This past Thursday and Friday I attended the Ontario Library Association (OLA) Super Conference in Toronto, Canada. It is a huge annual event in the professional librarianship calendar in Ontario (and beyond) with more than 1000 delegates and up to 29 parallel sessions running at any one time. It's all here and it is all focussed on the professional development of librarians.

Since I'm still very much an outsider to the world of librarians, I find myself noticing things that are probably taken for granted by my peers. Take, for example, the very idea of professionalism. Imagine 29 separate sessions, 3 to 4 of them per day, plus plenary sessions. And each of them on some specific aspect of the life and work of the library. The level of detail is remarkable. And all of it dedicated to helping each delegate improve their work, their library, and the service they provide to their patrons. I was just way impressed.

A good example came from the very first session I attended. Some of you reading this blog will remember Nasser Saleh. Nasser used to be the eIFL.net country coordinator for Palestine. For a number of years he contributed greatly to the growth and development of eIFL.net. Nasser now lives in Kingston, Ontario, and is the Integrated Learning Librarian at the Engineering and Science Library of Queen's University. (He's also doing a Ph.D. part-time, but if you know him, you won't be surprised at just how busy he keeps himself.) Together with his colleague, Sharon Murphy, Nasser was presenting a session entitled Colleagues: get out of the library. In it they detailed the efforts being made at Queen's to integrate librarians into the classroom, to reach out to students and researchers where they learn and in doing so facilitate their access to knowledge. Impressive. And the audience of assembled librarians thought so as well. There was plenty of discussion of how things were working at other universities, and ideas put forward of what to do next.

After such a bracing start, I was worried that the talk I was participating in that day, Open Source and Libraries in the Developing World, might not be equally well received. I should learn to relax more. Fortunately for me I was sharing the platform with Nasser himself, and with eIFL-FOSS' good friend, Bess Sadler of the University of Virginia. We had a packed room which was immensely satisfying. (Remember, there were 28 other sessions going on at the same time.) Bess gave the intro and overview about free and open source software; Nasser spoke about what eIFL.net does, and then I stepped up to tell people about our new eIFL-FOSS program. People were interested and enthused. For these librarians, what goes on in libraries in developing and transition countries is not some esoteric interest: the librarians in those countries are their colleagues, their peers, and often their friends. That's another one of those things I've learned. Librarianship is a profession, and professionals share a bond with each other no matter where you find them.

Amongst the folks kind enough to attend our session was Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Geekcorps and co-founder of Global Voices On-line. We were all a little in awe since Ethan was the big keynote speaker at the conference that day. But I later learned he is a keen supporter of eIFL.net and his blog about our session couldn't have been nicer.

Ethan's talk itself was entertaining and enlightening. What I took away was his observation that, "homophily makes us stupid." And if you don't know what homophily is, you'll recognize it as soon as you do; it's that undirected but incessant grouping instinct we have to flock together with birds of like kind. Ethan's point was that we are seeing lots of instances of homophily on social networking sites. And while it's nice to hang with your "friends" a lot, you'll probably learn more, face more interesting challenges, and grow a bit more by encountering strangers. In a way, that's why I took up with eIFL.net. I figured I'd learn more here and more quickly. I was right :-)

The sessions on Friday were barely any less well-attended than the Thursday sessions despite an horrendous snowstorm battering south-western Ontario. Yes, this is Canada.

I was tremendously psyched to attend a session by Dan Scott of Laurentian University entitled, Evergreen: state of the open-source ILS. Dan is the project coordinator for Project Conifer, which brings together Laurentian, Windsor, and McMaster University as they investigate, pilot, and potentially migrate to the Evergreen ILS. Dan is immensely talented as a programmer, and has a great presentation delivery. Of course when you completely know what you are talking about, it probably helps :-) I finally think I have a good handle now on precisely where Evergreen is on its development curve and, especially, on the level of enthusiasm amongst Ontario libraries, both academic and public, for this venture. One of best things about FOSS is that nobody can constrain you from simply picking it up and starting to use it. So you run into situations, as in this session, where librarians were piping up and surprising Dan with announcements that they too were in the process of migrating to Evergreen. It got so that at one point I wanted to stand up and say that I too was Spartacus. Fortunately I contained my enthusiasm.

Systems librarians are, I suppose, a different breed than, say, reference librarians. Certainly the discussion at Dan's talk was considerably more technical than any I had heard the day before. And that got me wishing I were having more fun with source code than I am at the moment. But that's another story ;-)

Two final items from the OLA conference. The first is Erik Hatcher's presentation on Blacklight: Univeristy of Virginia's catalogue on SOLR. Erik is frighteningly clever and willing to give a presentation while things index and compile behind the scenes, live. No doubt that's because he trusts his own code :-) Blacklight is a little project that has huge potential. It is a "next generation library catalog written in ruby, using solr as the underlying search engine." But in layman's speak, it is a cool, faceted access to your catalogue. Naturally enough it is a FOSS project and, also not surprising, our good friend Bess Sadler is closely involved in the ongoing development of Blacklight. I intend to check out their subversion repository in the next couple days and take a look at the kind of code that super-coders write.

Finally, a nod to Our Ontario. This is a collaborative project delivering integrated access to digital collections of libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, galleries, and more. This year it deservedly won the OLITA award for technological innovation. You won't be surprised to learn that Our Ontario is built entirely on a FOSS stack using Cocoon, Lucene, and Solr. And if it is innovative technology for libraries in Ontario, wouldn't you expect to find Art Rhyno involved? So it won't come as a surprise to learn that Art is the Chair of the Steering Committee for Our Ontario. And thus I had the pleasure of meeting up with Art again.

OLA Super Conference was certainly a new experience for me, one that has confirmed my impression of librarians as a highly professional and committed group.

Comments: If you can login to the eIFL.net website, then you can add comments to this blog post directly. If not, just write to me at randy.metcalfe[at]eifl.net and be sure to let me know whether you wish your comment to published and attributed (I'm also happy to receive comments that you don't wish to have published).