A First Timer’s Thoughts: Access 2010 Conference
Posted on October 17, 2010 by kcarlson | 2 Comments
Written by Kathleen Carlson, MLGSCA Blog Chair
Here are the musings of a first time attendee at the Access 2010 Conference, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (Oct. 12-16). This is the annual conference of the Canadian Library Association, Emerging Technologies Interest Group. The featured event is the Hackfest which is a pre-conference event. The Hackfest is a chance to engage in a kind of librarianship we don’t often get to engage in, without long-term commitments, politics, departmental rivalries. Unless you’re actually there it’s hard to see just how much fun it is, how much you can learn, and how refreshing (and tiring!) it can be to work so hard on something somebody else suggested and even pay for the privilege.
This year approximately 40 people attended the Hackfest at the University of Winnipeg and the challenges were not unveiled until the morning we all met. There were five Hackfest teams and my team’s challenge was to ‘Create a mobile app for discovering information, historical photos, about a person(s) in a cemetery.’ (The reason I selected this challenge was because of the ghoulish subject matter and proximity to Halloween).
Here are the cases where we felt the mobile app could be used:
• A person is walking in a cemetery and wants to know more about a gravesite at their location.
• A person is at home researching cemetery gravesites of a famous person.
• A person wants to know what cemeteries are in an area, and a list of the graves/people.
Our team identified the founder of the province of Manitoba, Canada, Louis Riel. He is buried in the St. Boniface Cathedral Cemetery in Winnipeg. It took 8 hours of work (including an hour lunch break, lots of snacks, non-alcoholic drinks, power (13 PCs and Macs were on two a/c strips) , 1 experienced programmer and 1 hardworking coder and 7 other members of the group to search for open source data to link out to this App project. Here is our demo Mobile Death App. Many thanks to Roy Tennant, OCLC and Peter Binkley of the University of Alberta for sharing their knowledge with this team member.
The Opening Keynote Speaker, Hal Niedzviecki, co-founder of the magazine Broken Pencil, a guide to underground arts and zine culture. He spoke about “What Libraries Can Learn from Peep Culture.” We pondered questions that were asked: Are we were all just letting corporations data mine our personal information on the web; Do we really enjoy broadcasting our personal life to everyone even if we don’t know them?; and finally do we have low expectations but cherish the connections we make online?
Other sessions at Access 2010 included:
• Usability Testing and the Google Generation – Lisa Fast, NeoInsight. A fascinating look at how usability studies show we can all learn from Google on placement of information and links on our respective library home pages.
• GIS & Open Access GeoSpatial Data-Daniel Brendle-Moczuk & John Durno, University of Victoria, British Columbia, demonstrated open source GIS and how we can share already built maps without starting from scratch.
• Mobile Technologies: iRoma; Goin’ Mobile – James MacDonald, University of Northern British Columbia and Rob Zylstra-Yellowhead Regional Library- Demonstrated a pilot project of roaming a library with an IPad using paging and chat service.
• A Human Library -Janet Kaufman and Randy Oldham, University of Guelph, Ontario -They explained their two day event of 35 living books(people that are subjected to stereotyping and prejudices). Books could be checked out for 30 minutes by one borrower.
• After Launching Search and Discovery, Who is Mission Control? A Tragicomedy in 8 Acts -William Denton and Adam Taves, York University, Ontario- This staged reading by the two speakers showed the interplay between a literacy librarian and a systems librarian and how they try to achieve the same goal of easier user access.
The Closing Keynote speaker was Michael Geist, University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-Commerce Law. His recently released book is “Radical Extremism to Balanced Copyright” on the Canadian Copyright Reform Bill C-32, which was released on October 4, 2010.
In closing I believe attending a conference is about stretching one’s mind and learning new things and being a bit uncomfortable. Therefore I would recommend this premiere library technology conference in Canada to anyone interested in emerging technology that is rapidly changing. All libraries and librarians both in Canada and in the United States will face and hopefully embrace this new technology and migration to open source maybe part of the answer.
Posted 10/17/10
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2 Responses to “A First Timer’s Thoughts: Access 2010 Conference”
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October 18th, 2010 @ 11:19 am
Wow. Wish I was there.
October 18th, 2010 @ 11:24 am
Very cool, Kathleen! Thanks for sharing. Sounds like a great, and different sort of meeting!!