meeting Jessamyn too!
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