Access 2008 day 1
Brief thinklets from the first day at Access:
Karen Schneider’s keynote and Dale Askey’s talk on why we don’t share more code spoke to the ongoing professionalization of coding practices in OS development in the library world. We have a better sense that this is what we do, and we see the way forward toward learning to do it better. There was a good comment from an audience member about how the use of Subversion made him more careful about preparing his code (since it’s hard to delete once it’s in the repository), which automatically makes it easier to share.
Prominence of Evergreen: it was the subject of KGS’s keynote, and two of the three hackfest projects we heard about; and there’s more coming.
Prominence of Solr: it’s part of everyone’s toolkit.
Mark Leggott is so organized that he has postcards at the registration desk advertising next year’s Access at UPEI.
Best joke (Dale Askey, Kansas State): speaking at a Canadian library conference officially gives him enough foreign-policy experience to run for vice president.
Running observation: librarians are more worried about users’ privacy than users are.
Many thanks for the props for my joke, Peter. I don't think I've ever told a joke that anyone said was the "best." Even if the talk had totally bombed, at least I would have that!
About the comment "librarians are more worried about users' privacy than users are." My observation has been different. I have not met many librarians who are non-trivially interested in privacy. I have met a *lot* of IT professionals are who worry about privacy though. Perhaps at Access you are encountering more IT pros than I. pros?
Dale for VP! Wooh! Greetings from Michigan, the Bouncy Road State.
Woohoo, I have a voter, I think!