I’m at Kansas State University today, attending Library Camp Kansas.
CoverItLive coverage is below and I’ll be tweeting via @libsmatter also.
UPDATE: It was a very good, but very tiring day. If you seach for libcampks09, you will find more material.
I ended up facilitating two sessions – one on how to find a place for Open Source in our libraries and one on the future of libraries. I also attended a feedback session about Kansas’ plan to run a 23 Things program, and was in the audience at the start of the day to hear lightening talks about:
- Using Libraryh3lp
- Animoto
- LinkIt – a self-written pre-proxy link generating tool for staff and students to add to their web content when they want to keep university authentication link
- Jing
- StumbleUpon
- SlideShare
- PollEverywhere
- GoodReads
I was unsure of how to pitch the session on Open Source and how much people would know, so I opened up a whole lot of windows showing different types of OS library projects before we started. I offered to give some background to OS, but the best thing happened. Most of the staff were already implementing Open Source in their libraries, they knew what it was and had very useful and well thought out ideas – so we cut straight to the chase and started talking. There is a avery good account of the conversation on Sharon‘s blog, Breakout sessions. There is also a very good summary of the session on it’s own page of the Library Camp wiki, Open Source .
I was so glad to have a chance to learn from the folk from North East Kansas Library System . They have implemented Koha and many have been using and preferring Open Source products for years. They concluded that while not free, Open Source has been cheaper for them than proprietary software. The other compelling reason was the control that they now have over their system. They reflected that they needed to work differently and accept that the product will be updated and improved frequently. They think that the allocation of 2.5 FTE staff to the implemtation of the system was about right, but they hadn’t envisaged just how much work those people would have. They shared that it is important for any library implemention Open Source to ensure that they “find a good nerd” to tweak the system.
In the afternoon I led a session on the “Future of Libraries”. The group were very, very gracious when I explained that I was doing a similar session at Darien and wanted to see how it would go. I suggested that we look at content, community, people and place. Content = our book stock , what we link to, archive, the “collection”. Place = our buildings and our online sites. People = library staff. Community = our users and what they can do now. We covered the first three very nicely. Again, Sharon had a good summary, Breakout sessions .
I was also very, very happy to finally meet four of my “imaginary friends” – Josh, Erin, Bobbie and Royce.