Library Web Chic

I arrived in Monterey late last night for Internet Librarian. My conference starts early because I agreed to teach 3 preconference, which I’ve been preparing for months. The preconference I’m most excited about is the open source content management system one. Unfortunately sign-ups aren’t as high as I would have hoped, which is sad because the content is going to absolutely rock. My original co-presenter Amanda Hollister is sick but likely Jason Griffey was able to have his arm twisted to step in. My other preconference are actually first and they are taught with Jason Clark, who is awesome to work with. Our registration for the Web Services preconference is super high and I promise any attendee who is reading this, we will not disappoint.

Once I get through my mass of preconferences I’ve got one more presentation to do. I wasn’t supposed to be presenting but I’m filling in for a extremely good friend who is sick. The best part of the presentation is that I get to show off the Web Service/API for our library website. The developers have made significant progress on it in the last few weeks. The direction the whole thing turned has elevated it from cool, to gosh darn awesome. You see the lead developer for the project stumbled on information about OpenSearch and decided to use that as the backbone for of pieces of the API. This prompted me to provide information on Atom and RSS feeds which are some of formats it will eventually spit out. All and all while the API is far from complete, I truly believe it is going to significantly improve our ability to deliver services to our users. I can’t wait to show it off.

After Monday, I expect to engage is some well-deserved professional development time. There are some presentations I’m excited about including John Blyberg and Chris Barr’s “Solving the OPAC Problem” and Danah Boyd’s keynote, but my favorite part of Internet Librarian is just getting together with people and exchanging ideas, whether that be at the conference, Plumes or the Crown and Anchor.