Library Web Chic

Greetings from Boston!

If you've been wondering where I disappeared to again I'm in Boston to give a presentation at this year's NAAUG and SMUG conferences. [North American ALEPH Users Group and SFX/Meta-Lib User's Group] My presentation on Web Accessibility went really well. However, the best part of the trip thus far has been meeting Owen Stephens and talking to him about how he is using XML. Now I have at least six new ideas to go home and play with.

Today Owen is talking about his work with RSS and SFX. YEAH! However, the bad news is they only gave him 20 minutes to talk :( . So I will have to capture him again before I go home and grill him on that topic as well.

Another presentation I didn't see, (because mine was at the same time) but heard lots of buzz about was about creating pages for the OPAC that were accessible through PDAs and mobile phones.

Overall, the take away lesson from the conference(s) for me on the whole was XML is big. Learn more XML stuff to get the stuff done you want. I'll post some examples later of how people are using XML in interesting ways.

Lastly, here's a shot I took from MIT's campus of the Boston skyline.