Code4Lib PNW

Whew, what a lot of fun. Today, we held our first meeting of the C4L PNW group. This was a meeting that essentially got started after I returned from the C4L meeting in Providence and noticed that pretty much no one from the PNW was able to make the trip. After a few conversations, Kyle Banerjee and I decided to see if we could make this happen for our region (especially with the C4L meeting in North Carolina next year and the prospect of few if anyone from our region attending again).

So, how did it go? As good as could be expected I think. When we started planning this in the beginning of April — it reminded me a lot of the first C4L meeting in Corvallis in 2006. That happened very quickly — but for that meeting, I was pretty much an observer. Jeremy Frumkin and others did the heavy lifting. Well, this time it was my and Kyle’s turn and I think it turned out great. There were 45 attendees (a little under our goal of 60) and few Washington attendees in part due to travel restrictions, so it was pretty well attended. And, I should point out, we couldn’t have done this alone. We had help from the community, and especially help from three organizations: the Orbis-Cascades Alliance which provided logistics helping to setup payment processing, food and working with the University of Oregon to provide a meeting place. And then Oregon State University, which provided materials and financial backing. I honestly don’t believe that we could have pulled this off without the help of these three institutions…they really stepped up for us and I really appreciate it.

Anyway, the day went great. Here was the schedule:

08:00 — 09:00 Registration

09:00 — 09:20 Welcome/Opening Remarks

09:20 — 10:20
09:20 — 09:40
Andrea Peterson; Western Washington University; Using Drupal in an
academic environment
Andrea will talk generally about the implementation of Drupal within
an academic environment. This presentation will provide a general
discussion of setup, applications and customizations of the Drupal
system.

09:40 — 10:00
Ryan Wick; Oregon State University; Taking a closer look at the Omeka
Platform
Ryan will introduce and discuss the Omeka platform, discussing
functionality, development and the use of plug-ins. Having
implemented Omeka with the Oregon State University Special Collections
as a method for preparing exhibits, Ryan will discuss what he has
learned during the process.

10:00 — 10:20
Jeremy Williams, Lewis and Clark; Mark Dahl, Lewis and Clark; Terry
Reese, Oregon State University; Flicker and Academic Image Collections
The speakers will discuss decisions by Lewis and Clark and Oregon
State University to utilize Flickr when building academic image
collections. Jeremy and Mark will discuss accessCeramics, a project
that utilizes images being stored within Flickr, while Terry will
discuss Oregon State University’s entry into the Flickr Commons
program.

10:20 — 10:40 Break

10:40 — 11:20
10:40 — 11:00
Duncan Barth, University of Oregon; Considering storage systems
Duncan will talk about storage on the cheap and how to get there from
where we are right now. He will talk about his views on dealing with
large datasets, IR’s, and whatnot.

11:00 — 11:20
Paul Weiss, Eastern Oregon University; Sage/Evergreen migration update
Will discuss challenges encountered in a project designed to help the
76 libraries of the Sage library system migrate to a shared Evergreen
catalog.

11:30 — 12:00 Lighting Talks #1
12:00 — 01:00 Lunch

01:00 — 01:15 Raffle goodness

01:20 — 02:00
01:20 — 01:40
Bill Jordan; University of Washington; Update on the University of
Washington’s DataNet proposal
General discussion of the University of Washington’s NSF DataNet
proposal.

01:40 — 2:00
Mike Spalti, Willamette University; Integrating Tools and Content with
OKI Repositories OSIDs
Describes work underway at Willamette University to integrate
CONTENTdm repositories with open source and proprietary applications
that use the Open Knowledge Initiative Repository Open Service
Interface Definition (OSID).

02:00 — 02:20 Break

02:20 — 03:00
02:20 — 02:40
Kyle Banerjee, Orbis Cascade Alliance; "Duraspace — what’s in a
name?"
On May 12, Fedora Commons and the DSpace Foundation announced that
they were joining forces to pursue a common path in providing Open
Source software for managing and providing access to digital content.
Although they share a same general goal, DSpace and Fedora supported
by different communities have different architectures. This
presentation examines what the announcement means for those who manage
institutional repositories

02:40 — 03:00
Terry Reese, Oregon State University; Two years later — and Update on
the LibraryFind Project
Talk will discuss changes to the LF project and how it has grown over
the last two years.

03:00 — 03:30 Lightning Talks #2

03:30 — 04:00 Raffle goodness/Closing

The talks were great and varied. Better than I could have hoped for such a short time period — and I’ll be collecting PPTs from speakers to get them posted into our google group. And for next year…the general consensus was that this was something that folks wanted to do again. Though, maybe next year we’ll look at doing something that is a day and a 1/2 and really go out of our way to get a keynote. Likewise, with a group of this size, we will also be able to look at trying a few different things with the format. One suggestion for example, was to provide a short rebuttal time for lightening type talks — this way, folks could present on topics that were meant to generate discussion and allow the audience to respond. I thought that was a great idea and something we might play with this year in a couple of other settings.

Anyway, I can’t wait to see what we can pull off when given a year to plan it. Below are a few pictures. I got pictures of every speaker but Bill Jordan from UW (sorry) — but maybe someone else caught one and can send it my way.