Maybe it's just me but sometimes I need to recharge my batteries. Here is my solution: spend a couple of days with energized library technologists, FOSS developers, and systems librarians. Well, I did say that maybe it's just me. Fortunately my batteries got a full charge this week at Access2008, Canada's première library technology conference, which was being hosted just down the road from me by McMaster University. The librarians attending Access2008 totally get the need to take a holistic approach to ICT in libraries. And they mostly get FOSS as well. In fact I think I met more dedicated proponents of FOSS in libraries over the course of this conference than I had ever known existed.

One of the highlights for me was the opportunity to see keynote speaker Karen Schneider, whose blog has long been a must for librarians concerned with technology. Karen is now Community Librarian for Equinox Software which is the principal support company for Evergreen, a FOSS ILS. I thoroughly enjoyed her talk entitled Open++ - dispatches from the OSS frontlines. Karen was sharing some of the pluses (or "++" - which signals praise and potential karma points in the IRC channels that library technology geeks frequent) and a few minuses of her task of explaining open source on the ground in libraries. It is no small task to set out to demystify the FOSS community and ethos, but it is all part of the effort to spread the word about Evergreen.

Perhaps it is just the nature of the Access conferences, or maybe it is a reflection of the state of libraries in North America at the moment, but I found FOSS everywhere I turned. Dale Askey of Kansas State University gave a great talk about the anxieties some of us have about letting people see our code, and the real need to get it out there. Eric Lease Morgan spoke about his MyLibrary project at the University of Notre Dame. Walter Lewis and Slavkio Manojlovich spoke about the partnership between AlouetteCanada and OurOntario.ca All of these are FOSS efforts, naturally.

Other FOSS-relevant talks were given by a whole panel of librarians demonstrating their various uses of the Drupal content management system, and I was astounded by the simplicity and elegance of LibX (which started as a FireFox plugin but is also avaialbe for IE). Karen Coombs from the University of Houston gave a great presentation on the extremely modular approach she takes there for library services, disavowing monolithic solutions and instead knitting her library web space together with contributions from both proprietary and FOSS components. And of course one of the talks I was most keen on hearing was that of John Fink of McMaster University and Dan Scott of Laurentian University on progress in the Conifer project, which bring together a number of Canadian university libraries in one very large Evergreen instantiation. Dan, of course, is no stranger to eIFL.net having led the Evergreen training component of the eIFL-FOSS ILS project working in Armenia earlier this year. The news on Conifer is that progress is going well and the current expected date for all of these libraries to "go live" with Evergreen is the spring of 2009.

Evergreen did tend to be ever present at this conference. But other FOSS ILSs were also heard from. At least one group of public libraries located in the Ontario hinterland have decided to band together and share expertise on Koha.

Of course this conference wasn't entirely about or for FOSS in libraries. Access2008 is a conference for library technologists and there were lots of other solutions being canvassed. But perhaps it is only human for the most exciting buzz to come from IT solutions that librarians are creating for themselves that they can share with their peers. Thus one appeal of open source, perhaps.

I haven't followed news of mass digitization projects closely so perhaps I was the only one astounded by the talk by Jonathan Bengston and Sian Meikle of the University of Toronto on the mass digitization project going on there. I confess I had no idea of the scale of this. It is immense. Literally thousands of books are being digitized on a daily basis. This is impressive even as merely a feat of organization. But the results were also impressive. Sadly this mammoth effort has a shakey fundation now that Microsoft has decided to end its funding. But it certainly gave us food for thought about what is possible with sufficient resources.

The conference was rounded off after two and a half days with an inspiring talk from Bob Young, famed local entrepreneur and co-founder of RedHat.com and Lulu.com. Bob is always good value as a speaker but I found him especially insightful today as he contrasted his life in technology firms with one of his current roles as owner of a professional sports franchise, the Hamilton Tiger Cats.

I should finish this conference report with a mention of something that happened the day before the conference began: Hackfest. Hackfest is a day-long event in which librarians and programmers gather, divvy up a problem set, and set to work. You might say, it is the very spirit of what Access2008 is all about. You might also be wondering just how much real development work can actually get done in a day. The answer: lots! I was consistently impressed as the various groups that had worked together reported back during the conference. Here, for example, is Dan Scott's blog post on his Hackfest activity in which he was sorting out how to use Zotero with Evergreen. Cool!

My thanks to the organisers of Access2008. My batteries are re-charged. Full steam ahead!