With day two drawing for a close, my brain is full again. I need one of those pools of memories like in the Harry Potter books…
Today the most memorable quote of the day goes to Gao Tao. He was explaining Joomla and how they’d implemented it at his library. In the midst of telling us about decisions and meetings and other such fun stuff that you have to go through when implementing a major change in a library, he said, “The bad news is that you may get frustrated. The good news is that I just saved a bunch of money on car insurance.” Wow. The room erupted. And this was even after we’d grown to love him when he said to “please let me know if you’re having trouble hearing me, or if I start speaking in Chinese.”
Later I attended a presentation on Hennepin County Library’s inclusion of patron and librarian “comments” (reviews, annotations, etc.) in their catalog. Funny that I traveled all the way to DC to hear a guy who works just up the road… The most important thing I learned, though, was that rating and commenting should BOTH be present. I’d always kind of dismissed rating catalog records, but Hennepin has found that they end up with numbers (like “7/10” or just “5”) written in their comments. So obviously people want this feature.
Oh, and there were ponies in Michelle and Meredith’s presentation, as promised. But the theme had evolved by presentation time, so it wasn’t just a pony…. it was a pony with a monocle. I’m not clear on how the monocle thing started (even though I was in the room when the scheme was hatched the night before), but Jason donated his photoshop skills to add the monocle. It was cool. Oh, and the presentation was good to. :)
After coffee, I sat on the stairs outside of Steven Cohen’s “What’s Hot with RSS” presentation. Why the stairs? Because the overflow room was full… After we’d colonized the stairs people started sitting (in neat rows, for some reason) down the hall. Amazing. I wished I’d had internet access during that one because people around me kept asking to see the stuff he was showing, or wondered about alternatives to the tools he showed. But I didn’t. But I did get somebody else started on Twitter, and explained blogging to somebody else. Fun stuff.
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