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code4lib: final thoughts
2 Mar 07
code4lib2007 was held in Athens at the University of Georgia’s Centre for Continuing Education. It’s Friday, the conference is over, and I’m now sitting in Hot Corner, a funky little coffee shop where the wireless is free but the coffee is significantly over-priced. I’m pretty much wiped out by the conference. Assuming I remembered to tag them all correctly, there are currently 20 entries in my code4lib category (this will be the 21st – that’s not counting the preconference). The 20 minute limit per session is brilliant. Really, nobody needs more than 20 minutes to say what needs to be said, especially at a geek conference where everything’s online and if you don’t know somebody, you know somebody who does. The 5 minute lightning talks make this point even more boldly.
If I have one complaint, it was with the food. I was disappointed, but I’ve been South enough not to be surprised, that the meals were quite dissatisfying from a vegetarian perspective. It is possible to create yummy meals with enough variety that a vegetarian can get something to eat, but it doesn’t happen very often around here. Breakfast this morning was sausage on biscuits, bacon on biscuits, ham and cheese croissants, bagels, sugary muffins, juice, and coffee. Yesterday I watched a more strict vegetarian than I build herself a cheese sandwich out of hamburger condiments because the meal was burgers, hotdogs, fried chicken, and macaroni salad.
Otherwise the conference center was comfortable and the room was very well laid out for presentations. Ample power was available, and after a few glitches on day one, the wireless worked well enough.
Content-wise, apart from feeling a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of presentations, I am excited by a couple things. Perhaps, on a personal note, I was most excited that at no time during this conference did I feel like the presenters were speaking a different language. I’ve learned a lot since Access 2002, my first library geek conference. As far as what people actually said, I think the most exciting development is the way in which a cluster of technologies for indexing, searching, and presenting documents and representations of documents are coming to maturity. There appears to be some money behind open source ILS development, and some first-rank talent as well. There are neat things happening in terms of presentation of results and data visualization, and the exciting potential for a social layer built on top of library data. Seamless authentication remains a huge hurdle, but we can dream.
So I’m very glad I came. I got a heck of a lot more out of this conference than simply an opportunity to be with Jodi on my employer’s ticket. I’m going to need to learn a lot more about how to implement some of the things I’ve seen as part of a music project I’ve been planning. I also couldn’t help but notice the potential usefulness of much that was presented to projects my library’s web team has talked about. And now, once Jodi is done teaching at 3.30, I get a weekend holiday in the sun.
Posted by pzed on March 2, 2007 at 3.31pm
Categories: code4lib 2007, conferences, libraries
